Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Thursday, September 06, 2007
Reflecting on the sadness in Mother Teresa’s letters
“… I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul…”
— Mother Teresa, in a letter addressed to Jesus
Last week’s Time magazine cover article opened a door for the public to see a radically new spiritual landscape inside Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
For those who missed it, the article explores a new book, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” a collection of letters between Mother Teresa and her spiritual confidants.
Like the above quotation, the letters reveal a woman who spent years in spiritual desolation. She refers to her smile as “a mask,” to Jesus as “the Absent One,” and writes to a confessor that “the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”
What does it mean when a saint spends much of her life feeling abandoned by God?
In the last week I’ve heard the gamut of answers to that question.
For the faithful, her experience reveals the depth of her faith. It reveals a woman so committed to God that even while she experienced emptiness on the inside, she relieved more suffering and emitted more light into the world than most humans.
For the atheist, her continued belief in God looks absurd, perhaps morbid.
For the restless, her struggle is both comforting and disturbing. The restless are reassured when even a saint struggles to know God, but disturbed that even a saint did not find lasting inner peace on earth.
And for those whose mysticism involves suffering, her experience is just where Christianity can lead. That is, like Jesus, she encountered a suffering world, drank the suffering world, but offered profound relief.
I’ve come to understand religion, at its best, as leading to two kinds of peace. One is the kind where brick walls come down, weapons are buried, poverty is history and the lion lays down with the lamb. The other peace is personal. It is a peace where belief in the sacred grows from conscious experience of the sacred.
Again, what does it mean when a saint spends much of her life in spiritual darkness?
Did Mother Teresa live out an ideal, so that meeting God through the human experience also means meeting suffering? Or did her religion fail her by not leading her to know profound peace?
If nothing else, perhaps her experience draws out our compassion. Maybe Mother Teresa’s sadness helps all of us — those who know God, those who struggle with God and those who are done with God — to love this woman the same way we love any suffering person.
I mean maybe it causes us to love a little more.
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
All stories copyright 2000 - 2006 La Crosse Tribune and other attributed sources.