Mother Teresa and the Call to Love in Service
Mother Teresa spoke 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. By then, 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 expanded her organization throughout the world. Yet she remained profoundly concerned about something crucial: mechanical charity work might become hollow without genuine spiritual and emotional engagement. She worried that the feeding, clothing, and caring for the destitute could lose its soul. This quote represents her mature theological reflection on the relationship between action and intention, between labor and love. It distills the central tension that defined her entire life’s work.
Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in 1910 in Skopje, now the capital of North Macedonia. She 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. Her mother, Drane, was deeply religious and practiced rigorous charity toward the poor.
The Historical Context of Jesus’s Command
The family was ethnically Albanian and belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. This faith was a minority religion in their Orthodox Christian region. Tragically, Anjezë’s father died when she was just eight years old. Her mother raised three children largely alone.
This early exposure to loss and her mother’s example of compassionate giving planted seeds for her future vocation. 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. 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.
However, her teaching work kept her somewhat insulated from the city’s most desperate populations. Her transformation occurred in 1946 during a train journey. 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. She needed to obtain papal permission to work independently. This process 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. She began her work in the most disease-ridden, impoverished neighborhoods of Calcutta.
Understanding Love One Another as I Have Loved You
Many people do not realize something important about Mother Teresa: despite her eventual canonization and universal veneration, she harbored intense internal spiritual struggles. Scholars and theologians have called it a profound “dark night of the soul” that lasted for decades. Private letters, published after her death in 1997, revealed something startling. From the 1950s onward, she often felt spiritually empty and doubted God’s existence. She experienced acute loneliness and despair, yet she continued her work with unwavering commitment.
She kept this secret suffering hidden from the world and even from her closest advisors. This 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 the world celebrates her 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. Her homes for the dying, though remarkable in their compassion, lacked adequate medical technology. Some observers felt 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. Livermore still acknowledges Mother Teresa’s profound spiritual commitment even while raising important questions.
Work Without Love Is Slavery and Emptiness
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. In that passage, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet as an act of radical humility. He 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. Rather, she sought 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. Modern charity 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. They might reduce their labor to mere mechanics.
In her view, the person being served needed to feel genuinely loved and valued as a human being. They deserved to know they were worthy of that love, not merely 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