Mother Teresa: Patron Saint of Hypocrisy?

(Via Drudge)

At least, that's the view that Time Magazine at first spins in its piece on the new book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. Here's a passage from the article:

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

The article makes sure to quote a passage from a letter the book in which

The more success Teresa had — and half a year later so many young women had joined her society that she needed to move again — the worse she felt. In March 1953, she wrote Périer, "Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work.'"

The article goes on to offer scores of explanations for her "darkness", from a range of Catholic theologians to atheist psychologists. Ultimately, the article is trying to generate some dramatic conflict to propel the reader through another six pages, and it's thirst for such conflict means that a lot of the complexities of debate over her letters' meanings get oversimplified for the sake of exciting disagreement. The article does at least end with a positive concession to believers who might take heart in facing their own doubts after seeing how much Teresa did despite her even graver doubts...but you have to read the article all the way to the end to get to that.

Comments

[Seven Star Hand]

Hello,

Too bad Mother Teresa couldn't discern that the reason for her conclusions about the Christian god is because he doesn't exist. In fact, the gods professed by all three so-called faiths of Abraham are purposeful deceptions, hence the darkness she felt.

On the other hand, in spite of her inability to discern the existence of Jesus or God, she persisted in doing good, by her own strength.

I am deeply sorry for her suffering while greatly admiring her decades of good works. After all, no true saint would ever claim that faith is more important than good works.

Here is Wisdom !!

[Cure of Ars]

Steve it funny to me how desperate some people are to down play Mother Teresa. She is a phenomenon that should not exist in your world view. Any detail that can be twisted to explains her away is embraced with relief. So Mother Teresa suffered a dark night of the soul. This is actually not unusual for a saint. The love Mother Teresa had was not based on getting a good feeling back. She loved, even when she did not feel love. To me this is evidence that she had supernatural grace to persevere. You still haven’t explained her away. Our faith is not based on emotions but supernatural grace.

[PeterTerp]

Comment boxes are not the appropriate venue to prove or disprove the existence of God.

And I hardly think that the message to take from the Mother Teresa's life is that works are more important than faith. Rather, works and faith are one in the same. Mother Teresa's was a living faith...a faith made manifest in her actions despite her interior feelings.

One of the beautiful things about ritual in the Catholic Church is that it means that our bodies can still be made to worship even when our minds seem to have lost the interest. Without ritual, a person in a crisis of faith would have nothing at all to tie them to God.

It would be easy to see why Mother Teresa did what she did if she were in a constant state of ecstasy. It would be hire and salary, not selfless sacrifice.

Rather, she becomes a testament to the selflessness of Christ.

Why should Christ suffer for us? Why should Christ die for us?

He certainly wasn't getting warm fuzzies when we were scourging him, or when he was nailed to a cross, or when he was exhausted and asphyxiating.

Whatever reward he received wasn't something that he could immediately perceive.

That's the perplexing thing about Christianity. That's how it defies the wisdom of man -- because it does good without any apparent reward...not even some secret little psychological mind game.

That's not rational.

That's why it's love.

[PeterTerp]

Pah! Looks like someone stole my thunder!

[Therese]

I'm at work, so I don't have time right now to read the TIME article in its entirety, but Cure is right.

"The dark night of the soul," perhaps described most comprehensively in St. John of the Cross's work of the same name, is well documented among saints. It is particularly commonplace among contemplatives and could be described as "the absence of consolation" - that is, God withholds the grace to feel or experience His presence.

My patroness, St. Therese of Lisieux, lived the dark night for the last 3 or 4 years of her short life. In "Story of a Soul," she writes that she had contemplated suicide and would have done it had it not been for her faintest hope in the existence of Heaven. She describes the dark night in terms of the Gospel account of Christ sleeping while the apostles are being tossed about on the waters during a storm.

I remember Sr. Dede, who knew Mother Teresa during her life, saying a couple of years ago that her writings show evidence of a dark night. I also recall speculation immediately after Pope John Paul's death that some of his personal writings may detail his own dark night, which, given that his doctoral dissertation was on St. John of the Cross, is perhaps not unplausible.

[Lindsay]

Father Cantalamessa, too, supports the conclusion that Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul does not discredit her: http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-20348