Earlier this month a kind of posthumous autobiography was published: Mother Teresa: Come, Be My Light.
Have you ever wondered what in heaven's name God was up to? Of course you have. During the periods of your life when your prayers seemed to rise no higher than the ceiling and you had no sense of Christ's presence around you, didn't you wonder? When you were taking laps around your personal Sinai in a bewildering spiritual wilderness, didn't you plead for some sign? Mother Teresa did. But if her letters accurately describe her earthly pilgrimage, she never got out of the wilderness.
Jim White
The journals of our spiritual journeys rarely depict life without doubts. In fact, periods of our spiritual growth are often bracketed by times of drought. It was the 16th century mystic, John of the Cross, who coined the term “dark night of the soul” to describe times when Christ's servants feel estranged from God though they seek him desperately. Most of us can remember periods of “dark nights” in our lives.
But what if the dark night never yielded to a blazing dawn? I am awed by the kind of love in action demonstrated by this great but humble saint. And, I am puzzled once more, this time by something God did not do.
Although Mother Teresa wanted her letters destroyed after her death, they were edited and printed by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a senior member of the society she founded, in preparation for her canonization as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
According to her correspondence, in 1946 she heard very clearly God's call to go to Calcutta and work with the poorest of the poor. In describing her call, she remembered that although she explained her unworthiness to him, Jesus told her “Come, be my light.” As she understood it, her task was not merely to bind the physical wounds and heal the hurts of the outcasts, but to shed upon them the light of Christ so they might find the Savior.
Obediently, she sought, and finally obtained, the Vatican's approval for such a mission outreach. The witness of her writings reveals that she was never again to know the absolute certainty of Christ's presence.
Understandably, those who are militantly anti-divinity have made much of the Lord's protracted silence to Mother Teresa. They gleefully point out that if one so saintly as she didn't hear from him, perhaps God is not there at all. They point an accusatory finger at the bent little figure whose habitual blue-trimmed sari bordered a bronzed face etched deeply with lines of concern. “She is a hypocrite” they say.
In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 11, 1979, she spoke of humanity's need to love God but also to love our neighbors. She seized the moment to emphasize that the 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.”
Three months before, however, she had shared with her spiritual advisor, Rev. Michael van der Peet, that “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 ….”
So for half a century, this little woman persevered despite her doubts. She kept serving because that was the last assignment he gave her. Did God really withhold himself from her? Was there something in her that blocked the sense of God's presence and affirmation? I don't know.
I do know that at times God does some strange things. Like in the Bible when he asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his son. Apparently, God needed or wanted to know that a human being could be so obedient that he would even sacrifice his own son.
Perhaps it is all a part of some divine plan for God to know that a human being can render heroic service in the most trying of circumstances to the most desperate of people and can continue for half a century without additional confirmation of his presence. I don't know why God does some of the things he does.
But despite her long, long dark night, she continued to serve Jesus and the poor. For Mother Teresa, faith and doubt were not mutually exclusive. Indeed, she found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with her doubts and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Each year the organization she founded, the Missionaries of Charity, feeds 500,000 families, treats 90,000 leprosy patients and educates 2,000 children in Calcutta alone.
If this is hypocrisy, the world could use more of it.
I confess that I do understand why God does what he does sometimes. But I am more comfortable in the company of those whose faith is demonstrated by their works despite persistent doubts than in the presence of those who claim, “I know that I know that I know that I know,” but sow discord.
Some will undoubtedly point out to me that the Apostle Paul said, “I know whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 2: 12). Very true. But, he also said, “We live by faith and not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). If I know something, it ceases to be faith and becomes knowledge. Where facts are evident, faith is no longer required.
Though I don't understand God sometimes, I understand myself very well. I need his reassuring presence.
I pray that I will be faithful during the times of spiritual feasting and fasting; during the bright days of God's glory and in the dark nights of his absence; when his voice thunders in the core of my soul and when he is so silent I wonder where he went.
I pray that one call will be sufficient until he speaks again with a reassignment.