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Into the dark night

August 29, 2007 by Amy Welborn

My first post on the story of Mother Teresa’s decades-long struggle with spiritual darkness struck some as “dismissive,” and for that I apologize. That particular reaction was against the press coverage – not the Time article, but the subsequent filtering that I just knew would be picked up as a shocking new revelation and used by two groups to promote their own agendas: professional atheists (per the Hitchens reaction in the Time piece itself) and fundamentalist Protestants, who would take her lack of “blessed assurance” emotions as a sure sign that Catholicism was, indeed, far from being Christian.  Michael Spencer at Internet Monk had to issue a warning to his commentors on his Mother Teresa post, for example, that he wouldn’t be posting comments declaring that Roman Catholics weren’t Christian.

So that was my point in the “not news” remark. Because the simple fact of the dark night isn’t – not in terms of Mother Teresa herself or in terms of Catholic understanding and experience of spirituality.  It is very good that this book and the coverage has made this more widely known to people who were previously unaware of either the specifics or the general, and it is one more gift of Mother Teresa to the world, a gift she gave out of her own tremendous suffering. What strikes me is once again, at its best, taken as a whole, how honest Catholicism is about life, and our life with God. There is all of this room within Catholicism for every human experience of God, with no attempt to gloss over it or try to force every individual’s experience into a single mold of emotion or reaction.

Some other recent reactions and responses that are very helpful:

James Kushiner at Touchstone

Anthony Esolen, also at Touchstone:

It is not a mysterious thing, after all, that a young and enthusiastic person should become disillusioned after a month or two of the squalor of the Black Hole of Calcutta.  People lose their faith all the time — and people gain their faith all the time, and often they are the same people.  What is mysterious is that after her visions of Jesus ceased, after all the inner consolations were taken away, after the locutions, what my evangelical brethren call “words of knowledge,” fell silent, still Mother Teresa clung to Christ.  She retained her faith without the emotional accompaniments (and here let married Christians take heed). She continued to serve the poor of Calcutta even though the nagging little viper at her shoulder must have whispered to her, constantly, “This is all absurd.”  Let us be absolutely clear about this: outside of the ambit of Christian culture, no one goes to Calcutta.  What Mother Teresa did, no one does, not even for a year, without having been influenced by the message and example of Christ.  And to live there for good, no one does at all without the virtue of faith.

     Towards the end of the excellent film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, the rural mandarin (Robert Donat) announces his conversion to Christianity to his brethren of the village council.  He is moved not by theological argument but by the stunning example of courage shown, in utter selflessness, in willed poverty, in persevering charity, by the lady missionary (Ingrid Bergman).  He understands that when you see what is not only a new thing in the world, but a great goodness that the world on its own would never produce and cannot even explain, then you should submit to it and follow where it leads, with theology halting behind.  Here with Mother Teresa we have even more: a great goodness united to quiet suffering, unspeakable patience, and a kind of bright and steely charity, for how easy would it have been for Mother to try to salve her sores by “sharing” her feelings with her fellow sisters?  A worldly man may enter the Peace Corps because he “believes” in it and wishes to do good; he will not stay there one month after he has ceased to believe.  Mother Teresa never ceased to believe, even in and through the silence.

     Dubiety is inseparable from the human condition.  We must waver, because our knowledge comes to us piecemeal, sequentially, in time, mixed up with the static of sense impressions that lead us both toward and away from the truth we try to behold steadily.  The truths of faith are more certain than the truths arrived by rational deduction, says Aquinas, because the revealer of those truths speaks with ultimate authority, but they are less certain subjectively, from the point of view of the finite human being who receives them yet who does not, on earth, see them with the same clarity as one sees a tree or a stone or a brook.  It should give us Christians pause to consider that when Christ took upon himself our mortal flesh, he subjected himself to that same condition.  He did not doubt; His faith was steadfast; yet He did feel, at that most painful of moments upon the Cross, what it was like to be abandoned by God.  He was one with us even in that desert, a desert of suffering and love.  Nor did the Gospel writers — those same whom the world accuses on Monday of perpetrating the most ingenious literary and theological hoax in history, and on Tuesday of being dimwitted and ignorant fishermen, easily suggestible — refuse to tell us of that moment.

