The two pillars

A charism (>Gk: charis: favor, gift, grace) is any gift of the Holy Spirit. I am using it in this context to refer to the founding grace of a religious order, from which that order draws its spiritual life. Every charism has two aspects: a spirituality and a mission.

• Spirituality is a particular way of relating to God. It is not a substitute for religion, but a particular lived experience that places a person in relation to Jesus Christ and the Trinity. The spirituality of the Jesuits, for example, has a particular focus on discernment of spirits. The spirituality of the Benedictines focuses on the liturgy, especially on relating to God through communal prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours. The spirituality of the Dominicans places emphasis on coming to a deeper knowledge of God through study and contemplation. 

• Mission is a particular apostolic work towards which a charism is oriented. It is important to note that the mission is not necessarily an active apostolate. Monks, perhaps even more than missionaries, go out in search of souls to save them, but they do so through prayer and penance. To give some examples, the particular mission of the Dominicans is preaching; the mission of the Benedictines is prayerful labor; the mission of the Jesuits is...almost anything, it seems! But historically they have been excellent educators and missionaries.   

Of course, I give these examples with the caveat that I am painting in broad strokes. The particular spirituality and mission of any order is far more nuanced than I have presented them.

An illumination from what appears to be Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit is the source of all charisms.

But back to the point: The MC charism has two scriptural foundations for these two pillars of its charism. They are the source of inspiration for the life and prayer of the MC. We could say that they are the two engines that drive the MC's body and soul.

1. Jesus' cry of anguish from the Cross--"I thirst!" (Jn 19:28)--is the basis of the spirituality. Mother Teresa, in a famous letter she wrote to her Congregation from Varanassi, tells us that the thirst of Jesus is something more than love, something deeper than love. This is, of course, difficult to understand outside of a lived experience of Christ's thirst, as Mother had on the train to Darjeeling, when she received her call within a call to found the MCs. The MC takes his identity entirely from his understanding of Jesus's thirst for him. He comes to recognize himself and his vocation only in the light of this thirst. And from this experience of being loved, he desires to go out to the world to satiate Jesus's thirst--to share Christ's love by loving others.



The spirituality: "I thirst".

2. How does one satiate the thirst of Christ? Mother understood that Christ was especially present in the poorest of the poor. She took her inspiration from the 25th chapter of Matthew, when christ gives us his criteria for judgment, when he is separating the sheep from the goats: "whatever you did to the least of these my brethren--you did it to me" (Mt 25:31-46). When we give water to the thirsty, we are giving water to Christ. In the poorest of the poor, Christ thirsts to be given water, but he thirsts even more to be loved.

The mission: "you did it to me".

To summarize: the MC understands the meaning of his existence as this--to quench the thirst of Christ on the cross, by quenching his thirst for water and for love in the poorest of the poor. And I cannot emphasize enough that the poorest of the poor, those who dwell at the peripheries of existence, exist in the wealthy countries of the world perhaps even more than in the poorer countries. There is a great poverty of loneliness in the developed world, a thirst for love and a thirst for God.