[Dialogue] Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

Sat Aug 25 19:38:02 EDT 2007

Thank you

Carlos R. Zervigon, PMP

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  _____  

From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of W. J.
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2007 3:53 PM
To: oe at wedgeblade.net; dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Subject: Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

complete article:
<http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html>
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html 

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

By David Van Biema

Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the
emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
- Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979 

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo.
Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite
below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate
worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa,
whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta
in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of
message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to
say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying
on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one - the naked one - the
homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and
alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in
the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should
remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere -
"Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we
give and in the smile that we receive." 

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant,
the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote
with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a
very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the
silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, - Listen
and do not hear - the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want
you to pray for me - that I let Him have [a] free hand." 

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first
is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as
though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together
they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction - that one of the
great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed
inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely
observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well
as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality
privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared. 

And in fact, that appears to be the case. 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."
Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke
as if my very heart was in love with God - tender, personal love," she
remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What
hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine
America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with
far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's
life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she
was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I
read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and
their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the
way people understand her." 

The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who
Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior
Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for
petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus
far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in
the book were gathered as part of that process. 

The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish
mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark
night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some
spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record.
(The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45
years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's
context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early
1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work.
Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance
that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act. 

Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The
Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative
Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually
rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey
Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much
more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa,
a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as
just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to
people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives.
And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers,
everyone." 

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