Of course, the big religion “news” yesterday, propelled by a Drudge link, was an excerpt from and analysis of Mother Teresa’s decades-long dark night of the soul, described in a new book, to be published by Doubleday next month called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.
This is not news, although the detailed excerpts in the book will be new to most.
It is so not news that in 2003, First Things published an article by Carol Zaleski on The Dark Night of MotherTeresa.
During November and December of last year, the ZENIT News Agency published in four installments a study of The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life, by the Postulator of Mother Teresa’s cause, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. In this study a new portrait of Mother Teresa’s interior life emerges, drawn largely from letters she sent to her spiritual directors. She had wanted the letters to be destroyed, not intending to leave behind any record of her spiritual life (“I want the work to remain only His”), but they were preserved nonetheless; and who among us would willingly dispatch them to the shredder? Fr. Kolodiejchuk’s study is just the tip of the iceberg-the documentation submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints runs to eight volumes-but what it shows us is Mother Teresa as a classic Christian mystic whose inner life was burned through by the fire of charity, and whose fidelity was tested and purified by an intense trial of faith, a true dark night of the soul.
snip
The dark night of Mother Teresa presents us with an even greater interpretive challenge than her visions and locutions. It means that the missionary foundress who called herself “God’s pencil” was not the God-intoxicated saint many of us had assumed her to be. We may prefer to think that she spent her days in a state of ecstatic mystical union with God, because that would get us ordinary worldlings off the hook. How else could this unremarkable woman, no different from the rest of us, bear to throw her lot in with the poorest of the poor, sharing their meager diet and rough clothing, wiping leprous sores and enduring the agonies of the dying, for so many years without respite, unless she were somehow lifted above it all, shielded by spiritual endorphins? Yet we have her own testimony that what made her self-negating work possible was not a subjective experience of ecstasy but an objective relationship to God shorn of the sensible awareness of God’s presence.
In the history of Christian theology and spirituality, there have been many accounts of divine darkness, with a host of different implications. It is an ancient doctrine, emphasized by apophatic theologians and mystics, that God dwells in inaccessible light, a light so searingly absolute that it cancels out all images and ideas we may form of Him, veiling the divine glory in a dark “cloud of unknowing.” This tradition owes much to the Christian Neoplatonist Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and his liturgically inspired vision of ascent to the divine throne; as such, it says more about divine transcendence than about human desolation.
Among the monastic writers who flourished during the sunlit years of the twelfth century, divine darkness was an essentially cheerful idea. William of St. Thierry positively delighted in our mind’s incapacity to see that God is present, for he counted on love to make good the deficiencies of our feeble intellect. Love is the eye with which we see God, William said; love itself is understanding. But love is not to be confused with mere feelings. Feelings burn out too easily; they can be manipulated or seduced. The love by which we see God must be an act of the will rather than a passing affection of the heart.
Later generations of Christian mystics dwelt upon the more desolate kinds of darkness to which the spiritual life can lead: the darkness in which all modes of prayer and spiritual practice become arid, and all consolation in the love of God seems lost. Even in the desolate dark night of the soul, indeed especially there, St. John of the Cross taught, God is present, purifying the soul of all passions and hindrances, and preparing her for the inconceivable blessedness of divine union. Along with dark knowing, there is dark loving, no less ardent for being deprived of all sensible and spiritual vision of the beloved. Therefore St. John can say, “Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!”
Yet only in the modern period has the dark night of the soul taken the form of radical doubt, doubting not only one’s own state of grace, but God’s promises and even God’s existence. A wise Benedictine, John Chapman of Downside Abbey, made this point in a 1923 letter to a non-monastic friend: “[I]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most pious souls seem to have gone through a period in which they felt sure that God had reprobated them. . . . This doesn’t seem to happen nowadays. But the corresponding trial of our contemporaries seems to be the feeling of not having any faith; not temptations against any particular article, but a mere feeling that religion is not true.”
There is more on the whole issue here, in a fine post at Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex:
It is no doubt why this is “important” news to the mass media. It helps them to placate the burning emptiness the vast majority of them (polls suggest) experience for their lack of faith. They want to believe that faith is not possible and so they think that this is their assurance–if a great Blessed like Mother Theresa seems to have lost her faith then faith must not be possible.
There is a great difference between the emptiness that Mother Theresa experienced in her dark night and the emptiness that those without faith experience. Mother Theresa experienced hers in love, knowing but not feeling that she was united to Christ and she was given the grace to press on in her mission and her growth in holiness. She did not try to fill the emptiness with material goods but left it there to be filled by God.
Those without faith attempt to fill their emptiness with “stuff” of the world. Eventually they will experience despair of this longing ever being filled. They do not grow in holiness but regress into selfishness and look with disdain at those who tell them that faith and peace are possible. They cannot receive the grace they need for their healing and so they continue to take when their healing only comes through giving.
It is not surprising that Satan can turn a great life of heroic faith into an argument against its possibility. This is simply because love is misunderstood in our society. Only those who experience self giving love can understand how the dark night can be God’s gift to those who He loves most. Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, pray for us!
And the Internet Monk:
The lived spiritual life is a frequent contradiction. I reject the kind of “victorious life” formulaic teaching I grew up hearing in fundamentalist circles, and I must also reject the kind of consumeristic emotional junk food that is found everywhere in evangelicalism as a substitute for the presence of God. As much as I count myself a Christian hedonist, I am suspicious that “Delight yourself in the Lord” is often deeply and significantly misunderstood.
