SAINTS AMONG US
Calcutta presents a harrowing vision. The destitute, the skin-and-bones starving, the leprous and the dying seem to be concentrated there as nowhere else in India--or the world. Their numbers, swollen by past waves of refugees from Bangladesh, grow daily. At least 200,000 of them live in the streets, building tiny fires to cook their scraps of food, defecating at curbstones, curling up in their cotton rags against a wall to sleep--and often to die. Out of this scene of unremitting human desolation has come an extraordinary message of love and hope. Its bearer is a tiny gray-eyed Roman Catholic nun who 27 years ago, alone and virtually penniless, set out to work among the city's "poorest of the poor."
Today, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 65, is slightly bent from hardship, her man-size hands are gnarled, her Albanian peasant face is seamed. From her solitary, seemingly foolhardy labors have grown two orders of women and men willing to take risks and make sacrifices. Nearly 1,300 Missionaries of Charity--1,132 nuns and 150 brothers--are now scattered throughout 67 countries tending the world's poor: in Yemen and Gaza, in Australia and Peru, in London and in New York City's South Bronx--even, at Pope Paul VI's request, in the shadow of St. Peter's.
Calcutta is still the heart of the effort. There, Mother Teresa and her followers collect the dying from the streets so that they may leave life in peace among friends. They rescue abandoned newborn babies from garbage heaps, nurse them back to health if they can, find homes for them later. They seek out the diseased and the hurt, sponging maggot-bloated wounds as if--an image that sustains them --they were sponging the wounds of Jesus. They have made havens for lepers, the retarded and the mad; they have found work for the jobless. "Not for a second did I think that God would act like this," Mother Teresa told TIME Correspondent James Shepherd in an interview last week. "We have nothing. The greatness of God is that he has used this nothing to do something."
Between her travels to the order's farflung outposts, Mother Teresa rises at 4:30 a.m., prays, sings the Mass with her sister nuns, joins them for a spare meal of an egg, bread, banana and tea, then goes out into the city to work. Age and authority have not changed her; she is at ease these days with Pope and Prime Minister, but she still cleans convent toilets. She has won an array of international honors, including India's Order of the Lotus and the Vatican's first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize, but sees them only as "recognition that the poor are our brothers and sisters, that there are people in the world who need love, who need care, who have to be wanted." Especially in a season that celebrates God's good will toward man, Mother Teresa's own loving luminosity prompts many to bestow on her a title that she would surely reject. She is, they say, a living saint.
Saint. The word is heavy with meanings, not all of them congenial to modern man. The original Latin from which it derives, sanctus, means holy, and all the definitions since have revolved around just whom or what people consider holy. To many, saint is a medieval word, redolent of incense, conjuring up halos and glowing, distant images of spiritual glory in some great cathedral's stained-glass windows. To others, the word is still useful,
if prosaic, shorthand to describe someone who willingly suffers something that seems beyond the call of duty: a son or daughter, for instance, who spends years caring for a senile and demanding parent.
Somewhere between the two is the vision of the contemporary saint as a person of persistently heroic virtue and courage whose life is a model for others --a Mother Teresa, perhaps, or a Mahatma Gandhi. "A saint is someone by whom one lives," says the Rev. John Crocker, Episcopal chaplain at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "someone who for us is a revelation of what life is all about."
To the Roman Catholic Church, the only saint is a dead saint. Indeed, the very process of formal canonization was designed to determine who among the departed were certainly with God in heaven, and therefore could safely be asked to intercede for divine favors.
The path to canonization, though streamlined these days, is still long and tortuous. Usually required, among other things, is proof of between two and four miracles as evidence that the saint is really in God's presence. In practice a candidate must also die a Catholic. When he visited Uganda in 1969, Pope Paul prayed at a sanctuary for Anglican martyrs at Namugongo, but that is as close as any Protestants have come to Rome's recognition.
Still, the Catholic Church has honored a variety of saints.
The "two Teresas" are a classic example. St. Teresa of Avila was a mystic and 16th century religious reformer who, according to legend, stood mired in the mud on one of her journeys and cried out to God: "If this is the way You treat Your friends, no wonder You don't have many!" St. Therese of Lisieux was a sickly 19th century nun who died young and unknown. Her principal virtue was an awesome courage in the face of her long and excruciating fatal illness. Similarly, the church has sainted kings and rebels against kings, noblemen and tramps, virgins and mothers, activists and hermits.
