Mother Teresa and the Call to Love in Service
Mother Teresa uttered these words during the later decades of her life, likely in one of her numerous speeches, interviews, or written reflections from the 1970s or 1980s, when she had already become an internationally recognized figure fighting poverty in Calcutta, India. The quote emerges from her deep engagement with both Christian theology and the practical realities of serving the world’s poorest populations. At this point in her career, she had founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 and had expanded her organization throughout the world, yet she remained profoundly concerned that the mechanical work of charity—the feeding, clothing, and caring for the destitute—might become hollow without genuine spiritual and emotional engagement. This quote represents her mature theological reflection on the relationship between action and intention, between labor and love, and it distills the central tension that defined her entire life’s work.
Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, born in 1910 in Skopje (now the capital of North Macedonia), came from a relatively comfortable middle-class family and showed no obvious signs of future sainthood in her youth. Her father, Nikolaë, was a successful businessman and trader, while her mother, Drane, was deeply religious and practiced rigorous charity toward the poor. The family was ethnically Albanian and belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, which was a minority faith in their Orthodox Christian region. Tragically, Anjezë’s father died when she was just eight years old, leaving her mother to raise three children largely alone. This early exposure to loss and her mother’s example of compassionate giving planted seeds that would blossom into her life’s vocation, though the path would not become clear until her teenage years when she felt what she described as a divine calling to religious life.
At eighteen, she joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish congregation that ran schools throughout India, and this decision took her far from her Balkan homeland and toward the subcontinent that would become her true home. She taught in the congregation’s schools in Calcutta for nearly two decades, gaining administrative experience and developing a deep love for India and its people, though her teaching work kept her somewhat insulated from the city’s most desperate populations. Her transformation occurred in 1946 during a train journey when she experienced what she believed to be a direct call from Christ to leave her comfortable convent life and work directly with the poorest of the poor in Calcutta’s slums. This moment of spiritual awakening—what she would later refer to as her “calling within a calling”—required her to leave the Sisters of Loreto and obtain papal permission to work independently, a process that took several years and considerable ecclesiastical negotiation. By 1950, she had established the Missionaries of Charity with just twelve members and a handful of rupees, beginning her work in the most disease-ridden, impoverished neighborhoods of Calcutta.
What many people do not realize about Mother Teresa is that despite her eventual canonization and universal veneration, she harbored intense internal spiritual struggles and what scholars and theologians have called a profound “dark night of the soul” that lasted for decades. Private letters, published after her death in 1997, revealed that from the 1950s onward, she often felt spiritually empty, doubted God’s existence, and experienced acute loneliness and despair, yet she continued her work with unwavering commitment. This secret suffering, which she kept hidden from the world and even from her closest advisors, makes her quote about love even more poignant—she was speaking not from a place of spiritual comfort and certainty but from a determined commitment to act lovingly despite her interior desolation. Additionally, while she is celebrated globally as a symbol of compassionate charity, her methods and priorities were sometimes controversial even among her contemporaries; some critics argued that her focus on spiritual preparation and salvation sometimes took precedence over medical treatment, that her homes for the dying, though remarkable in their compassion, lacked adequate medical technology, and that she sometimes romanticized poverty rather than attacking its systemic causes. Her more recent biographer, Colette Livermore, a former nun in her organization, has written critically about aspects of her legacy while still acknowledging her profound spiritual commitment.
The specific reference to Jesus’s commandment “Love one another as I have loved you” grounds this quote in the Gospel of John, Chapter 13, where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet as an act of radical humility and then instructs them to love one another in the same selfless manner. Mother Teresa understood this passage not as poetic aspiration but as literal instruction for how to live and work. Her invocation of Jesus’s own example was not meant to be presumptuous but rather to establish an objective standard—she was asking her listeners and readers to measure their own capacity for love against Christ’s example of sacrificial service. The warning that “work without love is slavery” cuts against the utilitarian logic of much modern charitable work, which often measures success through quantifiable metrics and outcomes. She was concerned that in the rush to address statistics and scale operations, workers could lose sight of the human dignity of those they served, reducing their labor to mere mechanics. In her view, the person being served needed to feel genuinely loved and valued as a human being worthy of that love, not merely as a problem to be solved.
Over the decades following this quote’s articulation, it has been invoked in countless contexts far beyond religious ones. Educators, social workers, business leaders, and activists have adopted her emphasis on infusing