[Dialogue] {Spam?} Mother Teresa in the NY Times

[Wilson Priscilla]


August 29, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Saint’s Dark Night

By JAMES MARTIN
THE stunning revelations contained in a new book, which show that  
Mother Teresa doubted God’s existence, will delight her detractors  
and confuse her admirers. Or is it the other way around?

The private journals and letters of the woman now known as Blessed  
Teresa of Calcutta will be released next month as “Mother Teresa:  
Come Be My Light,” and some excerpts have been published in Time  
magazine. The pious title of the book, however, is misleading. Most  
of its pages reveal not the serene meditations of a Catholic sister  
confident in her belief, but the agonized words of a person  
confronting a terrifying period of darkness that lasted for decades.

“In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss,” she wrote in  
1959, “of God not wanting me — of God not being God — of God not  
existing.” According to the book, this inner turmoil, known by only  
a handful of her closest colleagues, lasted until her death in 1997.

Gleeful detractors may point to this as yet another example of the  
hypocrisy of organized religion. The woman widely known in her  
lifetime as a “living saint” apparently didn’t even believe in  
God.

It was not always so. In 1946, Mother Teresa, then 36, was hard at  
work in a girls school in Calcutta when she fell ill. On a train ride  
en route to some rest in Darjeeling, she had heard what she would  
later call a “voice” asking her to work with the poorest of the  
poor, and experienced a profound sense of God’s presence.

A few years later, however, after founding the Missionaries of  
Charity and beginning her work with the poor, darkness descended on  
her inner life. In 1957, she wrote to the archbishop of Calcutta  
about her struggles, saying, “I find no words to express the depths  
of the darkness.”

But to conclude that Mother Teresa was a crypto-atheist is to misread  
both the woman and the experience that she was forced to undergo.

Even the most sophisticated believers sometimes believe that the  
saints enjoyed a stress-free spiritual life — suffering little  
personal doubt. For many saints this is accurate: St. Francis de  
Sales, the 17th-century author of “An Introduction to the Devout  
Life,” said that he never went more than 15 minutes without being  
aware of God’s presence. Yet the opposite experience is so common it  
even has a name. St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic, labeled  
it the “dark night,” the time when a person feels completely  
abandoned by God, and which can lead even ardent believers to doubt  
God’s existence.

During her final illness, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the 19th-century  
French Carmelite nun who is now widely revered as “The Little  
Flower,” faced a similar trial, which seemed to center on doubts  
about whether anything awaited her after death. “If you only knew  
what darkness I am plunged into,” she said to the sisters in her  
convent. But Mother Teresa’s “dark night” was of a different  
magnitude, lasting for decades. It is almost unparalleled in the  
lives of the saints.

In time, with the aid of the priest who acted as her spiritual  
director, Mother Teresa concluded that these painful experiences  
could help her identify not only with the abandonment that Jesus  
Christ felt during the crucifixion, but also with the abandonment  
that the poor faced daily. In this way she hoped to enter, in her  
words, the “dark holes” of the lives of the people with whom she  
worked. Paradoxically, then, Mother Teresa’s doubt may have  
contributed to the efficacy of one of the more notable faith-based  
initiatives of the last century.

Few of us, even the most devout believers, are willing to leave  
everything behind to serve the poor. Consequently, Mother Teresa’s  
work can seem far removed from our daily lives. Yet in its relentless  
and even obsessive questioning, her life intersects with that of the  
modern atheist and agnostic. “If I ever become a saint,” she  
wrote, “I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ ”

Mother Teresa’s ministry with the poor won her the Nobel Prize and  
the admiration of a believing world. Her ministry to a doubting  
modern world may have just begun.

James Martin is a Jesuit priest and the author of “My Life With the  
Saints.” 

Priscilla Wilson
TeamTech Press
Mission Hills, KS 66208
pwilson at teamtechinc.com



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