Article on Mother Theresa

First Response: Saint Shock: Mother Teresa's “Dark Night of the Soul

By Don Williams


Time Magazine's (Sept 3, 2007) cover shows a head shot of Mother Teresa gaunt, sad-eyed, pursed lipped, staring into the camera. Its headline reads, “The Secret Life of Mother Teresa: Newly published letters reveal a beloved icon's 50-year crisis of faith.” The article itself leads with, “Her Agony.” In sum, her “agony” was to spend her life on the streets of Calcutta with the dying and emerge into the world spot light, including a Nobel Prize, without any sense of God's presence. She lived with a profound emptiness, desolation, and deepest loneliness. She felt Christ neither in her heart nor in the sacrament. All of this was shared with several “confessors” but never made public. Clearly this only intensified the loneliness of her soul. Now, we are told, we have a new Mother Teresa; her final ministry is to those who find the same alienation in their hearts. What are we to make of this?

First, the atheists hardly identify with her in her pain. They rejoice that the truth has finally been told by the most prominent “saint” of the Twentieth Century: there is no God. So Time reports that Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa and more recently “the atheist manifesto God is not Great (reviewed on this site) [responds]: 'She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure...more and more professions of faith, could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.'” Thus she lived with “cognitive dissonance,” like the later-day Communists, knowing the jig was up and pressing on all the harder.

Next, Dr. Richard Gottlieb, a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is called in for consultation. He asks whether Mother Teresa could have imposed darkness on herself as a way of resolving her conflict over high achievement by finding ways to punish herself. Her ambition was unique. She wrote, “I want to love Jesus as he has never been loved before.” But she agonizes over taking credit for her accomplishments as sinful. This would require her to pay the price by despair. Using sexual imagery, he speculates that Mother Teresa was the active party in her Jesus-relationship, but this might have scared her – and the only way to accomplish these great things was in the role of the spurned but faithful lover.

While holding some interest, such speculations are cheap shots. They look into a world of which they have no part and try to make sense of it on human terms. So Time rightly comments, “Most religious readers will reject [these explanations], along with any that makes her the author of her own misery – or even defines it as true misery. James Martin, editor of the Jesuit magazine, America, proposes that Mother Teresa functioned as a husband whose wife has a stroke and is comatose. “Its like loving and caring for a person for 50 years and once in a while you complain to your spiritual director, but you know on the deepest level that she loves you even though she's silent and that what you're doing makes sense. Mother Teresa knew that what she was doing made sense.” He adds, “Everything she's experiencing is what average believers experience in their spiritual lives writ large. I have known scores of people who have felt abandoned by God and had doubts about God's existence. And this book expresses that in such a stunning way but shows her full of complete trust at the same time.” This now makes her a saint to skeptics. She shows that doubt is a natural part of everyone's life.

As a follow up to Times' cover article, The Los Angeles Times editorializes, Saturday, Sept 1, “A Doubting Teresa: Revelations that the spiritual icon questions her beliefs don't belittle her faith or her work.” Launched from this, the editors take Time to task for a cover that “falls into the shock/horror category.” They go on to say, “Mother Teresa's agonies of doubt place her in the mainstream of Judeo-Christian belief. Almost from the beginning, those who worshiped God worried that he had deserted them. In the Hebrew Bible, the psalmist cries, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” [Psalm 22:1] – a sentiment echoed by the dying Jesus in the New Testament.... To the non-believer, the coexistence of belief and unbelief can seem to offer proof of cognitive dissonance. To the believer, however, it can be perceived as a consequence of a world in which the reality of a good God is manifest at some times and excruciatingly elusive at others.” The Times concludes, “What endures for many believers, even in times of 'darkness & coldness & emptiness,' is the divine injunction to serve others. The Book of Hosea says (and Jesus reiterates), that God desires 'mercy and not sacrifice.' Mother Terese wasn't the first, or the last person to heed that call even when beset by doubts. That doesn't diminish either her faith or the good works it inspired.” Let us add a few comments to these reviews.

First, Mother Teresa launched her ministry to Calcutta's dying from a deep relationship with Jesus and his sovereign call. This included visions and dialog with him. “Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor... Come be My light.... 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?” Time continues, “Mother Teresa had visions, including one of herself conversing with Christ on the Cross. Her confessor, Father Celeste Van Exem, was convinced that her mystical experiences were genuine. “Her union with Our Lord has been continual and so deep and violent that rapture does not seem very far.” he commented. Teresa later wrote simply, “Jesus gave himself to me.” For those of us who have had as real a call, it anchors us, even if we have to endure 50 years of silence. This the “world” will never understand. (Compare Exodus 3, Jeremiah 1; Galatians 1) Moreover, along the way, Mother Teresa found resolution in Christ's cry of dereliction (“Why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34) and saw herself held there in his forsakenness.

Second, most of us know some periods of spiritual emptiness and doubt, but this is virtually different in kind from Mother Teresa. She clearly entered “the dark night of the soul,” described by St. John of the Cross, a 16th century Spanish poet and mystic. This is a metaphor for loneliness and desolation that can occur during spiritual growth. Its purpose is to let go of our ego's hold on the psyche, and moves the supplicant from contemplative prayer to the inability to pray at all. It is the test of faith, the negation of the soul itself. It purges us from the seven deadly sins, starting with pride, and is both a sensual and spiritual emptying, entering a kind of purgatory. Its goal is a state of perfection, the union of love with God. We Protestants need to try to understand this and not project our own doubts and battles with unbelief on to Mother Teresa's spiritual journey. However, it smacks of Platonism, a radical dualism between the flesh and the spirit, the physical and material worlds, and a perfectionism in this life which breaks the eschatological tension between the “already and the not yet” the “kingdom come and coming.” Biblically we are called to live in that tension, the intersection between this age and the age to come.

Third, we would long for Mother Teresa to know, in the midst of her unique devotion to Jesus, and her dying to herself among the dying of Calcutta, more of the power and gifts of the Spirit. There is an eschatological joy which no mortification of the flesh or spiritual devotions can produce. The disciples are not commanded by the Risen Jesus to enter into a spiritual journey into the dark night of the soul. They are commanded to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit to come with power from on high. (Acts 1:8) The Christian life is fully paradoxical: based on Christ crucified and risen. We live with both profound suffering (at times) and deep joy. Here is how Paul puts it: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character; and character hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5:11-5)