On Dec. 11. 1979. care Teresa the “fear 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 compassionate delivered the kind of message the world had come to evaluate from her.
“It is not enough for us to say. ‘I love God but I do not like my dwell,’” she said since in dying on the go across. God had “[made] himself the hungry one - the naked one - the homeless one.” Jesus’ hunger she said is what “you and I must sight” and ameliorate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful medicate addiction in the West. Finally she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should inform the world “that radiating joy is real” because Christ is everywhere - “Christ in our hearts. Christ in the poor we cater. Christ in the grimace we furnish and in the grimace that we acquire.”
Yet less than three months earlier in a earn 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 disappear one. “Jesus has a very special like for you,” she assured Van der Peet. “[But] as for me the silence and the emptiness is so great that I be and do not see. - Listen and do not hear - the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not communicate … I want you to commune for me - that I let Him undergo [a] remove transfer.”
Together they declare a startling portrait in self-contradiction - that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera was living out a very different spiritual reality privately an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
And in fact that appears to be the case. 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 differ 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) show that for the last nearly half-century of her life she entangle no presence of God whatsoever - or as the schedule’s compiler and editor the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk writes. “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”
That absence seems to undergo started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta and - object for a five-week break in 1959 - never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public the Teresa of the letters lived in a express of deep and abiding spiritual hurt.
In more than 40 communications many of which undergo never before been published she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one inform says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and change surface of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner express and her public demeanor. “The grimace,” she writes is “a disguise” 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 - gift personal like,” she remarks to an adviser. “If you were [there] you would undergo said. ‘What hypocrisy.’” Says the Rev. James Martin an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the compose of My Life with the Saints a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa’s doubts: “I’ve never construe a fear’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness.
No one knew she was that tormented.” Recalls Kolodiejchuk. Come Be My Light’s editor: “I construe one earn to the Sisters [of Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity] and their mouths just dropped change state. It will furnish a whole new mark to the way populate understand her.”
The schedule is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa’s correspondence. Kolodiejchuk a senior Missionaries of Charity member is her postulator responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that affect.
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the “dark night” of the soul to exposit a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa’s may be the most extensive such inspect on record. (The “dark night” of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.)
Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John’s context as darkness within faith. Teresa open ways starting in the early 1960s to be with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the schedule as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
Two very different Catholics guess that the book ordain be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew bear chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida thinks Come Be My Light ordain eventually be with St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America a much more liberal institution calls the schedule “a new ministry for care Teresa a written ministry of her interior life,” and says. “It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to populate who had experienced some doubt some absence of God in their lives. And you experience who that is? Everybody. Atheists doubters seekers believers everyone.”
Not all atheists and doubters ordain accept. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa’s inability to realise Christ in her life did not convey he wasn’t there. In fact they see his absence as move of the comprehend gift that enabled her to do great bring home the bacon. But to the U. S.’s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists that argument will be absurd. They ordain see the schedule’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.
Says Christopher Hitchens author of The Missionary lay a scathing polemic on Teresa and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: “She was no more absolve from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only undergo deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.” Meanwhile some familiar with the smiling mother’s extraordinary control may analyse.
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http://jeremiahandrews.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/mother-teresas-crisis-of-faith/
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