Mother Teresa

Re President Wixom’s talk in Conference: (General Primary President)  She was telling about a woman in her ward who was struggling with her faith.

"About this time she read a book of the writings of Mother Teresa who had shared similar feelings. In a 1953 letter, Mother Teresa wrote: 'Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’ Ask Our Lord to give me courage'.”

Someone commented: It is funny to me that she would throw in Mother Teresa & act as if that letter in 1953 was the end of her doubts & an isolated incident. She actually carried that disbelief through to the end of her life-–abandoning prayer & belief in god many, many years before she died. She continued in her work because she believed god (she also doubted his existence in her letters throughout her life) had abandoned the people of Calcutta & they needed her continued strength and compassion. Prime example of the common practice in the church of only telling part of the story. 
This weighed heavily on me. I had no idea. Is it true?  I checked the Internet and this is what I found, all perfectly plausible as part of the human experience.

My question: Did Mother Teresa believe in God?

The woman was dying. Riddled with cancer, Monica Besra, a penniless 30-year-old Hindu mother from one of India’s impoverished slums, was told that further medical treatment was pointless.

All hope was lost.

Only a miracle could save her.

Unable to afford to stay in hospital and pay for drugs to ease the agony of impending death, Monica’s family took her to the Missionaries Of Charity hospice, a religious order for the ill, destitute and dying set up by Mother Teresa, the tiny “Saint of the Gutters”, who had passed away exactly one year earlier.

Just after dawn on September 5, 1998, the nuns urged Monica to pray in front of a photograph of the late, birdlike Nobel Peace Prizewinner because the anniversary was a particularly “holy day”.

Although she wasn’t a Christian, Monica, with nothing left to lose, did so.

“When I went in for prayers and looked at the photograph of Mother Teresa, I saw rays of light coming from her eyes and I felt very light and dizzy,” the woman later told delighted Vatican investigators, bemused doctors and incredulous journalists.

“I started shaking and my heart was beating very fast. I felt scared as I didn’t know what was happening to me.”

The nuns lifted up her sari and placed a locket containing a picture of Mother Teresa on a massive tumour protruding from her stomach.

“The next morning, I woke with a start and suddenly felt so light,” said Monica, adding that a “beam of light” had come from the locket. “I woke up a woman in the next bed and told her the tumour had gone.”

That “miracle from Heaven” – later certified by Pope John Paul II as the first step towards Mother Teresa’s canonisation as a saint – seemed to confirm what people as varied as Princess Diana and disgraced publisher Robert Maxwell believed: that the “Mother of the Poor” was touched by God throughout her life.

Now, however, a remarkable new book reveals that Mother Teresa – born as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Macedonia in 1910 – had persistently tried and failed to feel the presence of God during more than 50 years of her life, and consequently felt “lost and empty”.

In her darkest moments, she came perilously close to seeming to doubt his very existence.

The woman revered around the world as a saint in all but name also believed she had become “trapped in Hell” during her work among the destitute of Calcutta, where she founded her first mission in 1948 and worked tirelessly for the next five decades among lepers, the blind and the deformed.

In secret letters that Mother Teresa insisted should be burned after her death, but which the Vatican ordered should be preserved for the world, she also describes the “darkness, loneliness and torture” she constantly felt, which made her doubt the existence of Heaven and God.

In one letter to Father Michael van der Peet, a spiritual adviser and close confidant, Mother Teresa wrote: “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 – the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak.

“I want you to pray for me – that I let Him have a free hand.”

Cheerful in public, despite the rigours of working among the poor and dying, she was in inner turmoil, saying her life was one of almost constant “torture” and “my smile is a mask – a cloak that covers everything”.

“I spoke as if my heart was in love with God – tender, personal love,” she wrote to another adviser, wondering if she was involved in “verbal deception” of the millions who followed her every act as proof of God’s existence.

“If you were there, you’d have said: ‘What hypocrisy.'”

More surprising still, the author of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light is a Roman Catholic priest who has campaigned tirelessly for the famous nun to be canonised as a saint.

 Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, a member of the nun’s Missionaries Of Charity movement, says that for the last 50 years of her life she tried to feel the presence of God – but could not, “neither in her heart or the Eucharist”.

