Posted on 08/23/2007 7:50:42 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me — The silence and the emptiness is so great — that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear.
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one....
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
I heard about this years ago. Don't we all, at one time or another, have our own little crises?
Apparently some last longer than others. According to the article, Mother Theresa's lasted for fifty years.
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." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"
I simplify, but his analysis is that the Lord sometimes takes away all emotional consolations from the believer to teach him that love of God and true faith are not dependent on emotional satisfaction and "feeling good about God" but about devotion to Him regardless of what we get out of it.
And she persevered through it all.
If you haven’t been through this dark night, it isn’t just not believing or not praying or feeling the presence. It is the complete and utter absence of God. It is like staring into a huge fathomless black hole of utter darkness and sensing that God is gone from your soul.
God allows this for His reasons and many great saints have gone through this dark night of the soul.
Through it all, Mother persevered. She cried out, “Where are You”, and even then said, “Yes, Lord.”
She is a great saint for our time.
Rhetorical question: Do you love God because He's God, or do you love God because of what you get from Him?
[Jesus:] Wilt thou refuse to do this for me? ... You have become my Spouse for my love — you have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far — Are you afraid to take one more step for Your Spouse — for me — for souls? Is your generosity grown cold? Am I a second to you?
[Teresa:] Jesus, my own Jesus — I am only Thine — I am so stupid — I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You wish — as You wish — as long as you wish. [But] why can’t I be a perfect Loreto Nun — here — why can’t I be like everybody else.
[Jesus:] I want Indian Nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little children ... You are I know the most incapable person — weak and sinful but just because you are that — I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse?
— in a prayer dialogue recounted to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier, January 1947
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Christ spoke to her. Directly. After that, what most of us feel as great gifts of the Holy Spirit would feel like a desert perhaps. It is a wonderful story of faith. I’m definitely going to read this book when it comes out.
But she never stopped serving, regardless of her crisis. That's the difference between us and the saints.
I believe it is what St. Teresa of Avila referred to as the "dark night of the soul" in her works, The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. This is a phase passed through by those already blessed with the gift of mysticism and is time when God seems to withdraw from the soul and make himself absent leading to a loss of the spiritual intimacy which the favored soul had heretofore enjoyed. It's purpose, according to St. Teresa, is to enkindle an even greater desire for God in the saintly individual.
Any FReeper mystics feel free to contradict me....:-)
Even our Beloved Lord, yes, and amen.
She suffered the trials of Job ... and the rewards of Job, too, I’m guessing.
Looks like a 2007 article to me.
Maybe I need glasses. Or coffee.
The basic information, here, is not new.
I’m reading the Interior Castle for the third time..
So much of what St. Teresa writes is her attempt to put into words an ineffable experience. She writes clearly, but it takes me (as it would not others) time to understand.
I think many forget that the Almighty God is ineffable and does what He does because He does. He isn’t the God-in-a-Box, or God on demand like TIVO.
This is the Creator of the Universe and if it pleases Him, He does what He does for love of the soul that is willing and sometimes it is a painful purging or trying experience.
Fifty years in eternal time is a less than a flash of light on the horizon. I shudder to think of those times when a momentary pain or discomfort or confusion caused me distress and I complained to God.
Christ underwent His own “dark night” on the Cross:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Many saints went through this trial of fire. The severity of this test only adds to Mother Teresa’s saintliness. Every action she undertook in faith, in spite of this desolation, certainly magnified the graces received by those for whom she prayed. That’s what I would call “heroic” faith.
I fail to understand why any “conservative” would admire Thomas Merton.
WOW!
She was not immune to a great failure of many of the greatest Christians the world has known: to love your neighbor AS YOU LOVE YOURSELF. She believed herself to be less worthy of love than the neighbors she loved - and she felt she could not take time for herself to be healed, to grow, apart from the people for whom she sacrificed her life.
How could she love herself when she felt she could not take time away from loving her neighbor? Day after day, to keep saying, “I must minister to them, but I there is no one to minister to me”. She believed that her own spiritual state was worth less to God than the physical state of her flock, that she had to sacrifice herself completely to the point of destruction of her spirit in order to save them. This is so noble, and yet it hurt her so much...
This is the blueprint for burnout, for anyone who cares for those who cannot care for themselves. We become just like them - they perhaps cannot care for themselves physically, but when we cannot care for our own spiritual and physical needs, we are just as in need of care from others ourselves. When we feel that we are unworthy of the same level of care as the ones for whom we care, we cannot love ourselves. If we love ourselves as much as we love our neighbor, we must allow God to love US and meet OUR needs, just as we allow God to meet the needs of those we love through us. Only when we are filled with love can we love others fully.
Can a man save another if he is too weak to save himself? Can he sacrifice himself fully if he cannot physically or spiritually place himself in the position of sacrifice? Only when we have cared enough for ourselves can we care for others. It is not easy, but God will find a way to fill us if only we allow Him to do so - and we must not ignore our own needs to the destruction of our own tender hearts. He will renew us and give us the desire of our hearts, to see those we love tended by our own loving hands...
One cannot feel the love of God if one does not believe oneself loved by God. This is the word of God: we must love ourselves, even as we love our neighbors.
As noted in the article, Mother Theresa's experiences challenge the therapeutic approach to religion typical of many Americans. For the emotionalistic, love involves feelings and any lack of such feeling is inherently inauthentic. Thus if one stops feeling attracted to one's spouse, the marriage is over. If prayer no longer makes one feel warm and fuzzy inside, one must be losing faith.
Mother Theresa acted out the notion that love is willed. It's terribly difficult to feel warm and kind towards a urine-soaked druggie hacking up his lunch on your shoes. For that matter, it's terribly difficult to feel love for a snippy wretch like Christopher Hitchens. But that's the kind of virtue to which we are called.
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