September 5, 2026 // Saturday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time // Optional Memorial of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Virgin

Read the Word // Open your Bible to today’s Psalm for the Optional Memorial: Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-11

Reflect on the Word // 

Washing my hands, I glanced up and caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. I had lost thirty-ish pounds and people were starting to notice. I had always thought that losing weight would resolve my insecurities only to find out that it was, indeed, only a number. 

“It doesn’t matter. You’re still ugly.”

I can’t remember if I thought it or said it out loud. And it’s only in recounting this painful moment many years later that I realize how disembodied it was. I didn’t say I was still ugly; I parroted the lie the enemy had been leveling at me my whole life. 

Like many women, I subscribed to a cultural beauty standard that I couldn’t measure up to. Even when the Lord repeatedly, tenderly, told me that I was beautiful, I bemoaned that I might have a beautiful heart or soul or personality, but I wasn’t objectively beautiful. 

I was blind. Not only to myself but to real beauty. Thankfully, our beloved Saint of the day revealed the truth to me.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta is a paradox. At four feet eleven inches tall, her deeply lined face and modest sari are not features typically associated with fame or beauty, yet her radiant face graced dozens of magazine covers. The world was captivated by her presence and personhood. She was beautiful. 

It was Mother Teresa’s love of Jesus that transformed her, both interiorly and externally, embodying today’s Psalm: “Look to him that you may be radiant with joy, and your faces may not blush with shame” (Psalm 34:5). 

Though she didn’t resemble Him in a natural way, when you saw Mother Teresa you saw Jesus. And Jesus is beautiful. Unlike fillers or fads, true beauty blooms in us when we look at Him and radiates out to transform our whole person. We are in every way changed into love—and love makes us beautiful.

As I study photographs of this audacious Albanian nun I begin to understand: when Jesus says I’m beautiful, He’s not lying or exaggerating. I just didn’t know what beautiful was before. 

Relate to the Lord // Stand before a mirror today and ask Jesus to tell you how He sees you.