NUN'S SIMPLE LIFE WAS GREAT IN IMPACT.

Byline: Ellen O'Brien Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Mother Teresa, the tiny, iron-willed nun who roamed the streets of the world as a handmaid to the poor and dying, once called death ``the greatest development in human life.''

``I think dying is only going home to God,'' she said in 1979, the year she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

For her, that journey home was a long and eventful pilgrimage, and if she seemed to bear hardship and sacrifice easily, it may have been because she traveled light.

When she died at the age of 87 on Sept. 5, her personal belongings included not much more than a pair of shoes, a wash bucket, a Bible, and three saris worth about $1.50 apiece.

After a life that stretched almost the length of the 20th century - in which she was courted and honored by kings and presidents - she died on the thin mattress of an iron-frame bed in her convent building in Calcutta, one of the poorest cities in the world and her chosen home.

Starting there in its slums and hovels five decades ago, Mother Teresa built a network of more than 550 hospices, convents and homes for the destitute in 120 countries. She established religious orders that now encompass 4,500 sisters, 500 brothers and a few priests. That was her material legacy.

She also left for those willing to follow her path a standard of faith and zeal that made her, in the words of Nobel Prize Committee chairman Francis Sejersted, ``a symbol to the world.''

Many of her followers believe she died a saint.

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has asked Pope John Paul II to speed up her canonization process so that she might be officially named a saint by the year 2000. And New York Cardinal John J. O'Connor said, ``I personally would canonize her tomorrow.''

All of which might have amused Mother Teresa, who seemed frail - her diminutive frame was whittled down even further by age and hard work, until she stood not much taller than 4 feet - but who always maintained a healthy sense of purpose.

Philadelphia Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua recalled an occasion when she was asked how it felt to be considered a living saint. Mother Teresa shrugged at the question, and answered: ``Well, isn't everybody supposed to be a saint?''

Through the last decade, some critics have contended that she didn't do enough to root out the evils that afflicted her beloved poor, and that she was too friendly with corrupt leaders and venal men.

Of those detractors, she said: ``Pray for them.''

But whatever people thought of her, Mother Teresa was an indisputably charismatic and unsettling force.

When she addressed the 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, she observed: ``People have told us we spoil the poor with our work. It is good to have at least one congregation that spoils the poor, because everybody else is spoiling the rich.''

Everywhere they settle, her missionaries live in absolute poverty.

``They have nothing,'' said the Rev. Arthur Chappell, head of the theology and religious studies department at Villanova University. ``Even in Rome, they would sit on bare floors with their feet tucked up.''

Born in Macedonia

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Vojaxhiu to a comfortable ethnic-Albanian family on Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now part of Macedonia.

She grew up in a large house with a garden - a well-loved child called Gonxha, ``Flower Bud.'' By the time she was 14, she was plump and pretty, with a taste for fashionable clothes.

By then, too, she was beginning to believe that she was called to be a missionary nun.

Inspired by stories of Jesuit missionary work in India, she left home at 18 to join the Irish mission nuns, the Sisters of Loreto, and after two months in Ireland she traveled to Mount Kanchenjunga, in Darjeeling, India.

It was there that she took the name Teresa, after St. Therese of Lisieux, a French Carmelite who also found her vocation while still a child.

The young Sister Teresa went to St. Mary's High School in Calcutta, working first as a teacher and then as principal. She became known as ``Mother'' Teresa when she became principal there.

But the call she first heard as a girl continued to grow in strength over the next seven years. Then, on Sept. 10, 1946, she was on a train heading to a retreat in Darjeeling when she experienced what she always described as ``the call within the call.'' It was not a `voice' that spoke aloud to her, but it seemed a clear message from God.

``It was an order. I was to leave the convent,'' she said later. ``I felt God wanted something more from me. He wanted me to be poor, and to love him in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.''

Within three years she had founded her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, who take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In recognition of her transforming revelation, the nuns also vow their service to ``the poorest of the poor - to Christ in his distressing disguise.''

Mother Teresa began with a dozen followers. Soon she and her sisters were familiar figures to their neighbors as they worked their way through the streets in their blue-bordered, white saris.

By 1954, she had enough local support to open the House of the Tender Heart, her own home and the final refuge for those left to die along the streets.

The first person she nursed was a woman whose body was infested with maggots, and whose face had been half-devoured by rodents and ants. Eventually, Mother Teresa managed to have her admitted to a hospital.

Some years later, the photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark, working for Life magazine, would marvel:

``In this extreme of suffering, pus, blood, vomit, urine, screams, sad and vacant faces - the sisters never stop working. They are gentle and kind. Each time I ask something, the sister tells me: `It is God's work, don't you see? You should put down your camera and do some work.' Quite honestly, I don't think I could.''

In 1964, the indomitable little sister opened a leper colony in west Bengal. ``I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand dollars,'' she told an interviewer decades later, ``yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.''

Five years later, the British journalist and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge produced a documentary on her refuge in Calcutta. Muggeridge, a convert to Catholicism, was so touched by his subject that he went on to publish a book about her work: ``Something Beautiful for God.''

His description of her was masterful and precise. He saw the outlines of her peasant background in her features and bearing, and particularly in the way she went about her life: ``Without the special grace vouchsafed her, she might have been a rather hard, even grasping person. God has turned these qualities to his own ends.

``I never met anyone less sentimental, less scatty, more down-to-earth,'' Muggeridge said.

She couldn't wait

Others who met Mother Teresa were sometimes astonished by her decidedly ``unsentimental'' approach.

Bevilacqua remembered her visit to the Brooklyn diocesan offices when he worked there. She sought a rectory for use by her missionary priests, and he promised to carry her message to the bishop as soon as the bishop returned from vacation.

``She said, `We can't wait . . . I'm leaving Saturday, so I'll need it by Friday,' '' Bevilacqua said, and added: ``You know - I got it.''

Mother Teresa never seemed to hesitate to ask anyone for anything she needed for her work. And like Bevilacqua, many admirers over the years were surprised and amused to find how easily ``her'' prayers for ``their'' help were answered.

But her point-blank manner and unabashed sense of mission also earned her adversaries. Some critics argued that her opposition to artificial birth control and abortion was harmful to India, a nation of more than 900 million.

Mother Teresa, a dutiful daughter of the church, remained opposed to both practices. Abortion, she said, is ``thIe greatest evil of today.''