FOR THE POOR, AN IMMORTAL

Mother would probably have recoiled at the extravagance. A state funeral televised around the world. A military guard bearing her coffin to a ceremony attended by the powerful and the famous. Billboards proclaiming her apotheosis. Mourning in a land of a multiplicity of idols for a woman who believed singularly in Jesus. "Mother Teresa, you're immortal!" came the cries as the citizens of Calcutta, the city she served for a half-century, broke through police barricades to run beside the carriage that bore her to her funeral. The same carriage bore the body of Mahatma Gandhi after he was assassinated in 1948. It also ferried that of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, after his death in 1964. Mother would have preferred something simpler.

If we could, we would then chide her with the example of Christ himself. When a woman anointed his hair with precious ointment from an alabaster box, she was lectured by his disciples for not spending the money on the poor instead. Jesus' famous rebuke to his followers: "Ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always." And Mother would have nodded, recognizing our need to deliver the tributes, to shed the tears, to try to anoint her as a saint. But then she would point us to many of the people who had come to see her make her final round through the streets of Calcutta. And Mother would say, "The poor are with you still. There is work to be done."