CTS Biographies - Ignatius Press

28M OTHER T ERESAAs she repeated in many interviews in later years, shewas on the train to Darjeeling to make her annual retreatas usual, on 10th September 1946. “It was on that trainthat I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into theslums - to serve Him in the poorest of the poor. I knew itwas His will and that I had to follow Him. There was nodoubt that it was to be His work.”Let us recall that this was a person who had been closeto Jesus since her childhood. She would later write to theArchbishop of Calcutta, “From childhood the Heart ofJesus has been my first love”.At the age of eighteen she had clearly discerned herown vocation to the religious life and followed thatresolutely at the cost of abandoning her homeland and thelikelihood of ever seeing her mother again.Writing of her years in religious life in Loreto, shecould honestly say, “I have tried to live up to Hisdesires. I have been burning with longing to love Himas He has never been loved before”. At the age ofthirty-two, having been a religious sister for fourteenyears, she felt the call, and received permission toanswer it with a private vow, “to give to Godanything that He may ask - not to refuse Himanything”. The sensitivity of such a woman to thewill of God and the ‘still small voice within’ her mustsurely be heightened.