From Morning Prayer today, Psalm 41:
Like a deer that longs for springs of water,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, the living God:
when shall I come and stand before the face of God?
My tears are my food, by day and by night,
and everyone asks, “where is your God?”.
I remember how I went up to your glorious dwelling-place
and into the house of God:
the memory melts my soul.
The sound of joy and thanksgiving,
the crowds at the festival.
Why are you so sad, my soul,
and anxious within me?
Put your hope in the Lord, I will praise him still,
my saviour and my God.
Months after everyone else in the known world, I finally read Come Be My Light, the collection of Mother Theresa’s letters focusing on her decades-long spiritual dryness, published last fall, the 10th anniversary of her death.
The Psalm above strikes me as particularly apt for it describes an important aspect of Mother Theresa’s experience that is often neglected in discussions of this book and its subject:
I remember how I went up to your glorious dwelling-place and into the house of God: the memory melts my soul.
For those of you not familiar with the story of Mother Theresa, very briefly: After serving, happily, as a teacher with the Sisters of Loreto in India for many years, Mother Theresa experienced a profound and direct call from Christ to serve him among the poorest of the poor, living as one of them. In the direct aftermath of this experience, as she was sorting out exactly what she was to do and beginning to seek advice and permissions, she experienced profound joy – deeply felt intimacy with Jesus.
And as soon as she truly embarked on the journey, stepped away from Loreto and entered the hovels of the poor, those feelings of intimacy, and trust, the feeling of being awash in the love of Christ – disappeared.
The dryness, then, is made particularly haunting by the fact she had, in fact, known the opposite – like the Psalmist, she could remember it even in her present suffering.The source and reason for this prolonged spiritual dryness has been much discussed – some have even suggested Mother Theresa might have, in fact, been clinically depressed. I’m not an expert in spirituality so I can’t knowledgeably discuss any of that, but what struck me in the reading is this:
From this telling, from the outside, it just seemed to me that Mother Theresa was experiencing a stigmata of the soul. The stigmata is the physical expression of one’s identification with Christ. Paul tells us over and over, in many different ways, that being a disciple means that we take on Christ, that he lives in us, and this is the framework in which this can be understood.
She was called to meet Christ in the poor, to serve him in the poor, to bring his light to them. Christ is crucified; the poor are crucified; Mother Theresa enters this reality and is crucified, crying with the poor, with Christ, My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?
And the answer then, lies in the same place: in the love that Mother Theresa and her Missionaries of Charity bring to the poor and rejected. God is here.
As for myself–there is but one desire–to love God as He has never been loved—with deep personal love—In my heart there seems to be no other thing but He — no other love but His: the streets, Kalighat, slums & Sisters have become places where He lives His own life of love to the full. Pray for me, Your Grace, that there be really ‘only Jesus’ in me. (169)
I think this book is important, not just because of what it reveals about Mother Theresa herself, but because it reminds us of the complexities of the spiritual life, complexities recognized by and provided for, in a sense, by the ancient Catholic spiritual tradition, all-encompassing and as cosmic as it is in its implications and call. What is “faith?” What does it mean to belong to Christ? To have a good feeling about myself, confident that everything in my life has been baptized and is okay with God? Or does it mean, as Jesus says, as Paul says, reborn in Christ, filled with Christ, Christ alive in me, the old self dead and buried in the waters? One cannot read the Psalmist without wondering if something is sorely lacking in the way many of us think of these things, and what it is we are seeking when we seek “faith.”
In a way, it is a difference of situation. Most of us can shut the door, close the windows, change the channel and pretend that profound, pervasive suffering does not exist. Mother Theresa could not and Mother Theresa would not, because it was in that suffering, she heard the voice of Jesus, and it was a voice to which she could not say “no.”
And even as she served, even as her order expanded, the suffering was unrelenting. There were always more “dark holes” in which Jesus suffered in the poor.
When I read Mother Theresa’s letters, I hear something more than just a “response” to this situation – I hear an immersion in it, a total identification of Mother Theresa with the poor and with Christ – a mystical identification with that moment on the Cross when Jesus cried out, “I thirst.” A moment that, as long as the world exists and human beings walk on it in need, continues. And to live in this is profoundly sacrificial. We let go – of everything. Mother Theresa’s experience invites us to rethink what we mean when we declare that we are, in our own view, “close to God.”
That said, I had just a bit of problem with the book itself. The basic problem I had was lack of context. The book is centered, rather unrelentingly, on Mother Theresa’s darkness and dryness, with regular allusions to the contrast with her external demeanor of cheerfulness.I felt that all of these threads were never really pulled together adequately. Temptation and dryness and a feeling of separation of God often, it seems to me, is accompanied by temptation, or at least a sense that some other situation is better than this, that I would be happy if I were (fill in the blank.) I wondered this about Mother Theresa, was her yearning related in anyway to a desire to walk away from what she was doing and return to teaching or some other, less difficult apostolate? Or was it “simply” (I use that word, knowing its inadquacy) that in the midst of the life she had embraced, she yearned for that assurance which she had felt in the very beginning?The content, if you can call it that, of Mother Theresa’s dryness was sometimes unclear. Sometimes it seems as if it was primarily affective – but at other times there are hints of something even more profound – doubts that God exists, that the soul exists at all, that Christ is real and present in the Eucharist before which she spent countless hours in prayer. She believed, she doubted, she loved God, but did not feel as if she loved Him or was loved by Him. But yet she continued to serve and to smile. What did all this mean?
In short, I think the book could have benefitted from another person – maybe even two – who was an “expert” in spirituality – a Fr. Groeschel or someone like him – to author a concluding essay in which some questions, at least could be explored, if not answered, especially in their implications for the rest of us who struggle with our own doubts and dryness, especially in a culture in which “faith” equals emotion, and not much more.
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