Fr Henry Charles

Holiness is a difficult quality to portray, indeed, to imagine. For many people, a standard representation is what they remember from First Communion holy cards: people with eyes turned upwards, hands together, fingertips touching, barely corporeal. Mother Teresa was not of this mould, though she often seemed to remind us of it. Among the features distinguishing her was her luminous smile.

There’s a famous picture of her taken in the Vatican, standing next to Pope John Paul II. He looks sideways at her, clearly enthralled. There, side by side, were two embodiments of the Church, not usually so linked in reciprocal esteem, the institutional and the prophetic. The pope, a charismatic figure not easily upstaged, seemed on the occasion strangely humbled.

It’s quite a shock to hear Mother Teresa herself describe her smile as “a mask,” “a cloak that covers everything.” This and more we learn from a recently published biography, Mother Teresa: Come be my light. Already being compared to Augustine’s Confessions, the book, a collection of correspondence and notes, never intended to be read, tells a story of a life  lived over five decades in an arid landscape of loneliness, darkness, and doubt.

A few articles on this “hidden life” had previously surfaced in 2003 during her beatification process, but it has taken the present publication to make the general public aware of the fact.

“[The book] is that rare thing,” writes David Van Biema, of TIME, “a posthumous biography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure.” Indeed it could, though the issue is just what “reconsideration” entails, and what new perspective replaces the old.

Christopher Hitchens, of Vanity Fair, for instance, observes: “She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit she had dug for herself.”

For Hitchens, Mother Teresa thus moved from fabrication to attempted cure to deeper disillusion. The key stage here, of course, is the first. If you part company with Hitchens there, quite a different perspective is possible.

Feelings of God’s absence are in fact not uncommon either in the lives of the saints or the lives of less heroic believers. The Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, called the experience “the dark night of the soul” (la noche oscura del anima).

It presumes that one is neither negligent nor lazy, but given good will, represents a stage of purification, which is, humanly speaking, a prelude to enlightenment or a deeper living-in-existence, religiously speaking, to deeper union with the divine.

Missionaries of Charity

Mother Teresa’s entry into the night seems to have begun just at the time she began the work for which she become famous, leaving her teaching community and founding the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a community devoted to the service of “the poorest of the poor.”

Up to that point, her life was ordinarily uneventful, though just prior to her “call within a call,” she recorded several ecstatic moments that propelled her on her new course.

Her spiritual state from then on is conveyed through candid correspondence and notes to a few spiritual guides. Although visibly radiant in public, the Teresa of this exchange lived, with one brief interlude, in a state of abiding spiritual darkness.

A recurring syntactical habit, the frequent use of dashes, adds to the urgency of her distress: “I call, I cling, I want – and there is no One to answer –No One on Whom I can cling – no, No One – Alone...Where is my faith – even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness – My God – how painful is this unknown pain – I have no faith - I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart – and make me suffer such agony. So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them – because of the blasphemy – If there be a God – please forgive me – When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven – there is such convincing emptiness that those thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul – I am told that God loves me – and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

Such is a representative example of what the letters reveal. The experience presents interpretive challenges of real difficulty, the key one perhaps being, why does God allow such distress? I have noted a major response given in the tradition in terms of purification and union. But significance may also lie in other directions.

The real paradox, perhaps, one to be marvelled at, not perplexed over, is that Mother Teresa should have persisted in radiating faith and love while suffering so deeply from an absence of consolation.

We may prefer to think that a truer picture of “the saint of the gutter” is of one who could only care for the destitute, wipe their leprous sores, and endure the agonies of the dying, if she were somehow lifted above it all, strengthened by spiritual endorphins.

Yet what made her work possible was not subjective ecstasy, but an objective relationship to God rooted in obedience and perseverance.

This is faith in its most classic form, and it functions to edit our understanding today in many ways. To have faith is to be faithful, and that means no essential reliance on feelings or emotion. It is fundamentally a matter of the will, of what one chooses to be faithful to. Faith is no stranger either to difficulty or doubt.  In fact, it becomes more itself through struggle.

We also commonly refer to faith today as a journey. A journey it is, though one without personal maps, even if accompanied by mentors or guides. One, therefore, with little awareness of the road still to be travelled. The need for perseverance - and endurance - is obvious.

Mother Teresa also surprisingly sheds light on elements of our common experience today.  The dark night is not something foreign to us. It is not this or that aspect of faith that causes doubt today; it is the whole fabric that often seems and feels unbelievable. She is thus a saint for our time, though not just in the way we had always thought.

Her life, its hidden dimensions revealed, never lost its humility. She once recollected her mother Drana saying to her as a child, “When you do good, do it quietly, as if you were throwing a stone in the sea.”

We would never have guessed the cost of her radiance, if her journey were not so unintentionally disclosed. She learned her lesson well; she did her good quietly.

(First published in the Trinidad Guardian 15.10.07)