KOZHIKODE: Serving God by serving the poor was her passion from her childhood but Sr Althea never realised it was not all that easy to practice it everyday life until she joined Missionaries of Charity.
Hailing from Kayyunni, a remote agrarian hamlet nestled on Kerala-Tamil Nadu border in Wayanad, she joined Mother Teresa’s organisation in 1982. “As a novice I often wept while cleaning the wounds of leprosy patients with maggots crawling one after another at Kalighat in Kolkotha,” she reminisced.
“It was then the Mother told me ‘you are crying because you are yet to experience the scars of crucified Jesus in the wormy scars of these hapless humans. Once your faith and love for Jesus mature, you will experience the heavenly bliss while cleaning the wounds of the poorest,” she said.
Sharing her memories over phone from Rourkela in Odisha, Sr. Althea said the Mother always had that perpetual smile on her lips which itself soothed even a dying patient. “That smile was a gift of God,” she said. “When I saw her first she was removing worms from the wounds of a leprosy patient. For her the patient was Jesus himself. It was her prayer and her sacrament.”
Sr. Althea herself had a miraculous experience. “I received a telegram from my home that my mother was sinking and wanted to see me,” she recalled. “In those days it would take days to reach home in Wayanad from Kolkotha. I was in tears when I met the Mother for permission to go home. With a smile Mother knelt down and started praying and told me to go to the tabernacle and pray, and my mother will be cured. After a few days I received information that my mother has improved.” My mother still lives a healthy life, Sr Althea said.
Sr Althea is now busy preparing inmates, majority of them poor TB patients and poor children, in her house at Rourkela in Odisha for the canonisation of Mother Teresa. “We will get a cable TV connection for one day so that we all can witness the ceremonies of Vatican,” she said.
In 2003, Teresa was beatified by then Pope John Paul II in a fast-tracked process which is the first step to gaining Sainthood. In 2002, the Vatican officially recognised a miracle she was said to have carried out after her death, namely the 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumour.
The traditional canonisation procedure requires at least two miracles. The second miracle was from Brazil, where a person had been healed miraculously as a result of her earlier prayers.Nuns to celebrate day with poorest of poor
