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So few
– her superiors and spiritual directors, assorted priests – and that fact
makes plain that Mother Teresa lived out, rather than lost, her faith
because of her long spiritual “darkness.”
“There
is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead,” she wrote a
half-dozen years after establishing the Missionaries of Charity in
Calcutta. “It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the
work.’”
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This terrible darkness, revealed in Teresa:
Come Be My Light,” a new
collection of her letters, went away for only a brief time, but who knew she
suffered for decades? So few, because Mother Teresa always kept the focus
on others – her sisters, who tended to India’s untouchables, and Jesus, who
prompted her in 1946 to begin the Missionaries of Charity and whose image
she saw in each sorrowing person she loved and comforted in Calcutta’s
slums.
Is the
“darkness” she experienced something that should trouble believers? Does it
provide vindication for nonbelievers?
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I don’t
think so, and I’m sure Mother Teresa would not think so. On the contrary.
Although she never thought of herself as a saint, she certainly knew that
saints – her patron, Saint Therese of Lisieux – experienced their own dry
seasons. Saint John of the Cross called this the “dark night of the soul.”
She also knew that Jesus, when he asked her to start her mission, told her
she would bear great suffering if she heeded the call.
Did her
sense of spiritual abandonment challenge her faith? No, it fulfilled it.
She came to see her “darkness” as a way of living her particular vocation.
She offered up her own suffering – she took up this cross – for others: “If
my separation from you brings others to you and in their love and company
you find joy and pleasure, why, Jesus, I am willing with all my heart to
suffer all that I suffer – not only now but for eternity – if this was
possible.”
And how
she brought others along. Something about her earthly work, something about
her countenance, brought people along. Believers and nonbelievers were
taken with the little nun from Calcutta.
“Mother
Teresa was, in herself, a living conversion,” British journalist and
commentator Malcolm Muggeridge once observed. "It was impossible to be with
her, to listen to her, to observe what she was doing and how she was doing
it, without being in some degree converted."
What
was it? “Something of God’s universal love has rubbed off on Mother
Teresa,” Muggeridge allowed, “giving her homely features a noticeable
luminosity; a shining quality.”
She
may not have felt God’s presence in her life, but others did. Her religious
order has grown to more than 130 convents and 5,000 nuns – 1,000 in the last
year – and she founded an order of priests.
Yet
how she suffered.
How to explain it?
In the
end, says the Rev. Emmerich Vogt, the former pastor of Portland’s Holy
Rosary Church, Mother Teresa’s exterior and interior lives were each
essential to her profound holiness and love. In losing the mystical union
with Jesus she had once experienced – in conducting her vocation with the
deep hurt of this loss – Mother Teresa shared the suffering Jesus endured on
the cross. (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) In continuing to
tend to the poorest of the poor during her long, dry season, she shared the
kind of selfless love that receives nothing -- not even emotional
consolations – in return.
How do
we know that God and not depression was at work in Mother Teresa’s intense
darkness? “The saints remind us that God ordinarily reveals his in-dwelling
presence, not through visions and feelings of God, but by prompting virtuous
actions within us,” said Vogt, who knew her and gave retreats for the
Missionaries of Charity for almost 25 years. “You know it’s God at work
when Mother Teresa becomes more loving. The sisters will tell you that she
became more and more loving and more and more virtuous.”
It’s
critical to know all this about Mother Teresa, because faith is not
necessarily about warm feelings and mystical experiences. It wasn’t for
Mother Teresa. It isn’t for the rest of us. Faith, Saint Augustine said,
is dark to the intellect and dry to the senses. Thanks to Mother Teresa’s
agonized honesty and the publication of her letters, people will realize she
was as human as others. And she didn’t run away from what she started, but
continued on – in faith.
Mother
Teresa turns out to be more human and, therefore, more amazing than most
anybody knew.
The Sunday Oregonian
September 9, 2007
By Associate Editor
DAVID REINHARD
Can be
reached at 503-221-8152
Or
davidreinhard@news.oregonian.com |