In Protestant democratic usage, all faithful Christians are saints, as the word is used throughout the New Testament epistles. Thus a popular Protestant hymn notes that the "saints of God are just folks like me." But Protestants, like Catholics, do sometimes distinguish between the everyday and the heroic. Despite the criticism of his authoritarian personality and his patronizing attitude toward Africans that arose even before his death, Albert Schweitzer is still commonly considered a Protestant saint. So is the Lutheran martyr to the Nazis, Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Salvation Army Founder William Booth, African Missionary David Livingstone and Methodism's revered founder John Wesley are among many cited as Protestant saints.
Jews do not talk of saints, but prize the zaddik, the "righteous person." A zaddik, explains Orthodox Rabbi Stephen Riskin of Manhattan's Lincoln Square Synagogue, is "deeply pious, self-effacing, generous with everything he has, burning with a desire to serve God and serve mankind. One serves God by serving man, and man by serving God. The two are intertwined." Besides recognized zaddikim, there are according to Jewish lore a group of hidden zaddikim in every generation, believed to number at least 36, upon whose merit the existence of the world depends. Only the virtue of these 36 hidden saints--lamed-vovniks in Yiddish--stays God's hand from destroying the world.
Do the old saintly qualities still apply? Australian Anglican Ross Walker, a social worker in Canberra, says they have not changed much since Jesus' time: "Love, self-denial, continuing self-sacrifice and grace are all necessary." Though saints "like to keep what they do private," he says, their very personalities often betray them: "They are all inspiring, larger-than-life people."
Austrian Catholic Theologian Adolf Holl also believes that the essentials the church sought in saints have not altered. The saint must exhibit a heroic degree of virtue akin to the asceticism that ancient athletes and warriors strove to perfect. And the works of a saint must be out of the ordinary, almost unique. He or she should have a charisma or aura, the kind of radiance that was classically symbolized by a halo. The life of a saint should display a certain personal serenity.
Saints normally are not normal. "A saint has to be a misfit," says University of Chicago Church Historian Martin Marty. "A person who embodies what his culture considers typical or normal cannot be exemplary." Father Carroll Stuhmueller of Chicago's Catholic Theological Union agrees. "Saints tend to be on the outer edge, where the maniacs, the idiots and the geniuses are. They break the mold." Not all accept that description of a saint. Hewing closer to Protestant tradition. Church Historian Jane Douglas of California's School of Theology at Claremont insists that saints are no more, no less than "Christians who go about their tasks in the world with a kind of holiness that grows out of faith."
Perhaps the best definition of sainthood is one that draws remarkable agreement: the saint as a window through which another world is glimpsed, a person "through whom the light of God shines." It is just that light that many see in Mother Teresa.
The once waspish Malcolm Muggeridge, a recent convert to Christianity, writes movingly in his book Something Beautiful for God of putting her on a train in Calcutta.
"When the train began to move, and I walked away, I felt as though I were leaving behind me all the beauty and all the joy in the universe. Something of God's love has rubbed off on Mother Teresa."
The woman who inspires such tribute was born to Albanian parents in Skoplje, Yugoslavia, in 1910, and baptized Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Even at the age of twelve, she remembers, she wanted to be a missionary, "to go out and give the love of Christ." The desire grew when some local Jesuits, freshly sent to India, wrote enthusiastic letters home about their work in the Bengal missions. By the time she was 18, Agnes had joined the Irish branch of Loreto nuns who were working in Calcutta. In 1937 she made her final vows.
By then Teresa had fallen into the academic life at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta. There she taught geography to Bengali girls from comfortable homes, later became principal. But the school was hard by Calcutta's Moti Jheel slum, and the contrast between the horror outside and the genteel world within the convent walls must have motivated her decision to work for the poor, though she claims that it did not. What did change her she remembers vividly.
