Jim Towey experienced Mother Teresa’s generosity firsthand one morning in Mexico.

Towey, Mother Teresa’s legal counsel at the time, pulled out of the small convent where she was living. As he maneuvered his vehicle around the crowds that formed in front of the convent, he caught a glimpse of Mother Teresa standing outside.

Figuring she needed something, Towey hurried to where she stood.

What was Mother Teresa’s urgent need? She wanted to make sure Towey got his breakfast.

“She handed me a peanut butter sandwich and a banana,” Towey said. “She saw that I left and I had not had breakfast. That’s a mother.”

Towey shared lessons from Mother Teresa’s teachings Wednesday night in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium. He emphasized her compassion for others, faith in God and devotion to prayer in the presentation, which was titled “Mother Teresa at 100: Reflections on Why Her Work is Just Beginning.”

“I can mark my life’s beginning on August 29, 1985, when I met Mother,” Towey said.

Towey became Mother Teresa’s legal counsel in 1985, and their friendship changed his life.

“I wasn’t alive in Christ until I met Mother,” Towey said. “I was very comfortable in my own hypocrisy. … I didn’t really have a living faith. It was kind of a cultural faith, cultural Catholicism.”

He said Mother Teresa is not a saint because of her “super-sized holiness,” but because she embraced her humanity.

“We always thought she was getting the spiritual consolations the rest of us didn’t get,” Towey said.

In fact, Mother Teresa sometimes felt abandoned by God, Towey said. These periods of darkness lasted for decades, he said.

“What happened was Mother learned to befriend the darkness,” he said. “Mother’s journey into the darkness was necessary for her to fully share the cross of the suffering poor.”

Through this journey, she taught the world how to cope with darkness and to accept it, he said.

Mother Teresa’s humanity was nurtured by a prayer life. Towey quoted Mother Teresa as saying, “If you’re too busy to pray, you’re too busy.”

Freshman Paige Johnson said she agreed with Mother Teresa’s statement.

“I think Mother Teresa touched on a very good point, because prayer life is one of the most important things in life,” Johnson said. “If you’re not leaving time for that in your life, then you’re really going nowhere.”

Sophomore Danny Lindsey reflected on his own experiences with prayer.

“In my life I notice that when I get more stressed out and I kind of lose that time to pray, things are a lot more stressful,” Lindsey said. “Prayer for me personally, it really helps my life stay centered and helps me get through all the stressful times in life.”

Lindsey said Mother Teresa represented selflessness and devoting time for others.

Towey said he aspires to be like Mother Teresa by reaching out to those who are ill and aging.

“I think today in America, the challenge is to maintain your dignity when you’re sick,” Towey said.

In 1996 Towey founded ‘Aging with Dignity,’ a national non-profit organization whose mission is to protect the human dignity of individuals as they age and to promote better care for those close to death.

“It’s a question that you always have to ask yourself: ‘Who is it that God’s asking me to befriend and bring the bread of friendship to that might be starving?’” Towey said.

In recognition of his dedication to preserving the dignity of all people, Towey received the St. Thomas School of Law’s Dignitatis Humanae Award Wednesday.

Towey has served as director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush, and also as president of Saint Vincent College. He will assume his new role as president of Ave Maria University in July 2011.

Rachel Britton can be reached at brit7192@stthomas.edu.