It’s Mother Teresa’s Feast Day, so it’s a good time to mention that I’m the first person in the world to have taken her name as a confirmation name (a thread)

In the second grade, I did a combined Holy Communion and Confirmation. So, keep in mind that I am 8 in this story.

I had always been obsessed with Mother Teresa and her calling to “help the poor while living among them.” If we were choosing our name based on who we wanted to inspire our actions in life, well, I wanted radical faith AND action like hers.

The problem is this was 2004, and Mother Teresa was not canonized until more than a decade later — in 2016.

But, again, I was little. I put her name down on the form anyway. And, a month before my confirmation, I got back my papers with approval for me to take “Saint Theresa of Lisieux” as my confirmation name. I was like, “Wait, there’s an ‘H’ in this. Something’s not right.”

My mom explained that this was the Theresa (really Thérèse) you prayed to and roses would appear. Ok, that was cool, but not the woman I was looking for. So, I went to the head of Sunday school and told her the problem. She said that’s a decision way above her head.

So, at rehearsal the following week, I stepped out of the procession line, walked up to our Bishop who was visiting and said, “Your Excellency, I have a problem.” The Sunday school head darted across the pews to grab me by the arm and apologized profusely to the Bishop.

He stopped her and said to me, “What is troubling you, my child?” I explained, in a childish ramble I’m sure, that she told me the problem was above her, so I was hoping he could help me because I got the wrong confirmation name.

He listened and nodded along, but at the end, he said, “I’m sorry. That’d be up to the Vatican.”

So, I asked how to ask them and wrote a letter stating my case that same day. The diocese handled the rest, and over the next couple weeks, it began to feel like writing a letter to Santa Claus. I was going to be “Theresa” after all.

But then, the day before my confirmation, I was taken aside by the head of Sunday school and given a new name sheet. “Mother Teresa of Calcutta.”

How you ask? Apparently, the Pope — Pope John Paul II (!!) — gave approval because they’d been friends. In fact, he’d just beatified her in the fall (non-Catholics, this meant she had entered Heaven and could intercede when prayed in the name of): http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/2003/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_20031019_mother-theresa.html

I ran to my soon-to-be godmother (my tía, Wanda) holding the paper above my head in my small satin gloves and shouting, “I’m going to be Mother Teresa!”

I took this role very seriously. My parents both worked in Immokalee, the underserved, largely farmworking community on one side of the county (the other side being the multi-million-dollar mansions on Naples Beach).

I wanted to help the Habitat for Humanity efforts there but was too young, so I took it upon myself to collect money for the Immokalee Friendship House, an offshoot of St. Matthew’s Emergency Housing and Feeding Ministry.

My mom had taken me to the Friendship House a few times to visit some of her students who stayed there. I remember sitting with their kids as they ate pasta one night and thinking that more money would help them get tortellini instead of rigatoni. Little kid logic, you know?

So, I collected several hundred dollars over the next several months by making my case to family and neighbors. One of my clearest childhood memories is going in, asking to make a donation, and the woman at the front desk being in utter shock by how much money I was giving her.

I want to end on this quote from my confirmation saint, since it’s been my guiding principle in life ever since, “If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”

(My mom has insisted I add this photo)