O happy soul, whose body has risen from the Earth which you wander and tread on during your sojourn in this world. Made to be the very mirror of Divinity, you have been crowned with divine imagination and intelligence. –Hildegard of Bingen

Kia ora tatou:

In the space of three days, three people who barely know each other drew my attention to the same article, about the same person. It has been said that one thing is an event; two things a coincidence, and that three things constitute a pattern. This post has been welling up inside me for the last few days, demanding to see the light. This article may appear at first to have little to do with photography. I make no apologies for that.

But on reflection it does.

In the September 3 issue of Time Magazine, there is an article on her and her faith. Or apparent absence of it.

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 27, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. Following training, she went to India. And it is there that the extraordinary story really begins.

Most of us know of her, of the extraordinary work she did. Fewer of us will know of her Nobel Peace prize on December 11, 1979. And almost none of us will know of the inner struggle she went through during her lifetime of the private battle she had with her faith.

A small book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consists of letters between her and her confessors and superiors over 66 years.

On Sept. 10, 1946, after 17 years as a teacher in Calcutta with the Loreto Sisters, Mother Mary Teresa, 36, took a 645-km train trip to Darjeeling. She had been working herself sick, and her superiors ordered her to relax during her annual retreat in the Himalayan foothills. On the ride out, she reported, Christ spoke to her. He called her to abandon teaching and work instead in “the slums” of the city, dealing directly with “the poorest of the poor” - the sick, the dying, beggars and street children. “Come, Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor,” he told her. “Come be My light.” The goal was to be both material and evangelistic , “to help them live their lives with dignity [and so] encounter God’s infinite love, and having come to know Him, to love and serve Him in return.” And so she returned. It was the last time she would truly feel His presence. She maintains that He said to her: “You are I know the most incapable person - weak and sinful but just because you are that - I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse?”

And so she worked to get permission from the local Archbishop, Ferdinand Périer. On Jan. 6, 1948, Périer, after consulting the Vatican, finally gave permission for Teresa to embark on her second calling. For the rest of her life she would labour in a profound spiritual darkness, crying out to him but receiving no answer. She would say: Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love - and now become as the most hated one - the one - You have thrown away as unwanted - unloved. And later When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven - there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. - I am told God loves me - and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

It could be said that this was a pain born of the hardship she had to face in ministering to the poor. But it would seem that the more successful she became, the more she achieved, the deeper her sense of separation from him became. In 1984, five years after her Nobel, a Jesuit priest in the Calcutta province noted that “Mother came … to speak about the excruciating night in her soul. It was not a passing phase but had gone on for years.”

Over the years, she went through a succession of confessors in her attempts to deal with this private darkness. She wrote, ‘I am willing to suffer … for all eternity, if this [is] possible,’ prepared to live without Christ for eternity.

And yet we have this picture of a woman. Small but gentle, devoting her every waking moment to caring for the poor, the destitute, to people tormented by sickness, poverty, AIDS, leprosy. With this temporal load to carry, it seems inconceivable that she should be able to do so without even the balm of a relationship with her Lord to carry her. Her spiritual life, her personal life was an incredibly long, ‘dark night of the soul’ from which she never seems to have had respite.

Is there a point to this? Of course there is.

While her temporal work is remembered with gratitude and affection, the yardstick that most of us use to measure her life, and for which she received the Nobel Prize, it is said that it is the record of her journey that will prove to be her most durable and lasting legacy. As Martin of America puts it, “It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone.”

Mother Theresa lived a life of poverty and devotion, of giving and inspiring others, while all the time she faced the reality of her own interior darkness and sense of spiritual destitution. In spite of this she remained true to her commitment to Christ and the mission he had given her. In the end her struggle became a cornerstone for her.

For those of us who are religious it can be seen as a reminder of the power of Faith, of believing in the infinite Power of God, that just because we do not sense Him, it does not mean he does not exist. For those of us who are not, it is a reminder that doubt is a natural human attribute, and one that can work for us, that we should never lose heart and should continue on.

Now as the process of canonising her (making her a Saint) gets underway, we could well draw from her life a valuable lesson.

To never give up.

To believe in the value of what we are doing. And what we believe.

You may want to read the full article for yourselves. You can find it here.

Arohanui e hoa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Books I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.