Father Kolodiejchuk says: “I read one letter to the Sisters Of Teresa’s Missionaries Of Charity and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her.”

Father James Martin, author of My Life With The Saints, about notable religious figures, was astonished by the letters. “I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was so tormented.”

This startling – and controversial – new insight into the spiritual turmoil of one of the 20th century’s greatest icons has been seized on by prominent atheists as proof that all believers, even the most famous, are deluded.

They point to glaring inconsistencies in Mother Teresa’s public and private pronouncements of faith.

Three months after writing of her unfulfilled quest to feel the presence of God, Mother Teresa travelled to Oslo, in December 1979, wearing a flimsy dress and open-toed sandals amid the snow and ice of a freezing Scandinavian winter, to receive the Nobel Prize.

Railing against abortion and drug addiction in the West, she proclaimed in her acceptance speech that Christ “is everywhere, radiating joy, because Christ is in our hearts, Christ is in the poor we meet, Christ is in the smile we give, and Christ is in the smile that we receive”.

In comments broadcast around the world, she added: “It is not enough for us to say: ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbour.’

“By dying on the Cross, God had made himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one – and Jesus’s hunger is what you and I must find and alleviate.”

Such passionate public conviction sits oddly with her private crisis of belief.

Yet, far from proving that God does not exist, Father Kolodiejchuk told the Mail he believes Mother Teresa’s struggles with faith, pain, abandonment and desolation prove she was walking in tandem with Jesus through her life.

“Most people thought what she was doing was easy because she was so in love with God.

But what the letters show is that her interior reality was that she was united with Jesus through anguish, pain and a sense of abandonment.

“Looking at all she was doing and the radiance and holiness she had, we now realise that all these years she was living by heroic efforts of faith.

“It’s a sign of holiness – to suffer as Jesus suffered.

“She was united in Jesus by living with him throughout the pain of his life on earth and on the Cross.

“By suffering, she became more like Jesus.

“It’s a sign of His love for her. This is encouraging for everyone, whether they are doubters or seekers, because it shows even saints can find great faith despite the problems.”

According to the letters, mainly written to advisers and priests over a 66-year period, the great spiritual void in Mother Teresa’s life began soon after she asked the Pope for his blessing to start a home for the poor in Calcutta, shortly after World War II.

After being raised as a Roman Catholic by her Albanian mother following her father’s death when she was eight, by the time the then Agnes was in her teens she knew she wanted to commit herself to a religious life.

Aged 18, she left home to join the Sisters Of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Ireland; she never set eyes on her mother or sister again.

After learning English, she took her vows as a nun in 1931, choosing the name “Teresa” after the patron saint of missionaries.

Arriving in India to teach at a Catholic convent in 1937, she was horrified by the poverty and death all around her.

But she felt a “call within the call” to serve God by leaving the convent to help the poor by living among them. Her nerve almost failed her after she was forced to beg on the streets just to feed herself.

“While looking for a home, I walked till my arms and legs ached,” she wrote in her diary at the time.

Tired, lonely, hungry and depressed, she was tempted to return to the structured life of the convent.

She wrote that the “Tempter” kept telling her to go and live in comfort. But “of free choice, my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your Holy will in my regard. I did not let a single tear come”.

After receiving the blessing of the Pope, she formed the Missionaries Of Charity order, saying her sole aim in life was to care for the “hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, and people who have become a burden and are shunned by everyone”.

Relying on divine providence to provide cash, she worked in an openair abandoned Hindu temple, helping the sick and lepers cast out of Indian society.

“A beautiful death,” she said, “is for people who lived like animals to die like angels – loved and wanted.”

Word spread; other nuns and priests joined her; donations poured in.

A 1969 a TV film and book by Malcolm Muggeridge, called Something Beautiful For God, helped turn her into an international celebrity. (Muggeridge thought the film footage would be unusable because of poor lighting, and claimed “divine light” from Mother Teresa had saved the documentary. The crew believed it was down to a new type of Kodak film.)

The tiny, frail figure had also become one of the most recognisable people on the planet, regularly topping polls as the most influential religious figure of the 20th century.

