What we miss in the recently canonized Mother Teresa is what we we don't see in the leading contestants for the presidency.
The nun from Calcutta (now Kolkata), who was made a saint last week, had a humanity we can't imagine Democrat Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump even considering.
She cradled babies nobody would love at her order's Missionaries of Charity orphanage, she comforted the dying on filthy streets, she touched the "untouchables" - the lepers - in the colony she established. She even was honest enough to write about doubts of her faith.
On the other hand, as we've seen too often in the lives of these candidates, they'll do whatever is expedient. They'll kiss babies, have their photos made with children, say the right words at the right place at the right time in order to please the right audience.
The Catholic Church's newest saint had a different motivation. It came from God.
Mother Teresa, who took her first vows to become a nun at the age of 21 and went on to be a teacher and principal at a Catholic high school, experienced on a train going from Calcutta to the Himalayan foothills for a retreat what she termed "a call within a call" to minister to the poorest and sickest people in Calcutta.
For the rest of her life, she lived simply and was all servant. It is a life the poorest of Americans can't imagine. It is a life far from the vast riches of Clinton and Trump.
We can't envision ourselves doing the work of Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, but we can all live with humility and a desire to help other people. We also don't expect our presidential candidates to take vows of poverty, but we do expect them to be genuine enough to be able to relate to the average American. That's an entirely different matter from insulting them (Trump), pretending to speak their dialect (Clinton) or promising something for their votes (both candidates).
With these candidates, it's difficult even to believe they can relate. Both are spouses and parents, but neither ever lived anything below an upper middle class life. Clinton has lived in refined, government-provided housing most of her adult life, and Trump started out with a large, monetary send-off from his wealthy father. Neither has had to want for anything, and both have learned to have their way almost whenever they wanted it.
Like them or not, most presidents in the last 60 years have demonstrated some qualities to which most of the electorate could relate. Dwight Eisenhower was grandfatherly, John Kennedy had an ease with the press and exuded love for his young children, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were born poor, Gerald Ford was a caring husband during his wife's breast cancer, Jimmy Carter had a deep spiritual belief and lived out his faith in his post presidency, Ronald Reagan made fun of himself and had a way of speaking that moved ordinary Americans, George H.W. Bush was grandfatherly, Bill Clinton seemed like a guy with whom you might want to party and George W. Bush made Americans feel better (albeit temporarily) after 9-11, which was 15 years ago today.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, couldn't even put aside her politics to relate to Mother Teresa.
At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, the now-sainted nun said, "Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion."
Her address received a five-minute standing ovation, while the Clintons and Vice President and Mrs. Albert Gore, all staunchly pro-abortion, sat silently.
"They looked like seated statues at Madame Tussaud's," wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. "They glistened in the lights and moved not a muscle, looking at the speaker in a determinedly semi-pleasant way."
On Mother Teresa's canonization, Trump offered a video tribute, while Clinton vaguely remembered finding some "common ground" with her.
But the Republican candidate is no puritan on the issue of abortion, either. He's been all over the lot on it, only coming out against it as part of the party platform.
With eight weeks to go before the presidential election, let's be frank. Neither candidate is going to win us over on relatability. Trump has burned a number of bridges along the way, and a new issue of credibility seems to be uncovered on Clinton nearly every day.
What's left for us as individuals is to live out the words - we'll never equal the deeds - of Mother Teresa:
"What we need is to love without getting tired," she said. "How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. What are these drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting."