Tuesday 19 April 2016

Mother Teresa Exhibition opens

Last night saw the opening of our official exhibition about the life of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, who will be canonized in September.

Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, Parish Priest of St Patrick's, Soho Square, who knew Mother, preached at the Mass, and afterwards gave a short talk in the Parish Centre:

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Then the exhibition opened in our library. It will be open every day from 10.30am until 7pm, until 30th April. Each afternoon at 4 o'clock, a film will be shown about Mother Teresa's life in the Parish Centre.

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Some of Mother Teresa's sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, came from London and Liverpool:

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The exhibition includes Mother's habit and sari, some cutlery and crockery used by her, her Nobel Peace prize and other artefacts.

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There are also many boards, which tell the story of Mother Teresa's life, and some letters written in her hand.

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At the end of the Mass, a first-class relic of Blessed Teresa was venerated. Fr Sherbrooke reminded us of the prayer Mother used to say after Communion each day, still said by the Missionaries of Charity. It is a prayer composed by our own Blessed John Henry Newman, before whose grave at Rednal Mother Teresa knelt in prayer:

Dear Jesus,
help me to spread your fragrance wherever I go.
Flood my soul with your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly
that my life may only be a radiance of yours.
Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with
may feel your presence in my soul.

Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!
Stay with me and then I will begin to shine as you shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others.

The light, O Jesus, will be all from you; none of it will be mine.
It will be you, shining on others through me.
Let me thus praise you in the way which you love best,
by shining on those around me.
Let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by example,
by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do,
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears for you.  Amen.