     In her love of Christ — and the world does not understand Christ, and is not too bright about love, either — Mother Teresa did not merely take up His cross and follow him.  She was nailed to that Cross with him.  She was one with Him — it was His greatest and most terrible gift — at the moment when he cried out to His Father, and the worldly Jews beneath mistook the name of God for Elijah.  We Christians must trust that she is also one with Him now too, sharing in the glory of His triumph over darkness and the grave.  “See,” He says, encouraging us to persevere and be fearless, “I have overcome the world.”

Carl Olson has an excellent post, as well.

In today’s Magnificat, a small meditation from Pope Benedict is included from a book called Dogma and Preaching, which is also pertinent:

The task set before the Baptist as he lay in prison was to become blessed by this unquestioning acceptance of God’s obscure will; to reach the point of asking no further for external, visible, unequivocal clarity, but, instead, of discovering God precisely in the darkness of this world and his own life, and thus becoming profoundly blessed.

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Posted in Amy Welborn, Michael Dubruiel, Religion | Tagged Amy Welborn, Michael Dubruiel | 13 Comments

13 Responses

  1. on August 29, 2007 at 8:31 am Ellyn

    I particularly liked what Esolen had to say about the lessons here for married Christians. In an emotion saturated culture, Mother Teresa makes a powerful witness. And brings inspiration to those of us with enough ‘nagging little vipers’ to make our daily work feel like an out-take from Snakes on a Plane.


  2. on August 29, 2007 at 10:00 am Cheryl

    I too appreciated Esolen’s comments. Sometimes we all need to be reminded that love is a decision, not a feeling. What a powerful witness Mother Teresa was, and continues to be.

    First Things has also reposted an article from 2003 about Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul:

    http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=486


  3. on August 29, 2007 at 11:43 am John Henry

    In fact, the last comment (as of now) on Carl Olson’s piece is a prime example of the spin of the fundamentalist Protestant Amy mentions.


  4. on August 29, 2007 at 12:02 pm Mimi

    I very much appreciate the quote you hilighted from Touchstone. I’ve been turning this over in my head for the past week or so, as I have definitely been through the long dark night of the soul, and am amazed at Mother Teresa’s strength to keep walking with Christ through it.


  5. on August 29, 2007 at 1:57 pm Owen

    What I am going through in my ongoing search for a sustainable job and a protracted time of financial hardship would not be happening at all had I not converted to the Catholic Church because I would still be earning my pay cheque as a Protestant minister.

    However, I *could not* go through what I am right now if I were not a Catholic.

    Protestantism, at least the two main forms of it I knew, held no place for the tension of being both fully “saved” (to regress in my terminology to make a point) and fully in a dark place in my soul; no place for having little faith and knowing that rather than this state being a sin it is all that is asked of me in regard to faith in a certain sense, to have faith the size of a mustard seed; to know that to have my doubts as Thomas had is is not punishable by the letter of some hyper-faith law apparently grounded solidly in a Bible verse but welcomed by our Lord as another way to reveal himself, his character, his goodness, his provision for me as he takes my hand in the darkness and leads me to exactly where he wants me to be; to be able to “offer up” my own ‘suffering’ on behalf of others even when I struggle to believe that God will work this out well for me (or at least in the way I presently hope for it to be worked out); and, to rest in the company of the Communion of Saints (which Protestant understand very differently than I as a Catholic understand it) with the assurance of the prayers of others even when I am stumped as to how to put two words together effectively for myself and my family. This is why I say, this trial that my family and I are experiencing because we are Catholic is one we can endure only because we are Catholic.

    I cannot afford to buy the new book just now but if I could I know I would find myself gaining strength from the knowledge that even as Jesus the God-Man lived in a continual state of spiritual and physical tension he asks nothing less of many of his people. We can do this.


  6. on August 29, 2007 at 11:56 pm Carl Olson

    In fact, the last comment (as of now) on Carl Olson’s piece is a prime example of the spin of the fundamentalist Protestant Amy mentions.