Diana, Princess of Wales, became a fan – they were together for the last time during a private meeting in New York three months before they died in the same week.

 Some think Mother Teresa’s Come Be My Light will come to rank with St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography proving that great religious figures must first climb through grave doubts.

But what of Monica Besra, the woman whose cancer was “cured” by a locket containing Mother Teresa’s picture?

Some doctors have claimed the cancer was wrongly diagnosed and that the tumours were caused by tuberculosis, which were treated with simple prescription medicines.

Monica has since converted to Catholicism and has become something of a celebrity in her home village, 300 miles north of Calcutta, where she continues to raise her five children.

“I don’t know what happened,” she says. “All I know is that I’m alive and I should not be.”

As her new letters reveal, Mother Teresa was all too familiar with human frailty and doubt. Like the rest of us, she found questions of God, Heaven and Hell as impenetrable as the mysteries of death.

  From Publishers Weekly

Mother Teresa was one of the most revered people of the 20th century, so it is no surprise that 10 years after her death people still want to know what impelled this poor, humble Albanian woman to give her life to God so completely. Kolodiejchuk, a Catholic priest and friend of Mother Teresa’s who is actively promoting her cause for sainthood, assembles a startling and impressive collection of her writings, most of which have never been seen by the public. Two themes especially shine through in Mother Teresa’s letters, namely, her absolute conviction that she was doing God’s will, and a deep and surprising chasm of darkness within her that some would call the dark night of the soul. It is also apparent that this saintly woman was no pushover. In her quest to found the Missionaries of Charity, she aggressively pursued approval from her bishop, fully confident that God desired this work to be done. Kolodiejchuk is at times a bit presumptive in his interpretations of Teresa’s letters, as no one can say for certain what was in her mind and heart at all times. What we do know, in part thanks to this volume, is that Mother Teresa’s vocation to care for the poorest of the poor will continue to inspire people for generations.

Review:

“If I ever become a Saint—I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from Heaven—to lit the light of those in darkness on earth .”—Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Mother Theresa began her missionary work in the late 40s and has become one of the most beloved figures of the twentieth century. Her compassion for the poor and her devotion to the cause has brought her great admiration from believers and non-believers alike.

For the first time we are able to get a glimpse of the inner workings of her brain and heart. "I am told God lives in me -- and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul," she writes in one of her letters that help shed light into her plight to feel the presence of God. Mother Theresa suffered for her faith. "There is nothing but emptiness and darkness," she declared. They say suffering is needed for Sainthood. She definitely passed that test. Some may find it disappointing that a person as holy as Mother Theresa struggled with her faith. I personally found it rather consoling. It helps me relate during those moments of doubt and questioning.

She might have questioned her faith; she might have felt the emptiness of God's presence, from time to time, but she never questioned her mission to serve and to do God's will. These types of dichotomies abound the entire book. Here is a perfect example: "But when I was eighteen, I decided to leave my home and become a nun, and since then, this forty years, I've never doubted even for a second that I've done the right thing; it was the will of God. It was his Choice."

Although Mother Theresa had asked that these letters, that spanned decades, be destroyed upon her death, they have been published in this book that will inspire millions to live her example of faith; to live her example of sacrifice and to get closer to God.

For those who have not yet seen the book, it offers a remarkably candid and penetrating insight into the depth of Mother Teresa's spiritual life, revealing a surprising and tragic absence of any sense of God's presence or comfort with her for most of the final 50 years of her life. I have found myself reading her letters and diary entries with a mix of voyeuristic curiosity, heartwrenching concern, and a desire to glean wisdom from this luminary of Christian history.

Many times Mother Teresa begged that these papers be destroyed, and I can't blame her for desiring that; I would be mortified if my deepest thoughts and feelings-- intended for myself, for God, or for my closest confidants-- were made public. And there would be an added sense of betrayal, as opposed to, say, posting something on a myspace page that eventually made its way to unintended eyes. Ultimately, the Catholic Church decided that Teresa's own spiritual experience belonged not to herself, but to the Church. And, in spite of feeling like part of the betrayal when I immerse myself in her descriptions of the depths of her soul, I do have to agree that the potential benefits of Mother Teresa's personal writings for the spiritual development of every Christian outweigh other concerns.

Some of the valuable lessons from Mother Teresa's words:

A Deeper Understanding of Spiritual Darkness

"There is no God in me--when the pain of longing is so great--I just long & long for God--and then it is that I feel--He does not want me--He is not there..."

Although the darkness and sense of abandonment that Mother Teresa suffered was, it seems, more profound than that which most of us are likely to experience (corresponding to her unusually high calling), her words will connect powerfully with anyone who has gone through a period of doubt, darkness, or depression, as well as enlightening everyone's understanding of the complexities of such a spiritual state. Too frequently those in the Church rush to interpret spiritual dryness as a sign of spiritual failure or unfaithfulness; indeed, Mother Teresa initially regarded her own feelings of being abandoned by God as resulting from her own sinfulness. But there is not always such a simple, formulaic explanation for these "dark nights of the soul"--would it not seem rather naïve and foolish to conclude from Mother Teresa's spiritual condition that she was not praying enough, or that she wasn't being faithful enough to God's call?

This is not to imply that those in spiritual anguish--Mother Teresa included--are free of sin, but that there is not a set correlation between our faithfulness and the happiness--or even the joy--that we experience.

And yet these feelings of spiritual darkness are often compounded exponentially by feelings of guilt and failure..."I'm not a good enough Christian," "I'm not faithful enough," "It's all my fault that I can't seem to experience the joy of Christ right now."

Mother Teresa reminds us that there is an element of mystery to suffering in this age, that its causes cannot be identified the way we diagnose the roots of lower back pain or of a toothache.

An Extraordinary Model of Faithfulness

"I know there have been things which could have been better, but in all sincerity I have tried to refuse nothing to God to answer His every call."

So often we want to know what God desires of us--so long as that calling does not interfere with the plans we have already made for our life, or draw us into a place where we would feel uncomfortable, or where we would have to give up things or freedoms we are unwilling to surrender. Even things as simple as rearranging our schedules, repairing a relationship, or making small sacrifices in our standard of living we tend to reject as too difficult--as if God were asking us to go evangelize a colony of single-celled organisms on Mars.

Mother Teresa voluntarily spent decades of her life in utter poverty, without even the comfort of God's presence with her--and she did not leave her mission field to seek the limited pleasures and comforts the world could offer, all because she knew that she was doing what Christ (or "the Absent One," as she came to call Him) had called her to do. Her faithfulness--with so few spiritual comforts and supports--is both humbling and inspiring.

A Powerful Witness to Hope

"The joy of loving Jesus comes from the joy of sharing in His sufferings...In all of our lives, as in the life of Jesus, the Resurrection has to come, the joy of Easter has to dawn."

It seems particularly cruel that Mother Teresa's darkness did not ultimately lift before she died in 1997. Even the most famous of the spiritually desiccated, St. John of the Cross, suffered in his similar condition for a mere 40-some years before finally experiencing God's presence again in his final years. How could Mother Teresa love so deeply while feeling so abandoned? How could she keep going for half a century? How could she experience any joy at all? Mother Teresa lived her life in a condition of pure faith and hope, trusting that God's reality was greater than her sensation of His absence, that the hope of resurrection was a concrete certainty, that "the Absent One" would indeed return, as He had promised in the scriptures. Her life defines "hope"...a life built on Christ's promises, and not on her own experiences. Her witness can be heard as a word of hope to all who suffer, have suffered, or will suffer from the agony of Christ's absence--there is a greater reality than what we can perceive, there are mysteries that we cannot comprehend, and there is a hope that transcends our understanding. 

Now I must buy the book.

          Di's and Teresa's Deaths

                              DeLoy H. Esplin - 9/5/97

In Paris, at age thirty-six,

        the Princess Dianna of Whales is dead.

Of what, we ask ourselves—speed, al-

        cohol, or the paparazzi instead?

In Calcutta, at age eighty-seven,

        Mother Teresa also has passed away.

Her mission—"Helping the poorest of the poor."

        Both live on we say.