W ho knew?
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.'"
This terrible darkness, revealed in "Mother 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?
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 "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 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.
