The Passion of Mother Teresa

Even in death, Mother Teresa has a hard time staying out of the headlines.  Her extraordinary life continues to both inspire and unsettle those of us who have not achieved in our own lives her measure of selfless giving.  But the recent concurrence of the tenth anniversary of Mother Teresa's death with the startling revelations contained in her newly published letters has caused many of us — secular and Christian alike — to reevaluate and, even, to second-guess our earlier judgments about her holiness.

Over the past few weeks, various attempts to understand Mother Teresa's decades of felt abandonment by God have led to a variety of interpretations.  Even the best of these have fallen short of adequately clarifying Mother Teresa's spiritual anguish.  First of all, believers have tried to read her disconcerting admissions in terms of the "dark night of the soul," a theme that appears in several spiritual traditions.  At first glance, this instinct seems correct, but more must be said.  Then secular authors, including many in the press, have attempted to re-present the Nobel laureate as an icon of modern skepticism and agnosticism.  This view immediately begs the question of how to distinguish properly between agnostic hesitation before faith and the purification suffered inside faith.  Finally, various enemies of religion have used the revelations of Mother Teresa's letters to justify their familiar claims regarding the debilitating effects of faith in general.  In other words, they allege that Mother Teresa was just plain crazy, which should not come as a surprise inasmuch as religion inevitably makes all believers crazy.

In evaluating the shortcomings of these three approaches, we may reasonably presume good will in those who advance the first two explanations, but the third conjecture arguably reveals its own pathology, for which good will and dedication to honest dialogue may offer some relief.

With respect to the first two attempts at understanding Mother Teresa's sense of abandonment, several general principles of Christian spirituality could be applied.  These can offer both believers and non-believers a context within which to avoid the oversimplifications of their conclusions.  Of course, one should tread lightly when commenting on God's intimate activity within souls, but Mother Teresa's letters themselves paint for us a broad picture in which we can identify the specifically and objectively Christian content of her experience.  To speak more precisely, a close examination of Mother Teresa's remarks in her letters give moment for pause before identifying her anguish with the "dark night" of classical spiritual theology.  An even closer reading of these materials strictly forbids one from identifying what Mother Teresa reports with modern agnosticism.  Instead, her letters reveal an extraordinary way in which a privileged soul experienced its union with God.

The above assertion requires some explanation.  Classically, Christian spiritual writers have distinguished three stages in the soul's growth in holiness — the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive stages.  This three-stage outline should not be applied too rigidly to anyone's spiritual life, for it attempts to identify general levels of spiritual progress.  The purgative represents the initial and introductory stage in which the soul is converted to God and is purged of its attachments to sin.  This stage is necessarily one of cleansing and penance.  Once purified, the soul then enters the illuminative stage, wherein it begins to taste something of the sweetness of God's grace.  Progressively, the mind and heart are expanded to receive an ever-greater share of God's truth and love, which truth and love nourish the soul and are shared with others.  Finally, the soul is given the final grace of union, in which it enjoys direct friendship with God.  Very few souls experience this union while on earth, but all souls in heaven enjoy it perfectly.

While making great spiritual progress in this world, some privileged souls pass through what spiritual writers have called the "dark night of the soul," which can mark a soul's transition from the illuminative to the unitive stages.  This "dark night" is said to entail the loss in the soul of sensible consolations and discernible feelings of grace and love, so that a person clings to God only for His sake, and not for the sake of the good and pleasurable affects loving God creates in us.  The soul in the "dark night" feels abandoned, rejected, and neglected by God, but it still adheres to Him in faith and trust.  The soul is still in grace, even though it can feel nothing of it.  After suffering this final purification, God then grants to the persevering soul the grace of mystical union.

Classical Christian spirituality permits us to make a few critical distinctions regarding the extraordinary character of Mother Teresa's experience.  First of all, Mother Teresa's letters suggest that her long-suffered feelings of abandonment perhaps should not be identified with the "dark night," for as her letters tell us she suffered this trial early in her religious life.  Even the testimony of her spiritual directors confirm that Mother Teresa passed through the three stages rather quickly as a young sister, and that before her move to Calcutta she had passed through the "dark night" and eventually exhibited some graces associated only with the unitive stage.  This helps us to understand the inner locutions she experienced, especially those on that celebrated train ride in which Christ invited Mother Teresa to found a new religious congregation.

Therefore, instead of the "dark night," Mother Teresa experienced in Calcutta a distinctive mode of union with God.  Specifically, it appears that she was allowed to share for years the very love of God as felt by the human heart of Jesus on the cross.  That love was one of complete union, complete fidelity, and complete obedience, but with no vision, no consolation, and no comfort.  This love-in-abandonment embodies the deepest essence of Jesus' cry "I thirst."  No wonder Mother Teresa painted these words on the walls of her chapels.  We now know that she lived this mystery of the passion for many years.  In each chapel, "I thirst" is painted next to the crucifix.  The biblical text captured her love for Christ in the poor, but it also described Christ's cry of thirst from her own heart.

What then should we say about the darkness Mother Teresa felt?  It was not the darkness of doubt or hesitation.  To be sure, she was no agnostic.  She held nothing in common with those who lack faith.  We see this verified in her letters.  Mother Teresa exhibits no hesitation about believing.  She believed God.  She hoped in God.  She loved God.  She progressed in the spiritual life, and from what we can tell, attained a measure of union with him.  Her virtue and union allowed Teresa of Calcutta to share deeply in the passion of Jesus Christ.  Contrary to what some might conclude, Mother Teresa's feelings of abandonment reveal not how far she was from God, but rather they show us how close God drew her to Himself.