dark night of the soul

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.