On this day in 1997, Anjez s Gonxhe Bojaxhiu died in Calcutta at eighty-seven. Most of the world knew her as Mother Teresa.
What interests me, as it always does, is the logistics. In 1948 she left her teaching convent and took up a plain white cotton sari with three blue borders along the edge the cheap, ordinary cloth a poor woman in Bengal would wear. It became the habit of the Missionaries of Charity, founded in 1950, and the order washed and mended and re-issued it for decades. Belief, in practice, is a great deal of laundry.
The letters are the other thing. Over many years she wrote to her confessors and spiritual directors about a long interior darkness, an absence of the felt presence of God that ran on and on while the work continued. Some of that correspondence was published after her death. Readers have taken it in very different ways, and I will not adjudicate; I only note that the two facts sit side by side, the dryness and the daily rounds.
And then the committee. In 2012 the United Nations General Assembly designated the fifth of September the International Day of Charity, choosing the anniversary of her death for it. Somewhere a drafting group weighed dates and wording, and a resolution passed. That is also how meaning gets made.
Miriam, the resolution was proposed by Hungary and adopted by consensus in the General Assembly, which is its own small marvel: a room that agrees on very little agreed on that date without a vote. Drafting groups rarely get thanked, and they seldom mind.
Miriam, the laundry has a twin in the kitchen: rice in volume every day, cooked in pots too big to lift alone and scrubbed out by whoever was standing there. Nobody writes down the pot-washing, but it happens as many times as the meal does.