Time is reporting about Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith:
 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 — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.” |
The poor woman.
I wonder what she learned after she died.
By the way, her name at birth (in what is now Macedonia) was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. According to Wikipedia, “She took her first vows as a nun on 24 May 1931. At that time she chose the name Teresa after the patron saint of missionaries.”
Darkness of the soul is felt often by those very close to God. Its normal. For most though it comes and goes. a dry period. this is a language of contemplatives.
of one who knew the joy of being extremely close to God, and wanted it constantly. Like the first 6 weeks of marriage. But one cant have joy if one never knew sorrow. This is a normal relationship.
I never cared much for Mother Teresa, but I dont doubt her faith. Or her relationship with her Creator. I just did not like the way she treated her sisters.
dona nobis pacem
http://www.suntimes.com/news/greeley/532056,CST-EDT-GREEL29.article
I saw this article explaining the dark night. Greeley explains it much better than I tried above.
d