Rediscovering Mother Teresa

Book Uncovers a Lonely, Spiritually Desolate Mother Teresa
"There is no God in me," she wrote.
Shona Crabtree, Religion News Service posted 8/30/2007 01:42PM

Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, to be released Sept. 4, is a collection of Teresa's personal letters to her spiritual advisers. For the most part, they are letters she never intended to become public and, in fact, had asked to be destroyed...

In 1942, Mother Teresa made a vow not to refuse Jesus anything. Starting in 1946, she experienced several mystical encounters with Jesus, whom she called "the Voice," asking her to serve "the poorest of the poor." The "darkness" was her term for feelings of loneliness and abandonment when her communion with Jesus ended.

Prior to 1946, Kolodiejchuk said little was known about Teresa's spiritual life. "She says in a letter, 'I came to India with the desire to love Jesus as he has never been loved before,'" he said. "She was a woman passionately in love with Jesus."

Yet no sooner did Teresa start her work in the slums of Calcutta than she began to feel the intense absence of Jesus—a state that lasted until her death, according to her letters.
"The paradox is that for her to be a light, she was to be in darkness," Kolodiejchuk said.
In a letter estimated to be from 1961, Teresa wrote: "Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason—the place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me—when the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long for God. … The torture and pain I can't explain."

Over time, the Rev. Joseph Neuner, a spiritual adviser, helped Teresa realize her feelings of abandonment only increased her understanding of the people she helped, Kolodiejchuk said. Ultimately, she identified her suffering with that of Jesus, which helped her to accept it.
Catholic saints typically experience a "dark night of the soul" in the words of 16th-century priest St. John of the Cross, Martin said, but never as long as the "whole working life" Teresa experienced...

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007 By DAVID VAN BIEMA

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything."... more


And yet "the question is, Who determined the abandonment she experienced?" says Dr. Richard Gottlieb, a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute who has written about the church and who was provided a copy of the book by TIME. "Could she have imposed it on herself?" Psychologists have long recognized that people of a certain personality type are conflicted about their high achievement and find ways to punish themselves. Gottlieb notes that Teresa's ambitions for her ministry were tremendous...Gottlieb also suggests that starting her ministry "may have marked a turning point in her relationship with Jesus," whose urgent claims she was finally in a position to fulfill. Being the active party, he speculates, might have scared her, and in the end, the only way to accomplish great things might have been in the permanent and less risky role of the spurned yet faithful lover.

The atheist position is simpler. In 1948, Hitchens ventures, Teresa finally woke up, although she could not admit it. He likens her to die-hard Western communists late in the cold war: "There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he says, was Teresa... more


The Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she turned to him with her "darkness," he seems to have told her the three things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving for God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work for Jesus...more

Personally I do not find that surprising. Many of the great Mystics of the church talk about the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing. I remember asking Father Thomas Green, author of Drinking from Dry Wells how long does these periods of dryness and aridness (absence of God) lasts. He answered, "For the rest of your life."

I find that terrifying and difficult to reconcile with our church teachings of God's presence in our everyday life giving us health, wealth, and prosperity. Sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice Christianity. The Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox teaches about 'dark night' experiences but not the Protestants. Why is that?