Poplin Shares Insights About Working With Mother Theresa

Twenty years ago, she traveled to India to work with a saint.

Two decades later, CGU education Professor Mary Poplin continues to share her memories of her time with Mother Theresa—canonized this past September—and the lessons she learned. Poplin visited the Roman Catholic nun and the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1996 to understand why Mother Theresa characterized their work as “religious work and not social work.”

Poplin shared her insights at the University of Mary, a private Catholic university in North Dakota, during that institution’s first-ever Nov. 16 Prayer Day event.

In the two months she spent with Mother Theresa, the nun rarely spoke.

“I bet she said maybe five or six things to me in the two months I was there. Every single one of them was very significant in my life,” Poplin told attendees during her “Finding Your Calcutta” keynote address. “Mother Theresa didn’t waste any words.”

Poplin said helping Mother Theresa serve “the poorest of the poor” taught her that she did not need to travel to Calcutta to serve those in need.

“She walked up to me, and this was all she said: ‘God does not call everybody to work with the poor,’ Poplin recalled. ‘And God does not call everybody to live like the poor like he calls us to live. But God does call everybody to a Calcutta.’ And then she pointed directly at my chest and said, ‘You have to find yours.’”

“OK—well I was 41, a full professor, and this little lady was telling me I hadn’t found my life’s work,” Poplin said. “And she was right.”

Poplin’s experiences in India were published in her book, Finding Calcutta (InterVarsity Press), in 2008 and is also available in Korean and Chinese.

Her keynote address was reported in a Nov. 16, 2016 post in the Bismarck Tribune.

View the video of the University of Mary’s Prayer Day and Poplin’s keynote address (starting after the 7:30 mark).