Joseph Langford
Fr. Joseph Langford, saw the book about Mother Teresa of Calcutta, “Something Beautiful for God”; the photo on the cover of the book touched him profoundly and from that moment he had a great desire to know her and her charism and to adapt it to the life of the priest. After his ordination to the priesthood, he founded, together with Mother Teresa, the Corpus Christi Movement for diocesan priests who wished to participate and live the spirituality of Mother Teresa of Calcutta in their priestly life. his Movement began to grow and to spread among priests in various parts of the world until on July 16, 1983, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Father Joseph had the inspiration to ask Mother Teresa to found a community of priests in the charism of the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa accepted to carry out this project which began in the city of New York as the Corpus Christi Fraternity. Soon became the religious congregation of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers.
In 1986 Father Joseph wrote the meditation, “I Thirst for you,” which has been translated into many languages and distributed throughout the world. This meditation is an expression of the spiritual sentiments that marked his life and his pastoral work. Fr. Langford spent most of the rest of his life working among the poorest of the poor in Tijuana, Mexico. He also wrote and published two important books, one about the Virgin Mary, and the second, “Secret Fire,” a profound meditation on the mystery of the thirst of Jesus, the center of Mother Teresa’s spirituality.
“Mother Teresa would seek no other pulpit than the hovels of the poor, and no other sermon than her works of love, performed for the unloved, in God's name.”
“The same God who loves us as we are also loves us to much to leave us as we are. Perhpas because we tend to hold to ideas about God that reflect our own suppositions and fears, more than God's self-revelation. We reduce God to our own dimensions, ascribing to him our own reactions and responses, especially our own petty and conditional kind of love, and so end up believing in a God cast in our own image and likeness.But the true God, the living God, is entirely "other":. Precisely from this radical otherness derives the inscrutable and transcendent nature of divine love-- for which our limited human love is but a distant metaphor. God's love is much more than our human love simply multiplied and expanded. God's love for us will ever be mystery; unfathomable, awesome, entirely beyond human expectation.Precisely because God's love is something "no eyes has seen, nor ear heard nor the heart of man conceived" (1 Cor 2:9), Mother Teresa meditated on it continuously, and encouraged us to do the same, to continue plumbing this mystery more deeply. To this end she invites us: "Try to deepen your understanding of these two words, 'Thirst of God.;”
“..we need more love than we deserve...has God not indeed shown us his greatest love precisely when we deserved it least from the tree of Eden to the tree of Calvary and beyond?”
“Writing a check was easily done, and easily done with. It allows us to do "charity" while keeping at bay the inner tug that urges us to give more of ourselves and our time, rather than our possessions.”