Mother Teresa redefined the central concepts of poverty by expanding them beyond their material meanings. She had spent decades working in the slums of Calcutta, and her authority came not from theory but from direct encounter with suffering at its most extreme — she described picking up a man from an open drain whose body was 'full of maggots,' who died three hours later with 'such a beautiful smile on his face.' But the point of this passage was that material poverty was not the deepest form of deprivation. She told the American graduates to look around them: 'Right here, in your own country, you must remember, there must be the lonely, the unwanted. What do you call them? Shut-ins.' She then told the story of a man in a big city whose hand she shook, and who held on for a long time, saying: 'For so many years I feel the warmth of a human hand.' The poverty of loneliness, she argued, was more devastating than the poverty of bread.