On Friday, September 5th, 1997, Mother Teresa passed away at 87 years of age. The Catholic nun who founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, and who ran it up until last March, was in failing health, and had been close to death several times in the last several years. Even though her Catholicism was a constant source of criticism, she remained steadfastly devoted to the concerns of the poor, the weak, and the infirm, to her great merit.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojacxhiu on 27 August, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, (now the capital of the former-Yugoslavian province, and newly declared independent republic of Macedonia). Her father died when she was seven years old, and five years later the young Agnes first decided to become a nun; at age 18 she left her home in the Balkans to enter an Irish order called the Congregation of the Sisters of Loretto, in the Indian state of Bengal. After two months in Ireland, where she learned English, she set sail as a postulant for India, arriving in Calcutta in 1929, after seven weeks at sea.

As a novitiate Agnes completed her training at the hill station of Darjeeling in the Himalayas, about 300 miles north of Calcutta, and on 24 March, 1931, she took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as a sister of Loretto. Catholic nuns are required to select a Christian name at the time of their induction into holy orders, and the sister took the name of Saint Theresa of Lisieux, who died of tuberculosis at age 24 in 1897. Mother Teresa, of course, could not have known that she, herself, would die exactly a century after her namesake.

Sister Teresa was sent to St. Mary's School at the Loretto Convent in the Calcutta suburb of Entally, where she taught geography, history and catechism for 17 years; afterwards, becoming principal. It was on a train trip from Calcutta to Darjeeling, on 10 September, 1946, that Sister Teresa heard the "call" to help the poor. "The message was quite clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them."

The pope approved of her leaving the Loretto order, and in 1950 the Catholic Church approved the sister's founding of the new order, the Missionaries of Charity, of which the sister now became Mother Teresa. To her original vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the Mother now added a fourth vow of "wholehearted and free service to the poor," a vow that is unique to the Missionaries of Charity.

If Mother Teresa had been living in Dana Point, California, there can be no doubt that Angela Duzich, and Kit Fox, and Ed Knight -- all of them powerful bureaucrats in the Dana Point Planning Department -- would have pulled out all the stops to shut her down, as they did when they shut down the Regent's foundation set up in the memory of his grandmothers, and which offered shelter to the homeless. (They shut down another three or four non-profit services for the poor in the succeeding years after 1991, when they forced the Regent's shelter to close). Fortunately for Mother Teresa, she founded her order in Calcutta, India, where the government realized it had a problem, and was not prepared to oppose positive social work.

In 1979, Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize for her charitable work with beggars, orphans, lepers and the homeless and untouchables of India. While she has been criticized for her Catholic orientation, none of her critics had the courage or integrity to go to India themselves, to fulfill the work she was doing in her place. Under Mother Teresa's guiding hand, the Missionaries of Charity grew to encompass 4000 sisters working in 570 missions in 120 countries. The order now operates homes and hospices for AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis patients; soup kitchens; children's and family counseling programs; orphanages; and schools for the destitute.

All issues of dogma and theology aside, the acts of kindness and love that Mother Teresa performed unconditionally for all people should serve as a beacon to the living, to remind them of what is important in life. We get carried away with the importance of worldly possessions and status and rank, and we forget that life is a spiritual journey that we share with our mortal contemporaries, and that if we forget to share our lives with others, WE are the losers, because we lose the opportunity to know others, who give our lives context and meaning. The poor are not poor because they are lazy or sinful; they are poor because the circumstances of their lives have not been as fortunate as the circumstances that enabled others to line their pockets. This does not mean that there is any kind of moral breach between the rich and the poor, it means that those who are strong have a moral obligation to reach out to those who are weak. This is the very least they can do, and it has nothing to do with the abundancy any individual may possess. In the end, no one really "owns" anything, for in reality, we are more the stewards of the natural world, than its lords and masters.