Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

This article is from Time. I have only copied portions of it because it is six pages long. The link is at the bottom to read all. The information here is disturbing and enlightening at the same time. Although not Catholic I always revered Mother Teresa as a true angel on earth. I am distressed to read of her conflict with God. However I remember looking at photos and television footage of her and thinking that her eyes seemed so empty. I always assumed they would be soft and inviting, but I did not find them that way at all. Another lesson proving all is not always what it appears to be. In fact, this new book on Mother Teresa indicates that almost her entire life she questioned the very existence of God and Jesus. Years ago I would question why I could not be more like Mother Teresa in her faith, until I realized that everything was not one color. Now I see where she felt the same questions that have haunted me. Only her questioning seems to have been more intense and profound than even mine.

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007 By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Bettmann / CorbisArticle

Jesus has a very special love for you. 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. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest 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 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......................

"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated
"

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415-1,00.html

(eidted to correct the link)

Yes, it is easy to question God when you see all of this suffering. I feel sorry for her.

I'd sometime heard it said that her good works, in the style in which they were done, did some good but were not on the right path. Her first mission was to help the dying to die among love; now how can you take only the end-product of a society and do as if the others were not your affair? You can't be of much help unless you see what is going on before you, in front of you, and near to you. It is that ignorance and related delusions and follies which will cost the catholics dearly as time continues.

Spring, thank you for bringing this article here. It was very thought-provoking. I adore Mother Teresa, she was and still is a hero, maybe even more so now. I marvel at what she was able to accomplish ~ and how much more amazing it is in light of the startling revelation that she couldn't not feel the presence of God.

Hopefully later I will have some more time to share some thoughts on it.

A lexigram of Mother Teresa's name:


MOTHER TERESA
... from the letters ...
AEEHMORST
..... revealing .....

OM
RA ~ MA
SHE ROSE AS A STAR
AS MOTHER TO THE OTHERS
SHE ROSE AS
MOTHER TERESA
A SEER
SHE HEARS THE EAR
SHE HEARS THE HEART
SHE HEARS THE EARTH
SHE HEARS EROS
SHE HEARS RA
SHE SHARE THE EROS
SHE TAMES THE HATES
SHE REST THE HATES
EROS ROSE
TREES SEE HER
TREES HEAR HER
EARTH HEARS HER
HOME TO MOTHER TERESA
SHE SHARE THE STAR ARTS
AS SHE ROAMS THE EARTH
TO SET THE EROS

REST TO MOTHER TERESA
AS SHE ROSE TO HER STAR HOME
OM