It was Sept. 10, 1946; she was on a train to Darjeeling when she heard what she is certain was a call--from God. "A call within a call," she says, since she was already a nun. This time the invitation was to serve the poorest of the poor. By the spring of 1948, Mother Teresa had won permission to leave the cloister and work in the Calcutta slums. In August of that year she laid aside her Loreto habit and donned the blue-edged, coarse cotton white sari that would become her new order's uniform. After an intensive nurse's training course, she opened a slum school in Moti Jheel just before Christmas.
She was not alone long. Some of the young women who joined her--former students at St. Mary's--remember their own calls. Mother Teresa asked; they accepted. She believed fiercely that God would provide, and the little band lived literally from day to day, sharing with the destitute what they could cadge from charity. The sisters were to live little better than the poor they served. They were allowed only two of the humble saris (which still cost only $1) so that they could honestly teach that it is possible to stay clean with a single change of garment. Life became only slightly less precarious in 1950, when the Vatican approved their new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity, and they moved into quarters that still serve as the mother house.
Not until two years later did the sisters take on one of their harshest and most widely admired tasks, care of the dying. Mother Teresa remembers finding a dying woman on the sidewalk, her feet half chewed away by rats, her wounds alive with maggots. Only with great difficulty did she persuade a hospital to take the woman. Within days the nun was pleading with authorities for "just one room" to which she could take the dying. What they gave her was a onetime pilgrims' rest house near the Temple of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. She renamed it Nirmal Hriday--Pure Heart--and filled it.
Nirmal Hriday is now only one of 32 havens for the dying, 67 leprosariums, 28 children's homes that the order runs round the world, but it still moves visitors to wonderment. Muggeridge claims a modern sort of miracle for it. Some photos shot in the infirmary's hopelessly dim light, he says, turned out to be bathed in an inexplicably soft glow. Calcutta Journalist Desmond Doig, a self-described skeptic and author of a forthcoming book on Mother Teresa, reports a more personal miracle. Instead of finding the place repugnant, he became so suffused with its compassion that he began to nurse the patients himself. "Our work," explains Mother Teresa, "brings people face to face with love."
Not at Nirmal Hriday nor any other of Mother Teresa's homes does anyone get a sectarian hard sell. The dying get the rituals they want: Ganges water on the lips for the Hindu, readings from the Koran for the Moslem, last rites for the occasional Catholic. Babies left at Shishu Bhavan, the busy Calcutta center that feeds the hungry and shelters abandoned children, remain Moslems or Hindus if the parents wish; only foundlings are baptized. The nun who runs the center conspiratorially reveals that the sisters have saved more than one Hindu marriage from family pressure by quietly providing a childless couple with a newborn baby to pass off as their own.
Such understanding of local ways is typical of Mother Teresa, who became a citizen of India in 1948. But her Catholic orthodoxy does not bend far. Though the sisters operate 28 family-planning centers in India and elsewhere round the world, the only birth control they offer is the papally-approved rhythm method. As for abortion, Mother Teresa calls it a crime that kills not only the child but the consciences of all involved.
Mother Teresa and her sisters are not without their critics. To some, the nuns and brothers are merely bandaging a civic wound that needs drastic surgery. "We are not trying so much to do social work," Mother Teresa explains, "as to live out that life of love, of compassion, that God has for his people." The poor, she says, suffer even more from rejection than material want. "If we didn't discard them they would not be poor. An alcoholic in Australia told me that when he is walking along the street he hears the footsteps of everyone coming toward him or passing him becoming faster. Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."
However deep her compassion for the poor, Mother Teresa nurses no hatred for the rich. She joyfully shows a scrapbook of pictures of orphans she has placed in affluent homes in the U.S. and Europe. But she is also alert to the perils of contemporary civilization. "Our intellect and other gifts have been given to be used for God's greater glory," she says, "but sometimes they become the very god for us. That is the saddest part: we are losing our balance when this happens. We must free ourselves to be filled by God. Even God cannot fill what is full."
Mother Teresa by no means rejects the fruits of modern society if they can help her work. Pope Paul VI, on a 1964 visit to India, left her a white Lincoln limousine that had been given to him. She promptly raffled it off for a profit of some $100,000. She treasures other useful gifts: a streetcar pass for Calcutta's trams, a railroad pass for India's trains, an Indian Airlines pass that gives her free domestic flights. In 1973, Imperial Chemical Industries gave Mother Teresa a former paint-manufacturing plant, which she quickly filled with children, the sick and dying, and mentally ill women. She has also started a small but flourishing copra industry there that gleans its raw materials, coconut shells, from the litter left on Calcutta streets by thousands of coconut-milk sippers.
