A Life Well Lived

SMALL THINGS WITH GREAT LOVE

Inspiring Innovators: Melinda Gates is moved by Mother Teresa's belief in our shared humanity, and that everyone should be treated as if they matter

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2014

Over time, Mother Teresa has become regarded more as a monument than a person. What moves me about her, though, are the human qualities that have slowly been edited out of her story.

For almost two decades before she started doing the work for which she’s best known, she lived a quiet religious life, serving as a teacher. In Calcutta, however, she was gradually overwhelmed by the suffering of the people around her, and eventually decided to pursue missionary work. She called it her “call within a call”. But she was always full of ambivalence. She was racked with doubt about her chosen path. She missed her spiritual life. She felt called to do more than she was capable of doing. And yet, methodically, she followed the path she believed was hers.

My favourite quote of hers asks, “How do we love? Not in big things, but in small things with great love.” Mother Teresa and her network of 5,000 sisters show that those small things add up to one giant thing: the idea that all people, no matter how poor, share a common humanity, and that something can be done to help all of us. That was her great innovation. She espoused the belief that everyone matters, which was new in a world where brutal inequalities were considered normal and unavoidable. And then she reinforced that belief for decades and decades by actually treating everyone as if they matter. That was a brand new paradigm.

At the Gates Foundation, we don’t talk like Mother Teresa did. We talk about innovations, about technology, about global advocacy. But why do we do these things? We do them to make sure that every person has what they need—dignity, basic health and an opportunity for a better future. Contrary to the popular image, Mother Teresa proves that you don’t have to be a saint to make this kind of difference. You don’t have to be free of misgivings to do something difficult. You have to be brave, and loving, and you have to work hard. Those are qualities we all possess.

Some years ago, I travelled to India to volunteer in Mother Teresa’s hospice. A woman dying of AIDS asked me to help her see the sunset. So after she got her antiretrovirals, I carried her up to the roof. It’s hard to imagine two people whose circumstances differed more than hers and mine. But we share our humanity, we both live under the same sun, and it was beautiful and peaceful for both of us to watch that sun set. That’s what Mother Teresa taught me, and the world.

Melinda Gates, 50, is a philanthropist and co-founder of the Gates Foundation, which has an endowment of more than $38 billion. Mother Teresa (1910-97) was a Roman Catholic nun of Albanian descent, whose work with the unregarded poor, sick and dying of Calcutta earned her the Nobel peace prize