Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Mother Teresa’s Difficult Faith

September 8, 2007

I don’t know if Mother Teresa looked any taller when she was younger and not stooped as we saw her in later years. Perhaps, but she was a tiny woman at any age. Lined and wrinkled was her face. Her most prominent physical feature? Her eyes. Dark. Infinite. Filled with pathos, a blend of sadness and compassion.

Many have mentioned the peace and, even, joy that exuded from her and while I am sure that their sensibility is on the mark I would offer another reading of Mother Teresa, though, and I know this is not a pleasant comparison. I would say that Mother Teresa closely resembled a Holocaust survivor, exhibiting in her body the same sort of exhaustion, deprivation, suffering, and witness of unimaginable evil.

Following the advance press of the book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, there has been considerable discussion of the meaning of Mother Teresa’s admission of the loss of her awareness of the divine presence. In the years 1946-1947, just before her call to work with the poor of Calcutta, she experienced a deep mystical union with God in her prayer. After that, though, once she started her independent service of the destitute in the streets, God disappeared; for almost fifty years, Mother Teresa had no sense that God was there when she prayed. She wrote to a confessor, “There is no God in me.”

Her “fans” are more than a little thrown off. Most of us like to think that praying is as easy and satisfying for saints as shooting a few hoops might be for pro basketball players. Apparently, that wasn’t the case. Her detractors (yes, Mother Teresa has detractors!) are only too happy to have this evidence of the silliness of her belief in God and the band-aid nature of her work for the poor.

It really is sacrilegious of these critics to tear her down. It is possible to find fault with Mother Teresa and her approach to poverty and the religious life. However, that the world was dealing with a person who had a profound contact with God there should be no doubt. Her willingness daily to confront suffering and evil with charity for so many years is testimony to many intangible realities that escape the modern soul.

Mother Teresa’s difficult spiritual fate was a result of two things: her desire to unite herself with Jesus on the cross and her goal of worshipping him in the distressing disguise of the poor.

Her identification with Jesus ensured that she would experience the anguish and abandonment he felt on the cross, the barometers measuring the intensity of evil, telescoped from over the centuries, that confronted His love. Her identification with the poor would bring her face to face with that same suffering and evil.

Jesus’ act of self-sacrificing love that is at the heart of the Christian experience was characterized by St. Paul in his Letter to the Philippians as “kenosis”, a Greek word that means, “emptying”, a pouring out of oneself on others’ behalf without counting the cost. Having done this in her own life, Mother Teresa was indeed left with an unfathomable emptiness.

One has to return to the Holocaust to glimpse a similar emptiness, a similar absence of the divine. In his foundational book, Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his experiences as a twelve and thirteen year-old in Auschwitz and nearby concentration camps from 1944 until the end of the war in 1945. I see World War II and the complete collapse of civilization as one bookend of modern times. It inaugurated the era in which we live that has been marked by evil and the elusiveness of God. Eliezer Wiesel was twelve going on thirteen and a very faith-filled and spiritually advanced youngster when he and his family were sent to the camps. Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. … Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

Notice the silence and absence of God that he mentions, echoed in later years by Mother Teresa. For Elie Wiesel (who, by the way, remains a man of faith albeit a qualitatively different faith), the actions of the Nazi’s in the camps were not the only evil; in the minds of many prisoners was the complicity of the rest of German society and, indeed, the rest of the world. I believe that in her encounters with the poorest of the poor in Calcutta and throughout the world, Mother Teresa came face to face with that same evil. How can it be that millions live and die in the misery of the concentration camps of slums while the world is indifferent? She was courageous enough to embrace that darkness and to enter the world where God’s consolations disappeared. Mother Teresa’s faith stepped into another dimension as she held to the belief that beyond the heart of darkness lies the light of the Creator.

Mother Teresa’s bleak faith is iconic of the spiritual life of humanity following the Second World War. God is not readily evident; humanity does little to reveal Him. Those who would believe do not find it easy. It is a great strength, though, to be accompanied by such a saint.