Biography and Life Experiences of Mother Teresa "Agnes Bojaxhiu" - Getting Closer to God's Voice

Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on the day of her confirmation. (image source) Mother Teresa was pretty when she was a little girl. It is said that she learned generosity from her mother, Drana Bojaxhiu, who reportedly invited the city’s poor to dine with them for dinner.

▲Agnes with her grandmother

Her father was an entrepreneur and her mother was active in participating in the local church activities. Mother Teresa’s father Nikolle Bojaxhiu fought against injustice by being an active Albanian rights activist and he died in 1919 when she was eight years old. Several biographers supposed that he was poisoned by Serbian agents.   Her family encountered financial crisis after her father’s death. That fully explains why Mother Teresa has a close relationship with her mom and she inherits much of her, her sense of humor and her compassion to the poor and those who suffer.

By the age of fourteen, Mother Teresa determined to devote herself to spiritual pursuits. She left home in 1928 at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto to learn English with an attempt to become a missionary. Since then, she never saw her mother or her sister again. Being a Loreto nun for two decades, first a teacher and later Principal. The world outside of her classroom was made up of slums and abject poverty. She can’t ignore the poverty surrounding her in Calcutta. The Bengal famine of 1943 brought misery and death to the city, and the August 1946 Direct Action Day began a period of Muslim-Hindu violence.

Mother Teresa’s Illness and Death

Mother Teresa’s health started declining in the 1980s. She suffered a heart attack while visiting Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1983.Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and she died on September 5 at the age of 87.

Mother Teresa became known throughout the world for her humanitarian commitment.  She started to live as a Catholic nun when she was just 12. When she was 18, Bojaxhiu traveled to Ireland to join a religious congregation known as the Sisters of Loreto and took on the name of Sister Mary Teresa since then. In 1946, Mother Teresa left high school and work in Calcutta’s slums. She moved to India in 1929. In 1937, she took her final vows to become a full-fledged religious sister and she took on the title “Mother” to mark the occasion based on the custom.