Good Habits To Follow

Princess Diana is having a “moment” right now. She’s been hailed by Vogue as a “Gen-Z influencer” in the crusade to resurrect ’90s fashion. But there’s another ’90s queen who warrants revisiting: the princess’s spiritual mentor, Mother Teresa, who died five days after her in 1997, having captured hearts to a degree only Lady Di could rival.

A new book from Jim Towey tells the story of the unlikely kinship between the tiny missionary and glamorous monarch, as well as others he witnessed as legal counsel and devoted friend to the saint. To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa is a powerful “white pill,” masterfully weaving together vignettes from Towey’s own life with the arc of the Albanian nun pursuing the will of God.

In the opening, Towey is a winsome twenty-something D.C. staffer for Republican senator Mark Hatfield. He’s on the political fast-track by day, and barhopping by night—yet unfulfilled. Meanwhile, Mother Teresa, who grew up Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, is a child coming of age amid complicated civil unrest, helping her mother provide for the family after her father is poisoned by political rivals.

One of the most moving moments early in the book is when Mother Teresa says goodbye to her mother, Drana, at the age of 19 to enter the Sisters of Loreto and begin missionary work in India. “They would never see each other again,” Towey writes, describing what would become an excruciating cross for both to bear.

Likewise, Towey’s story is not without crosses. In a heartbreaking passage early on, his best friend commits suicide shortly after college, following a failed marriage and bout of despair. Towey describes the “snide cynicism, nurtured by the phony social rituals and mercenary friendships of Capitol Hill” he cultivated following the loss.

It’s in this sullen state that Towey first encounters Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity (MCs) on a trip to Calcutta on Hatfield’s behalf. At first, he’s disgusted, assaulted by the “smell of sewage and burning garbage” of the decaying city. But during his brief meeting with Mother Teresa, whom he calls “Mother” throughout the book, she persuades him to visit Kalighat, her Home for the Dying, and later, the MCs in Washington, D.C.

The trip to Kalighat is a disaster, humiliating the “white-bread congressional staffer” who fails to embrace the service tasks assigned to him before retreating from India altogether to a luxurious

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