    I would hasten to point out that the comment in question was not mine, of course, but was made by some silly anti-Catholic, Jack Chick wanna who thought that a post about Mother Teresa would be a great place to start bashing the Catholic Church. Which only goes to show, I suppose, how close are Protestant Fundamentalists and Atheist Fundamentalists.


  7. on August 30, 2007 at 8:17 am Therese

    Faith itself is a gift from God. The Dark Night is discovering in a very deep way that God is not a vending machine. It is trusting that He is, even when he seemingly does not respond directly to your requests. It is entering into his life in a deep way.

    It is like going into the desert carrying a satchel because you know that you will need things. But eventually the satchel is empty and you find that the desert somehow provides all that you need. There is an oasis or a cactus with dew or water inside. God provides. God is the source of all. It is discovering that God is enough and the only thing that is enough.

    I can’t help but think that these letters from Mother Teresa’s desert presume an understanding that she continued her journey in the desert because she found that she could keep on, keeping on despite the lack of an oasis on her journey. That she could dwell so long in the desert. That her 40 days were years, is testimony to a faith grown into a grand mustard tree. No seed begins to grow and live without water. A great tree has deep roots and can grow and live in times of drought. The trees leaves are curling up and dry and suffering but the wood is strong and still green from the deep waters brought up by the roots.

    That she continued her work, that she continued to bring Christ to the physically and spiritually poor at every opportunity, and that she spoke profoundly on matters of faith is ample evidence that the great trees roots ran very deep. She still missed the rain but she was not without living water. She was drawing living water from every sore she tended, every maggot she removed, every depairing homeless she gave hope, and every bankrupt soul she showered with words of truth and true wealth. And when they had hope, had a smile, had life, she had Jesus watering her soul from deep down in the roots. And as the rains did not come her roots went deeper and deeper through harder soils and still she found water- enough to keep on, keeping on.

    We will be taking refuge in that great tree of faith for many years to come.


  8. on August 30, 2007 at 11:33 am ger

    No one has raised this yet… but is it possible it is a hoax ……any verification of the authencity of the letters ? I somehow find it hard to believe.


  9. on August 30, 2007 at 12:49 pm Old Zhou

    On the train to work this morning I was reading “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, and found this at the bottom of page 28:
    —
    I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must more on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
    —

    I find it amazing that “The Life of Pi,” ranked 1,074 on Amazon, with over a thousand reviews, can give such a positive view of doubt while, at the same time, the media has a feeding frenzy over Mother Teresa’s doubt!


  10. on August 30, 2007 at 4:46 pm Mike Petrik

    Excellent observation, Old Zhou. But while I agree that the media’s concern over Mother Teresa’s doubt is, at bottom, pretty lame, I can’t share Pi’s disdain of agnostics. To decide not to take a position on a question that cannot be answered by normal human evidence or reason is far more understandable than to take a position notwithstanding the lack of sufficient evidence, absent some exogenous explanation. Catholics believe that God offers us all, via the exogenous variable of grace, an impulse directed to faith. This explains, I think, why even those of us who are animated more by reason than emotion manage to “move on” to a “philosophy of life” ordered by faith in God. That said, I can far more easily understand how such persons might resist the impulse (i.e., grace) and stay in the no man’s land of doubt than I can understand how such persons “move on” to atheism. Atheism cannot, in my view, be explained either by grace or reason. It seems irrational. But, hey, I’m no philosopher.


  11. on August 30, 2007 at 6:03 pm Nicholas

    ger:

    Pretty much everyone who has persisted in the spiritual life has experienced the dark night, so these letters are probably not hoaxes.


  12. on August 30, 2007 at 11:22 pm Ohevni

    Mother Theresa’s 50 year “night of the dark soul?” All I can think of is her immediate Heavenly welcome home!!! Into the ineffable LOVE of the our Holy Triune God!!! Surrounded by the Heavenly Host!!!! With our Blessed Mother Mary singing the most beautiful hosannas for this humble soul who was Christ to so many here on earth!!!! Does anybody think she’s complainin now?!!!


  13. on August 30, 2007 at 11:34 pm Therese

    FYI: NPR had a pretty good interview with the priest that wrote the book (also postulator of her cause) and another priest from the US. It was on their OnPoint program. I believe you can listen to it online in their archives.



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