For all the shrewd organizing sense with which she is sometimes credited, Mother Teresa remains otherworldly. She suffers journalists and photographers only because publicity may help her people. After Photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont cajoled her into posing for the portrait from which TIME'S cover was painted, she told him that she had prayed for a special favor at Mass the morning of the sitting. For every picture he took, she had asked God to "free one soul from Purgatory." Two years ago, after she had accepted the Templeton Prize for "progress in religion" in London, one of her co-workers asked where the prize was. When she could not find it, a frenzied search of the auditorium ensued. There, on a chair in a corner, was the envelope --with a check for -L-34,000 inside.
God, after all, continued to provide.
Mother Teresa is unique; yet the world has many who share her kind of faith and fervor. Each sister and brother in the Missionaries of Charity is a story in courage. And beyond her circle are thousands of others.
"We are surrounded by persons with saintliness," says Anglican Dean Herbert O'Driscoll of Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, B.C., "the elderly living full, triumphant lives in great pain, persons loving to the full where no love is returned. That is the uncelebrated sainthood going on about us every day."
Even the spiritual heroes, whose special tasks or character draw attention and emulation, seem to rise up in abundance for those who look for them. Many, like Mother Teresa, live by the standard set in Matthew: 25. They feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned. These works of mercy draw attention because they are deeds that even a world without faith can recognize as good. Yet those who practice them usually lead intense spiritual lives.
Annie Skau is a Norwegian Evangelical nurse who traces her vocation to a direct call from God. Praying in the forest one day, she heard a voice ask, "Will you go for me to China?" and in 1938 she went to Shensi province as a medical missionary. Expelled by the Communists in 1951, she moved to Hong Kong, where her 6-ft. 5-in. frame became a familiar sight as she directed the construction of a 300-bed tuberculosis hospital. Now limited by a heart condition to three or four working days a week, she still rises before dawn to read the Bible. "The old Christian who has lived and walked with the Lord for many years," she says, "is living in a treasure chamber."
This same serenity marks Surgeon Carl Becker of the Protestant Africa Inland Mission, who has spent 46 years in the interior of Zaire. Hopping by plane from outpost to outpost, Becker once routinely performed up to 15 major operations a day. Now 81, he continues to work at a large new center at Nyankunde, awaking at 5 a.m. to pray with his staff before his rounds. He and his ailing wife Maria may soon leave Africa. The Zaireans would like to see the couple ultimately buried there--a great tribute to whites--but the Beckers do not want to become burdensome invalids for the hospital.
To Dr. Cicely Saunders of London, her Anglican faith is essential to her work in the St. Christopher's Hospice she founded there. Like Mother Teresa's Nirmal Hriday, it is a home for the dying--cancer patients whom Dr. Saunders treats with heroin and other drugs to ease the pain of their last days. The hospital is cheerful, even gay; patients nibble sweets, chat with visitors, have a drink if they want to. Dr. Sanders, 59, concedes that she could not maintain that atmosphere nor watch her patients die without her faith. "It makes a difference as a very frightened lady drops into unconsciousness that I believe in a religion which speaks of a God who dies, and rises."
Early experience as a victim has moved some medical saints to serve others. As a girl, Yaeko Ibuka was sent to a leprosarium near Mount Fuji. There she became a Catholic and resigned herself to disfigurement and death, only to be told that she did not have leprosy after all. Though free to return home, she says, she "understood for the first time the power of God's love," and stayed. Now, 55 years later, Yaeko Ibuka is known as "the angel of Fukusei Byoin." At 78, she continues to offer her gentle, unstinting care to the lepers.
