She did not lead a stirring life. She has no dramatic conversion story. She wasn’t knocked off a horse and blinded by a brilliant light from heaven, like Saint Paul. There is none of the high sexual drama of Augustine. There is none of the shuttle diplomacy of Bridget of Sweden or Catherine of Siena. She didn’t have her head chopped off, like Thomas More. Her story is ostensibly simple: She became a nun at age eighteen and was riding on a train one day and heard a voice telling her to leave her religious order to serve the poor. So that’s what she did until she died. Her work wasn’t all that exceptional, especially for a nun. Plenty of people do what she did — take care of the sick and the dying, find homes for abandoned children, defend the poor, the unwanted, the unborn. “There was nothing otherworldly or divine about her,” said the musician Bob Geldhof, who met her in Ethiopia. And his opinion is echoed again and again of Teresa. For all the photographs and books and fame and prizes, for all that Pope John Paul II not only beatified her immediately but reportedly had to be persuaded against rushing her right to canonization, we don’t actually know much about the person. Who actually was Mother Teresa?

Here is what we know: She was born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in Skopje — in present-day Macedonia. She was the youngest of three children born to Nikola and Drana Bojaxhiu. She was an Albanian Catholic, born in the year of the great Albanian uprising, and during her first years, her home city was invaded by Serbians who spent days on an ethnic tirade — raping, torturing, and murdering her neighbors and kin, impaling infants, hanging men from trees.

Her father was a successful merchant and investor, served on the town council, and was often out of the country on business. But Nikola’s passion was Albanian independence; he hosted political strategy sessions in his home and apparently helped bankroll the movement to establish an Albanian state in the Kosovo region. That’s what apparently got him killed. At a political fundraising dinner in 1919 he was poisoned, presumably by vengeful Yugoslavian authorities.

After Nikola’s death, his business partners grabbed his share of everything and ran, leaving the Bojaxhius in financial straits. Drana supported the family by sewing and rug-making. She went to Mass daily at the Church of the Sacred Heart down the street, brought food to the poor, opened the family dinner table to the homeless, and gave refuge to women in need. “We had guests at table every day,” remembered Teresa. “At first I used to ask: ‘Who are they?’ and Mother would answer: ‘Some are our relatives, but all of them are our people.’ When I was older, I realized that the strangers were poor people who had nothing.”

Gonxha seems to have been a serious, bookish, and sickly girl, prone to whooping cough and other infections. She loved music, played a mean piano and mandolin, wrote poetry, acted in plays. She sang in the church choir and led a girls’ society devoted to the Virgin Mary. Attracted by what she had read of their work in India, she decided to join the Sisters of Our Lady of Loretto. When she told her mother, her mother locked herself in her room and didn’t come out for a day. When she finally emerged, she said to her daughter, “Put your hand in His … and walk all the way with Him.” Gonxha set sail for India in late 1928 and never saw her mother again.

Mother Teresa gave us next to nothing of her own story, and we should wonder why. She lived in our times of utter revelation, and yet her personal life is a closed book. You might say her first miracle was living in this age but flying beneath the radar, preserving her zone of personal privacy. Would-be muckrakers of her order’s operations stumbled in their own muck. There were no whistle-blowers, no believable tales told out of school by disgruntled former co-workers. Even the forces of nature behaved as if carrying out some unspoken mandate; when an earthquake leveled her childhood home and neighborhood in 1963, it was like a divine conversation-stopper, God forever interring her past in rubble and ruin.

We are left without a clue. Except for one thing: her name. In an instance of self-disclosure so rare and isolated that should to notice, she made her official biographers report that she took the name of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and not St. Teresa of Ávila. “Not the big St. Teresa but the little one,” she said, without further explanation. So: she takes the name of a bourgeois girl who entered a convent at fifteen, spent her days praying and doing the laundry, and accomplishing so little of moment that a fellow nun worried aloud that Thérèse would be hard to eulogize at her funeral, as “she has certainly never done anything worth speaking of.”

However, Thérèse was asked by her Mother Superior to write her life story, which she dutifully did, expressing in simple language her philosophy of life, which came to be called “the little way” — living with a childlike sense of wonder at God’s gifts, with a child’s sense of dependence and trust. It meant, Thérèse said, finding the true divine significance “in the least action done out of love.”

Published a year after her early death, the book became a surprise best seller. It was translated into countless languages and catapulted Thérèse to the ranks of the most beloved and important saints ever. Canonizing her between the world wars, at a time of social unrest and uncertainty, Pope Pius XI declared that if everyone followed her little way, “the reformation of human society would be easily realized.” A few years after that, Pope Pius XII called her “the greatest saint of modern times.”

This was the saint Gonxha chose as her patron. Not the big Teresa, the bold reformer and mystic who mapped the soul’s interior mansions, landing herself in hot water with the Spanish Inquisition. Gonxha chose the little way. Is there a lesson for us in that choice? Is there a lesson in the holiness of the ordinary, of the divine in the routine, in the idea that God comes to us not like a bolt out of the blue but in the din of the day, in families and workplaces, in struggles and joys, in the people He puts in our path, in the trials and sufferings He sends our way?

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