Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul by Dinesh D’Souza

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August 29, 2007

In Christopher Hitchens’ wickedly iconoclastic book The Missionary Position, Mother Teresa is portrayed as a self-satisfied dogmatist who never entertained any doubts. She was a “true believer” of the fanatical type. In his latest book God Is Not Great, Hitchens is at it again, depicting believing Christians like Mother Teresa as sharing the dangerous certitudes of the Islamic terrorists. Not only are all believers extremists, in Hitchens’ caustic analysis, they are also poseurs who claim to know what cannot be known.

The latest revelations about Mother Teresa, featured in the current issue of Time, completely explode Hitchens’ thesis. Time based its article on a new book which contains correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of several decades. She confessed to a spiritual adviser that within her heart “the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” In a 1955 note she remarked, “The more I want Him, the less I am wanted…Such deep longing for God—and…repulsed—empty—no faith—no love—no zeal.” In one of her letters, addressed to Jesus, she wrote, “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love—and now become as the most hated one…You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved…So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them—because of the blasphemy—If there be a God—please forgive me…I am told that God loves me, and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

Time interprets these anguished ruminations as a “startling portrait in self-contradiction,” as if Mother Teresa was one person in public and another in private. Hitchens cannot resist further digs, and he makes a complete about-face in his reading of Mother Teresa. Once he viewed her as an inflexible dogmatist; now he depicts her as a secret unbeliever who knew that “religion is a human fabrication,” comparable to the latter-day Communists who paid lip service to the official ideology but couldn’t abide it any longer in their hearts.

Here we see how atheist prejudice results in a breakdown of reason. Hitchens cannot bring himself to say, “I thought she was a self-satisfied dogmatist. I have to try to understand her all over again.” Earlier he condemned her for having no doubts; now he uses her doubts to suggest that she never really believed what she publicly espoused. Time cannot get beyond its cognitive dissonance that a sincere Christian may harbor uncertainty and anguish over a long period of years.

But Mother Teresa’s heart-wrenching self-examination is entirely familiar to thoughtful Christians. For instance, her insistent theme that she is being forsaken by God recalls Christ’s plaintive cry on the cross, “Why have You forsaken me?” From Augustine to Luther to John of the Cross, there is a whole body of Christian literature that sounds exactly like Mother Teresa. In John’s Dark Night of the Soul, for instance, the initial exhilaration of conversion is followed by a “dark night of the senses” that is “bitter and terrible to taste.” Even so, this suffering is nothing compared to what follows, the “dark night of the soul” in which “the soul feels itself to be perishing and melting away, in the presence and sight of its miseries, in a cruel spiritual death, even as if it had been swallowed by a beast and felt itself being devoured.” John interprets these travails as the purification of the sinful part of man, so that he is ready for the holy eternal embrace of God.

From Christian classics like these we learn that, contrary to atheist propaganda, believers don’t claim to “know” God. That’s why they are called “believers.” To be a believer means, “Even though I do not know, I have faith.” Nor do believers, however devout, experience God on a constant basis. There is a big chasm that between the terrestrial and the transcendental, and a terrible silence usually separates the two. A glimpse or foretaste of eternity, this is all that we get, if we’re lucky.

The greatness of Mother Teresa is that even when she was deprived of the spiritual satisfactions of feeling God’s presence in her life, she did not waver, she soldiered on. She was not deterred in her mission. And what she didn’t have by way of feeling, she compensated for by way of will. In doing so, she teaches us all something about love: it is not merely a sentiment, to be set aside when feelings come and go, but rather a decision of the will. That she did what she did in exchange for the love of God is astounding enough. That she did it all even when this love was invisible to her—if this does not constitute saintliness, I don’t know what does.

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16th Century mystic, St. John of the Cross, found God in the midst of his suffering

“Born in Spain in 1542, John learned the importance of self-sacrificing love from his parents. His father gave up wealth, status, and comfort when he married a weaver’s daughter and was disowned by his noble family. After his father died, his mother kept the destitute family together as they wandered homeless in search of work. These were the examples of sacrifice that John followed with his own great love — God.

When the family finally found work, John still went hungry in the middle of the wealthiest city in Spain. At fourteen, John took a job caring for hospital patients who suffered from incurable diseases and madness. It was out of this poverty and suffering, that John learned to search for beauty and happiness not in the world, but in God.

After John joined the Carmelite order, Saint Teresa of Avila asked him to help her reform movement. John supported her belief that the order should return to its life of prayer. But many Carmelites felt threatened by this reform, and some members of John’s own order kidnapped him. He was locked in a cell six feet by ten feet and beaten three times a week by the monks. There was only one tiny window high up near the ceiling. Yet in that unbearable dark, cold, and desolation, his love and faith were like fire and light. He had nothing left but God — and God brought John his greatest joys in that tiny cell.

After nine months, John escaped by unscrewing the lock on his door and creeping past the guard. Taking only the mystical poetry he had written in his cell, he climbed out a window using a rope made of strips of blankets. With no idea where he was, he followed a dog to civilization. He hid from pursuers in a convent infirmary where he read his poetry to the nuns. From then on his life was devoted to sharing and explaining his experience of God’s love.”

Catholic Online

http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=65

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As Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield point out in their incisive new book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder, we now have a “legal drug culture” built around the widely accepted idea that feeling blue is an illness.

“Horwitz, dean of social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers, and Wakefield, an expert on mental-illness diagnosis at New York University, agrees that depression can have biological roots. But they persuasively argue that many instances of normal sadness–the kind that descends after you lose a job or get dumped–are now misdiagnosed as depressive disorder. They also point out that the human capacity to feel sad is an evolutionarily selected trait that we might not want to drug away. They raise a great question: What if sadness is good for you?”

TIME Magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653643,00.html

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Mother Teresa Did Not Feel Christ’s Presence for Last Half of Her Life, Letters Reveal

“The nun’s crisis of faith was revealed four years ago by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator or advocate of her cause for sainthood, at the time of her beatification in October 2003. Now he has compiled a new edition of her letters, entitled, Mother Teresa: Come be My Light, which reveals the full extent of her long dark night of the soul.”

“‘We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us … Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic,’ he said.”

FOXNews.com

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,294395,00.html

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C S Lewis knew both pain and doubt but his faith was strengthened by both

“In A Grief Observed he satisfied, albeit inadvertently, the alleged curiosity of his readers. But he did not come across as a coward; nor did his firm grasp of ‘a theory of suffering’ prove altogether irrelevant. True, his faith in God was challenged; he uttered blasphemies; he doubted God’s existence; worst of all, he went through the very objections to God’s goodness which he had refuted in The Problem of Pain: they all seemed valid to a disabled mind, under the sway of unbearable pain. But then, reason returned: ‘Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less?’

When feeling disguises itself as thought, all nonsense is possible. Nowhere is it truer than in the problem of pain. Yet, from the Christian perspective, anything that can reasonably be said about suffering is only a preamble to the Mystery of the Cross. Lewis’s solution to ‘the problem of pain’ prepares the intellect for a dive into the Mystery.”

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0032.html