Schwester Selma Mayer of Jerusalem, 92, is also revered as something of an angel, certainly as a zaddik. She lost her mother when she was five, and as she grew up she became determined "to give to others what I had missed--mother love and concern for human beings." Schwester Selma was nursing in
Hamburg when the head of Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Hospital came looking for a head nurse in 1916. Through wars and epidemics she has been in Jerusalem ever since, always living at the hospital, often sitting up all night with a critically ill patient. She never married, seeing the care of the suffering as her "duty --one that took up all my time." But she did adopt and raise two daughters who had been orphaned like herself.
To other living saints, giving means devoting their lives entirely to the needs of orphans. Austrian Catholic Hermann Gmeiner, 56, saw that need in the wake of World War II, when Europe was crowded with homeless refugee children. He took a leaf from his childhood--an older sister had raised the eight other children after his mother died--and built the first in a series of "S O S villages" that now care for 15,000 orphans round the world. Every village consists of a cluster of houses, each presided over by a foster mother who cares for eight to ten orphans. They grow up as a family, even attending local schools. Gmeiner asks his foster mothers not to marry lest their commitment become divided. In turn, he has remained unmarried.
What Gmeiner has done for orphans, Canadian Jean Vanier has accomplished in a similar way for mentally retarded adults: permanent and caring communities. A Catholic layman and son of a former Governor General of Canada, Vanier spent 14 years of spiritual search before moving into a dilapidated old house in Trosly, France, in 1964 to share his life with two retarded men. Since then, L 'Arche (the Ark) communities, in which the normal and retarded share a common life, have opened on four continents. Vanier describes the homes as places of "human and spiritual progress," where the retarded gain in hope and confidence while the more fortunate who come in contact with them are drawn toward a life of simplicity and self-giving.
The call to help can come fairly late and in strange places.
Denny and Jeanne Grindall, Presbyterians from Seattle, where Denny is a florist and nurseryman, found their call in their 50s on a 1968 vacation in Africa. Visiting some Masai nomads in Kenya, they were appalled at the disease, drought and hunger. "We knew what we had to do," says Denny Grindall. "God led us to this place." He studied up on engineering and put his new learning to work (along with quiet infusions of the family savings) in a succession of six-month stays in Kenya. The Grindalls have won the respect and affection of the Masai and changed their way of life. The once nomadic tribesmen, guided by Denny and Jeanne, now till vegetable farms around a new self-built dam; Jeanne also teaches the women nutrition, hygiene and how to make clothes. The Grindalls' philosophy is simple: "Individuals have a responsibility to the Lord to use any brain and muscle that He has given us to help others."
To many religious people, good works are not enough in the face of the world's cruel inequities. They seek social solutions. Tanzanian Bishop Christopher Mwoleka, a black and a Catholic, sees a solution and basic Christian value in the ujamaa cooperative villages. A member of the Nyabihanga ujamaa village in his diocese, Bishop Mwoleka spends two weeks of each month at work in the fields, barefoot and clad in tattered shirt and dungarees. He argues that the cooperative way "is a practical way to imitate the life of the Trinity, a life of sharing."
In the U.S. one widely acclaimed spiritual heroine feeds the poor and campaigns fiercely for a better world. She is Dorothy Day, the snow-haired philosopher-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and still its indefatigable voice. She has been jailed eight times--most recently as an illegal picketer for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers in 1973. (Many regard Chavez himself as a saint for his selfless, intensely spiritual devotion to his cause.) A Marxist in the '20s, she bore a daughter to her common-law husband, but became a celibate after converting to Catholicism. "The best thing to do with the best things in life," she says, "is to give them up."
Now 78, Dorothy Day still presides over the Catholic Worker Movement from her tattered but vital hospice for the poor, St. Joseph's House, just off Manhattan's Bowery. Today 47 urban "houses of hospitality," inspired by the one she founded in New York, provide hot meals, and sometimes shelter, for the down-and-out. Some are tied to companion farms in the country in keeping with the back-to-the-land ideas of Co-Founder Peter Maurin.
Saintly people who focus attention on oppression can expect to pay for their actions. In South Africa, criticism of the country's racist policies has brought a harsh punishment to Dutch Reformed Minister C.F. Beyers Naude. Pastor Naude, now 60, was a prominent, rising churchman and Afrikaner supremacist until the 1960 Sharpeville massacre prodded his conscience. He forthwith set to work to destroy his church's theological approval of apartheid. Naude is now barred from the pulpit, ostracized, harassed by government prosecutors and denied his passport. Still, he says that being an outsider in his own society is "what God requires of me."
