I Remember When a Lady Came to Town

Richard Gordon

I can still see her small brown face, like a wrinkled walnut, circled by the white cloth of a nun's defining head-dress in bright July sunshine. Mother Teresa of Calcutta came to Ireland one day in the summer of 1972 and we met her at Corrymeela in Ballycastle.

The Irish troubles were about 4 years old, some people had already been killed and many more were to follow them, with their lives sacrificed on the altars of sectarian division and politically-inspired violence. Some said it wasn't religious, some said that the politicians were not to blame, some made a lot of money, some of us tried to speak words of reconciliation and compromise. But the majority dismissed 'reconciliation' and 'compromise' as weak and cowardly words and as giving-in. A few wonderful people cared enough to travel the world and to risk life and limb to teach us how to love our neighbour as ourselves.

Mother Teresa, the Albanian Loreto nun who spent her life in the service of the sick and the poor and the dying and the helpless came to Ireland to add her voice and her wonderful presence to the movement for reconciliation. The reconcilers were to learn over a long painful generation that reconciliation is learning to accept those who are perceived to be different and learning to listen to those who hold views contrary to your own. Reconciliation was often lampooned as surrender.

Corrymeela was and still is a Christian Centre for peace and reconciliation. It has always been a 'safe' or comfortable place where the ethos requires that anyone can put their point of view and everyone be courteously heard. Many international reconcilers have visited Corrymeela including the Dalai Lama from Tibet, and successive Presidents of Ireland and successive Northern Ireland Secretaries all visited. Mother Teresa came to Corrymeela for there certainly weren't many places in Ireland where she could meet anything like a cross-section of the population.

Mother Teresa is dead now but I remember meeting her on that July day in 1972, I read Malcolm Muggeridge's 'Something Beautiful for God' about her compassionate ministry to some of the world's most vulnerable people and it moved me powerfully.. There are Mother Teresa houses in 61 countries around the world. Her name is still a bye-word for compassion and care and love and practical sympathy. Her legacy lives on.

I remember her smile, her gentle face and her intense blue eyes, eyes that showed her strength and expressed her vulnerability for she appeared as fragile as precious china. She had seen cruelty, deprivation, suffering, neglect, division yet it had made her softer rather than harder and more loving rather than less caring. I listened with the others as she spoke to our hearts of her ministry to the old and the sick and the dying.

I know that Mother Teresa was not and is not without her critics even though the Pope and his cardinals want to make her a Pontifical Saint in record time. Some say she was a driven by an urge to proselytise for the Roman Catholic Church, others criticised the standards of health care in her hospices and houses for the dying, and still others were critical of the opaque way some of the specifically donated funds were distributed. But these people were and remain a tiny minority.

On that day in 1972 we were only a few hundred people. I shared a sense of guilt at my ineffectiveness as a peace maker and recognised my inability to break down the walls of sectarian division. The majority were still convinced that there's was only political stance that could lead to peace and there were those who believed only one religious denomination was truly Christian. They would probably have been uncomfortable at Corrymeela that day, and possibly chose not to be there. Many people felt compromise was not a way forward but rather a betrayal of historic allegiances. It was a 'dirty' word which suggested surrender and weakness.

Like many other pilgrims for peace from crucibles of conflict Mother Teresa came to Ireland and chose Corrymeela in Ballycastle. She came to share her experiences and to draw strength from other peace makers. Many poachers-turned-gamekeepers were there, many terrorists who had undergone life-changing experiences came there. It is very moving to listen to one time men of violence who became peace loving community workers, tell their stories. Victims and their relatives came also and it was these people for whom Mother Teresa had a special word and the warmest of her smiles.

The day Mother Teresa came to Ireland and smiled at me, remains clear in my memory all these 35 years later. It was a beautiful day but it was the loveliness of the person I met who lives most clearly in my memory. That day she made our world a lovelier place and the wonder of it is that she made the world a lovelier place for me.