Mother Theresa’s dark night of the soul
By Denny R. Burk
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A new book sheds an unexpected light on the iconic Mother Teresa. The description in TIME magazine has shocked many, and when you read the following you will see why:
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 â or, as the bookâs compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, âneither in her heart or in the eucharist.
As the rest of the article reveals, the atheist Christopher Hitchens is fairly cynical about Mother Teresaâs crises of faith. The article goes on:
To the U.S.âs increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the bookâs Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: âShe was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.
Hereâs the rest of David Van Biema’s article: Mother Teresaâs Crisis of Faith
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I read the TIME article over the weekend and continue to ponder it. I was initially very troubled, because M. Teresa is my favorite modern spiritual hero. But the more I think about this 50-year (off and on) “dark night” she experienced, the more I am moved and inspired by her faithfulness, as well as Christ’s mysterious but ultimately loving answer to her early prayers that she be allowed to participate in His suffering in a small way.
It might be necessary to understand the long tradition of the “dark night” in Catholic spirituality and M. Teresa’s own individual spirituality to appreciate the full magnitude of what she understood herself to be going through for Him. I’ve read a lot of her writings but don’t claim to have scratched the surface. But any believer who has walked in the valley, felt spiritual isolation, experienced depression, doubted God or struggled to remain faithful should be comforted and challenged anew by Teresa’s inner servanthood, which was the foundation and source of all of her outward works.
Erich