Much-loved by most of the world — and nearly all of it prior to
her famed condemnation of abortion in her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize
acceptance speech — Blessed Teresa of Calcutta has once again
taken center stage in world opinion. The upcoming publication of
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk
details private letters from Mother Teresa to her various spiritual
advisors, confessors and to God himself, over the span of 50 years
in which she is reported to have suffered what is known as the
“dark night of the soul.”
In one plaintive missive to Jesus, she asks, “Lord, my God, who
am I that You should forsake me?” Time
magazine’s David Van Biema gives a somewhat fair and balanced
presentation of the matter in a piece this week, but appears
concerned that the revelation will be misunderstood by many. He
details how priests explained that in her 50 years of
dryness:
[Mother] Teresa’s inability to perceive Christ in her
life did not mean he wasn’t there. In fact, they see his absence as
part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to
the U.S.’s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument
will seem absurd. They will see the book’s 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.
This is typical of some secular opinion on the subject of Mother
Teresa’s dark night and her Catholic faith. While this information
is not new — much of it was revealed in
2003 during the investigation for her Beatification,
when many of her letters were made public — it is the first real
notice of it in periodicals like
Time.
Fascinated by the fact that the deeply religious can sometimes
experience long stretches of spiritual dryness, Van Biema’s piece
then morphs into a psychoanalysis of Mother herself. He also
includes the obligatory quote from Christopher Hitchens — whose
disdain for Mother Teresa is so obsessive that it may be he who is
in need of the couch — which, for the benefit of all, I will
exclude here. Van Biema seems mystified by a comforting 1953 letter
from an early confessor in answer to her misgivings:
[Archbishop] Perier may have missed the note of
desperation. “God guides you, dear Mother. You are not so much in
the dark as you think. You have exterior facts enough to see that
God blesses your work. Feelings are not required and often may be
misleading.” And yet feelings — or rather, their lack — became
her life’s secret torment. How can you assume the lover’s ardor
when he no longer grants you his voice, his touch, his very
presence?
Faith is not a “feeling,” it is a gift of divine grace. One need
not “feel” God’s love so much as believe in it, trust in it and
return it. This kind of love, which is more a product of the will
than of the heart, is not the same as “like,” which is something
over which you have no control, as in a preference for the taste of
broccoli. And in the case of the divine Lover, the Christian
recalls his ardor constantly when he sees the Cross, and his
presence is demonstrated every day to Catholics in the Holy
Sacrament of the Eucharist. As the good bishop pointed out above,
apparently these and other exterior facts were enough to see Mother
through to the end of her race.
But God was always present to her, as she lived her life
according to his commands. If you are ever blessed as I was last
year, to go on a pilgrimage to Calcutta to work with her
Missionaries of Charity and worship with them at their Mother House
where Blessed Teresa is interred, you will see on the immaculately
white walls there, the words of Christ himself: YOU DID IT TO ME
and I THIRST. Her exhortation to her sisters:
I Thirst and You Did it to Me: Remember always to
connect the two, the means with the aim. What God has joined
together let no one split apart…Our Charism is to satiate the
thirst of Jesus for love and souls — by working at the salvation
and sanctification of the poorest of the poor.
As Papal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa
explained in a homily: “You-did-it-to-me”: Mother
Teresa pronounced these words distinctly on the fingers of one hand
and said it was “the Gospel of the five fingers.” For Mother
Teresa, Jesus who is present in the Eucharist, is present in a
different way but equally real, “in the distressing disguise of the
poor.”
Mother Teresa had been blessed early in her vocation with the
gift of mysticism — visions of Christ — what Time’s Van
Biema calls “her spiritual topper.” Even though a thousand years is
like a day with God, to Mother, those 50 years without intimacy
with him must have been a great cross to bear, a dark night indeed.
But in that she was able to see him in the eyes of the poor and
receive his grace daily in the Eucharist, she was never really
bereft of his presence; she simply couldn’t have carried out her
mission were it otherwise.
Although it can sometimes be a great blessing, no one desires
the dark night; indeed, in the last line of the Lord’s Prayer we
plead every day that it not be visited upon us. But as is often
pointed out, Jesus Christ had his own dark night on the Cross,
where he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This
of course, is his quotation of the opening line of Psalm 22,
written by his human ancestor David, a man to whom the dark night
was no stranger. But to cry out to God, as did David and Mother
Teresa, is to acknowledge his saving power, in the manner of the
Psalm’s conclusion:
And I will live for the Lord; my descendants will serve
you. The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may
proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have
brought
.
Lisa Fabrizio is a columnist who hails from
Connecticut. You may write her at mailbox@lisafab.com.