The assurance of God’s presence and the certainties of answered questions are not the same thing. I find far more rational certainty in the resurrection than I do existential experience of the presence of Jesus. Spiritual experience takes the shape of the incarnation itself, with God inhabiting a fallen world where human beings have become insensitive, fearful and callous to the glory of God that pours forth from every crack of the universe. If the fall is true, then none of us are “in tune” with the presence of God, and particular theologies of God’s presence may let us down profoundly.
The kinds of doubts that I read in Mother Teresa’s memoirs make me wonder what kind of expectations of God’s presence are made in the Roman Catholic theology of religious vocation? What kinds of stories of God’s presence are collected around the theology of the Eucharistic presence of Christ? I am not the person to answer these questions, but I know my own tradition has its own collection of promises and mythology that ignore the typical experience of human nature.
We need to learn to see joy in the hunger and not just in the satisfaction. I would be more depressed to hear Mother Teresa was constantly overwelmed by God’s felt presence. That would make my faith life seem like a sham. Knowing the great heros of faith have long periods of dryness means they are like me. The answer is not to be so spiritual you see visions all the time. It is to be so spiritual you don’t have to. You still long for it. You become filled with self doubts. But you choose faith. You choose joy. I am reminded of Jesus in the garden. We assume if we are holy enough the christian life would be easy. It isn’t. It wasn’t easy for Jesus. It wasn’t easy for Mother Teresa. They just did it anyway.
The other thing to remember is that sometimes, our gifts are given to us for others to enjoy, not us. Mother Teresa felt no peace; but others felt peace radiating from her.
Of course I haven’t read this book yet, but I was glad to see that the article put this in context fairly well and pointed out that this is simply part of almost all practicing Catholics’ spiritual lives at some point or another. St. Therese went through the same sort of thing in her final days.
There is surprisingly good current article on this book on http://www.time.com/time. Usually a topic like this would be mangled by the secular press even assuming good will.
Mother Teresa suffered profound spiritual darkness during most of the last 50 years of her life, not just her final days.
Incidentally the posted times of comments are wrong.
Kind of weird, the author of the book is on WordPress.com and is also on the top blogs list today.
If you want to read the article in Time, here’s a direct link. I do disagree with the view that this “is so not news”–that seems almost dismissive to me. This will be news to many people. Also, while a person may know intellectually that Mother Theresa experienced long-term spiritual dryness, this widespread public availability of her letters will bring home the reality of that to many.
I agree that although not strictly “new news”, the detail provided in those letters are indeed news. I new about her “dark night of the soul”, but I didn’t know that in essence it lasted for the rest of her life.
Saints also come in all varieties. Some almost never experienced the doubts experienced by Mother Teresa, or had them for only brief periods.
I admire her greatly for her saintly perseverence, for not quitting her great work. I do wonder, though, whether it would have been more honestly Christian for Mother Teresa to admit her spiritual darkness to more than only a few people. It’s a question to which I don’t have a clear answer. I would love to hear what others think about it.
I know how she felt. It pains me to think this will cause people to question her faith.
This makes me sad, but I like what Maureen said. We are to do what we’re called to do, no matter how we feel. We may not know the “why” in this life. But God has a purpose for all of it, even the pain and suffering. Of that I am sure.
The phenomenon of saintly people experiencing a distance from God is far from new. In fact, it’s something I’d say links lots of saints over the centuries.
Interestingly enough, there’s a history of it among the (now) three great Teresas. St. Teresa of Avila experienced several years of dryness in her life of prayer. St. Therese of Lisieux, for all of the saccarine spirituality that people portray her purveying (something that I think, at the root of her spirituality, is not true), went through a dramatic period of darkness late in her life where she was tempted to deny the very existence of God. And now there is Mother Teresa.
And yet all three of these women did not give in to that easy temptation, but, with the help that grace provides, persevered to the end–and gave great help to many others along the way.
If people with a strongly secular outlook are able to put their biases to the side for a moment and are willing to look at the lives of faith of these Teresas (and other saints with similar stories), maybe they’ll find a lot more substance in the Christian faith than they’ve given it credit for in the past.
Maybe the wider telling of Mother Teresa’s troubles now (I had heard of them in the past) could be a moment for our enlightened critics to give the Christian faith a second chance.
Somehow, however, I don’t think that Christopher Hitchens and Penn Jillette will be putting up portraits of Mother Teresa up on their walls anytime soon.
Did these critics even read the article? It doesn’t seem like they did.
1) It wasn’t widely known, and a new book is coming out, as well as moving on in the process towards sainthood. Perfectly legitimate news.
2) The article includes token Hitchens quotes, but it by and large makes all of the same points the critics here have been making, thinking they are discounting or playing off the article!
3) C-L-S is it’s usual vile self.
I do disagree with the view that this “is so not news”–that seems almost dismissive to me.
Me too.
From the Time story:
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.”
Yikes. Come on, folks, no presence of God whatsoever for nearly 50 years and neither in her heart or in the eucharist.
A lot of the commentary has been of the “nothing to look at here” variety. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention before. Surely some hard-core secularists will take too much pleasure from this. But so what. On its own merits, in its own context–wow.
I think this news flurry is a great opportunity to spread the word about the Catholic mystical tradition. So many people, when they feel like there must be “more” to religion than they’ve noticed in Catholicism, feel like they have to look to the Eastern non-Christian religions. But we have it all here: meditation, a dark path, and devastating mystery. All this and heaven too. Catholicism: the full-service religion!
This kind of profound absence of God seems to happen to many of the greatest of saints. I always knew Mother Teresa was a saint. Now I am humbled to realize how very great a saint she was.
All of Letter VIII of the SCREWTAPE LETTERS is very much to the point here. This is the missive in which Wormwood is introduced to the Law of Undulation. Just a bit of it here below:
“…It may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. … Do not be decieved, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”