Excerpts from chapter 13 of the book, Loving God, published in 1987 by Charles Colson
...Black limousines and television camera trucks lined the curb in front of the old red brick Assumption Catholic Church in the heart of Anacostia. Soon after the cameras and reporters were in place, a small group of nuns and priests arrived, clustered about a wisp of a woman in a white muslin sari. The tiny figure moved... up the steps of the church, waving at a cluster of children nearby and brushing past the reporters crowding the doorway.
This celebrity who somehow managed to understate her own arrival, an attitude unheard of in a city that thrives on pomp and protocol, was a seventy-year-old Albanian nun named Teresa Bojaxhiu—better known as Mother Teresa. As 1979 Nobel Prize winner and a world-famous figure, she could have commanded an airport welcome by a host of government bigwigs, addressed a joint session of Congress, or attracted thousands at one of the city's great cathedrals. Instead, she went as inconspicuously as possible to a troubled and neglected corner of the city to establish an outpost for nine of her Sisters of Charity.
Since Mother Teresa wouldn’t come to them, the power brokers had come to her. The mayor and city officials trailed the press into the stark church hall with its chipped and cracked plaster walls. The press, which cultivates its irreverence for politicians, were more restrained with this little woman from the streets of Calcutta. Still, she had to dodge the boom mikes coming at her like spears.
“What do you hope to accomplish here?” someone shouted.
“The joy of loving and being loved,” she smiled, her eyes sparkling in the face of camera lights.
“That takes a lot of money doesn’t it?" another reporter threw out the obvious question. Everything in Washington costs money; and the more it costs, the more important it is.
Mother Teresa shook her head. “No, it takes a lot of sacrifice.”
The press was bewildered. Everyone who comes to Washington has grand plans, usually involving the creation of agencies with armies of bureaucrats. That's what the city is for: setting agendas, passing laws, organizing departments-—and trumpeting it all to the press. But this woman with her leathery, wrinkled face talked about “sharing suffering” and “caring that people can live and die with dignity.”
No grandiose scheme, her message: Do something for someone else... for the sick, unwanted, crippled, heartbroken, aged, or alone. Strange words indeed for Washington’s sophisticated commentators who left the conference shaking their heads...Though her words sound naive, something extraordinary happens wherever she goes... But why she does it is our point here.
A few years ago a brother in the order came to her complaining about a superior whose rules, he felt, were interfering with his. “My vocation is to work for lepers,” he told Mother Teresa. “I want to spend myself for the lepers.”
She stared at him a moment, then smiled. “Brother,” she said gently, “your vocation is not to work for lepers, your vocation is to belong to Jesus.”
...[Loving] God and... living His life... This is holiness... Or as Mother Teresa sums it up, complete “acceptance of the will of God.”
[This] definition may sound rather nebulous to many Christians who have from childhood associated holiness with a long string of dos and don’ts. But seeing holiness only as rule-keeping breeds serious problems: first, it limits the scope of true biblical holiness, which must affect every aspect of our lives. Second, even though the rules may be biblically based, we often end up obeying the rules rather than obeying God; concern with the letter of the law can cause us to lose its spirit.‘ Third, emphasis on rule-keeping deludes us into thinking we can be holy through our efforts. But there can be no holiness apart from the work of the Holy Spirit—in quickening us through the conviction of sin and bringing us by grace to Christ, and in sanctifying us—for it is grace that causes us to even want to be holy. And finally, our pious efforts can become ego-gratifying, as if holy living were some kind of spiritual beauty contest. Such self-centered spirituality in turn leads to self-righteousness, the very opposite of the selflessness of true holiness.
No, holiness is much more than a set of rules against sin. Holiness must be seen as the opposite of sin… conformity to the character of God... (precisely Mother Teresa’s point to the recalcitrant brother)...