The U.S. has its own civil rights heroes. John Lewis, 35, the young apostle of nonviolence in the '60s, was arrested more than 40 times in civil rights demonstrations, and his skull was fractured at Selma in 1965. Since 1970 he has headed the Voter Education Project in Atlanta and helped register some 3.5 million blacks. As a Baptist seminarian, Lewis was kidded for talking up the Social Gospel, but he insists that some "immutable principles" must be at the base of the "Beloved Society" he envisions, and nonviolence is one of them. If a compassionate world is the end, he argues, "then the means we use must be consistent with it."
Perhaps the most widely revered political saint today is Brazil's Dom Helder Pessoa C`amara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife (TIME, June 24, 1974) and partisan of the poor. No better testimony for Dom Helder exists than the witness of those who have suffered in his behalf. Former Methodist Missionary Fred Morris, who last year was tortured by Brazilian authorities at least partly because of his friendship with Dom Helder, puts it simply. "Being with him, watching him, listening to him, one is less and less aware of him and increasingly aware of the reality to which he points--a God who cares about the little people of the earth."
But must a contemporary saint be an activist? The Rev. George Webber, president of Manhattan's New York Theological Seminary, says yes: "When I think of a saint today, I think of a person who is willing to spend his whole life in a struggle for justice." Yet Monsignor Francis Lally, a member of the U.S. bishops conference staff, offers a gentle demurrer. "A saint is a person who puts himself in the service of others for spiritual reasons," he says. Just how one accomplishes that, adds Lally, may vary from age to age. "The activist has taken over, but I think we're swinging back toward the mystic."
The great religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, have never swung away from mysticism as the pinnacle of holiness, though they also value deeds of compassion. Traditional Islamic belief views the saint or wali (friend of God) as a person with a foot in both worlds--one whose special communion with Allah coincides with his excellence in good works. As for Christianity's own rich tradition of monastic mysticism, which goes back to the fabled desert anchorites of Egypt, it seems to be undergoing a revival there and elsewhere.
In the ancient monastery of Deir el Makarios in the desert 50 miles southwest of Cairo, a Coptic monk is causing a mild sensation, drawing as many as 500 visitors a day. His name: Matta el Meskin, Matthew the Poor. Like the great anchorite St. Anthony, Matta el Meskin was once an affluent young man--a prosperous pharmacist. At the age of 29, heeding Jesus' call to "sell what you have," he disposed of his two houses, two cars, two pharmacies, gave the proceeds to the poor and, keeping only a cloak, devoted himself to prayer and asceticism. He is out of the world and yet still of it. From his cell, where he lives mainly on bread and water, he has written more than 40 books and pamphlets, most of them scholarly books on church affairs, directed the total rehabilitation of the decaying monastery and begun a reformation of Coptic monastic life so profound that he was one of three nominees to be Coptic Pope in the 1971 election.
Western Christians often mention Brother Roger Schutz, founder of France's Protestant monastery of Taize (TIME, April 29, 1974), as a saint. Brother Roger's worldwide Taize youth groups are out to change the world, but what he offers at Taize --and to them--is essentially a shared life based deeply on prayer. "We should not pray for any useful end," Brother Roger has written, "but in order to create a community of free men with Christ."
Most living saints, activists or no, of course do get down on their knees and pray, some for hours a day. In the traditional concept of sainthood, in fact, prayer is an essential condition of sanctity, the key to the deeds that surround it. Most of today's saintly people would agree that the concept has not changed.
"To keep a lamp burning," Mother Teresa told Correspondent Shepherd, "we have to keep putting oil in it." To build her own faith, she said, "I had to struggle, I had to pray, I had to make sacrifices before I could say 'yes' to God."
Those who succeed, however, share something of a revelation.
Schwester Selma of Jerusalem cherishes a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet of Calcutta, that perhaps says it best:
I slept and dreamt That life was joy I awoke and saw That life was duty I acted and behold Duty was joy.
That may be a liberating truth. Perhaps, in a world that celebrates this season with more than a touch of hedonism, it is just the corrective message that the saints among us bring.
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