DATE: Tuesday, September 16, 1997           TAG: 9709160005

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:   66 lines

NOTHING ABSTRACT ABOUT CALCUTTA'S POOR MOTHER TERESA WAS A CAREGIVER TO THE MOST DESTITUTE AND TORMENTED - DIRTYBABIES WITH BITES AND BOILS AND OLD MEN AND WOMEN WITH MAGGOTS ON THEIR SORES. THE ONLY HARD THING HARD TO UNDERSTAND WAS WHY SHE DID IT.

On the Diane Rehm show a caller was explaining: We made so much of the death of Lady Di and so little of Mother Teresa's because the princess and her problems were so much like ours while the old nun's mission was so exalted that she seemed ``abstract.'' Which is to say, according to Webster's, that she seemed unreal or hard to understand. Quite right, Rehm replied.

But isn't it the other way around - that Mother Teresa's work was utterly commonplace, too real and too close for comfort? She was a caregiver to the most destitute and tormented - dirty babies with bites and boils and old men and women with maggots on their sores.

The only thing hard to understand was why she did it. No, not why. That's clear. The work needed doing and she needed to do it. That she did it, and so enduringly on great scale, is the hard part to understand and to celebrate without being pricked by guilt and unease over things not done and thought not given.

How much easier it is to reform the House of Windsor and to tutor the queen on her behavior, which has been so much in error, toward a beautiful, blonde aristocrat who had been at pains to share her most intimate problems with the world. (About those problems Barbara Walters says she knows more than she can tell. Discretion can be such a bother.)

Diana was a star working at what Roger Rosenblatt called civic sainthood. All of her roles fit, and all her clothes. Her majesty's government had noodled the idea of somehow formalizing and expanding her celebrity in a wired world which spends much time turning inward while glancing out.

``I like to look,'' Peter Sellers told Shirley MacLaine in the movie ``Being There.'' Shirley thought he was profound and bared herself. He just wanted the remote.

It's a pity, the media magpies intoned, that the queen can't be more like Diana. Well, of course, there's no competing; the princess in death, like royal rebels before her, is even more overshadowing than she was in life. Still the queen should hug - and be seen hugging - more sick babies, caring more conspicuously.

That would make us feel better, set a good example - one much more comfortable than that offered by a withered old woman in Calcutta wearing sandals and a cheap cotton sari - a saint without chic, canonized by deeds beyond the power of her church to affirm or the media to magnify even if Elton John had sung her a secondhand tune or if John Travolta - ``always there'' for Princes William and Harry - had flown to her side.

At 3:30 a.m. a small crowd began gathering in front of the giant television screen at Times Square in New York. ``What is a sleepless night compared to what the world has lost?'' said Martiza Meyer, a young secretary. ``You think you are not addicted to her, but, all of a sudden, she is taken away from you and you realize that, unwillingly, you are (addicted),'' said a young man.

Naturally and sincerely, they spoke of Diana Frances Spencer to a New York Times reporter who perhaps did not ask their reaction to the death in Calcutta of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. The two lives were not neatly comparable. But it was the princess who was the more ``abstract'' - as distant as she seemed close, and cut down half defined.

Diana ascends for the nonce into legend, fixed in youth, pluck and beauty. Mother Teresa goes into the ages, a whisper on the lips of multitudes, a sweet sibilance invested in the most urgent of prayers. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu