Crisis of Faith

October 3, 2007

This is just part 1 of an article that I read in TIME magazine..I was so humbled and enlightened that I felt I needed to share…I know this is a bit long but I come to you and ask that you read this..I feel that this will bring you to some understanding of this sometimes dark and lonely spiritual journey we are on..Mother

was an amazing soul and touched so many in her life.. Her life

and path was set by way of sacrifice. This sacrifice as you will read

left her empty.. Truly empty..After reading this.. I sat in silent prayer and tears..What Mother fulfilled and sacrificed drained her faith.. What

kept going through my mind over and over as I read this, were the words

given to God while on the cross.."Why have you forsaken me"?While hearing this many different thoughts came rushing through me.. As they will you..This is a story of our light, our faith, our darkness, and our lack of faith as we sit in darkness at times.. Many, many of our Spiritual leaders have been on this very path, and it is well documented..We are not alone at those times of darkness as we struggle to continue on this journey.. Enough said.. Please take a moment and read.. I will be sending out part two in a little while..I send much love to all of you!Love~KarmaMother 's Crisis of Faith

Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the

emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not

hear. — Mother to the Rev. Van Der Peet, September 1979On

Dec. 11, 1979, Mother , the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo.

Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite

below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that

ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance

lecture, , whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a

one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of

self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come

to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love

God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the

Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the

homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find"

and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug

addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming

Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real"

because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the

poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we

receive." Yet

less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant,

the Rev. van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she

wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one.

"Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet.

"[but] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I

look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in

prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let

Him have [a] free hand." 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. And in fact, that appears to be the case. A

new, innocuously titled book, Mother : Come Be My Light

(Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between and

her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the

spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The

letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested

that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that

for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of

God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev.

Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist." That

absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began

tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week

break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public,

the of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding

spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have

never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness,"

"loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the

experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the

existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the

discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The

smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything."

Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I

spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal

love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have

said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. , an editor at the

Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a

book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of 's doubts: "I've

never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual

darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk,

Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of

's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open.

It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her." The

book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter

who Dumpster-dived for 's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior

Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for

petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials.

(Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The

letters in the book were gathered as part of that process. The

church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish

mystic St. of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the

"dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the

growth of some spiritual masters. 's may be the most extensive

such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St.

of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet

Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. 's context, as darkness within faith.

found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and

abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the

book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most

spiritually heroic act. Two very different Catholics predict

that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Lamb, chairman of

the theology department at the conservative Ave University in

Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St.

Augustine's Confessions and Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain

as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. of America, a much more

liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother ,

a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "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." Not

all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and

assume that 's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not

mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the

divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s

increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem

absurd. They will see the book's more like the woman in the

archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband

30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned.

Says Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a

scathing polemic on , and more recently of the atheist manifesto

God Is Not Great:"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 that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some

familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her

condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the

most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling

failure to counterbalance her great successes. Come Be My

Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a

wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or

another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind

great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That

it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge

of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only

more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat

shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint. [Jesus:]

Wilt thou refuse to do this for me? ... You have become my Spouse for

my love — you have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls

brought you so far — Are you afraid to take one more step for Your

Spouse — for me — for souls? Is your generosity grown cold? Am I a

second to you?[:] Jesus, my own Jesus — I am only Thine — I

am so stupid — I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You

wish — as You wish — as long as you wish. [but] why can't I be a

perfect Loreto Nun — here — why can't I be like everybody else.[Jesus:]

I want Indian Nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of

love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little children ...

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?— in a prayer dialogue recounted to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier, January 1947 On

Sept. 10, 1946, after 17 years as a teacher in Calcutta with the Loreto

Sisters (an uncloistered, education-oriented community based in

Ireland), Mother , 36, took the 400-mile (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 — as Kolodiejchuk puts it, "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." It

was wildly audacious — an unfunded, single-handed crusade (

stipulated that she and her nuns would share their beneficiaries'

poverty and started out alone) to provide individualized service to the

poorest in a poor city made desperate by riots. The local Archbishop,

Ferdinand Périer, was initially skeptical. But her letters to him,

preserved, illustrate two linked characteristics — extreme tenacity and

a profound personal bond to Christ. When Périer hesitated, ,

while calling herself a "little nothing," bombarded him with notes

suggesting that he refer the question to an escalating list of

authorities — the local apostolic delegation, her Mother General, the

Pope. And when she felt all else had failed, she revealed the spiritual

topper: a dramatic (melodramatic, really) dialogue with a "Voice" she

eventually revealed to be Christ's. It ended with Jesus' emphatic

reiteration of his call 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?" Mother

had visions, including one of herself conversing with Christ on

the Cross. Her confessor, Father Celeste Van Exem, was convinced that

her mystical experiences were genuine. "[Her] union with Our Lord has

been continual and so deep and violent that rapture does not seem very

far," he commented. later wrote simply, "Jesus gave Himself to

me." Then on Jan. 6, 1948, Périer, after consulting the Vatican,

finally gave permission for to embark on her second calling. And

Jesus took himself away again. The OnsetLord, 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. 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 & thoughts that crowd in my

heart — & make me suffer untold agony.So many unanswered

questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the

blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — 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?— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated In the first half of 1948,

took a basic medical course before launching herself alone onto the

streets of Calcutta. She wrote, "My soul at present is in perfect peace

and joy." Kolodiejchuk includes her moving description of her first day

on the job: "The old man lying on the street — not wanted —

all alone just sick and dying — I gave him carborsone and water to

drink and the old Man — was so strangely grateful ... Then we went to

Taltala Bazaar, and there was a very poor woman dying I think of

starvation more than TB ... I gave her something which will help her to

sleep. — I wonder how long she will last." But two months later,

shortly after her major triumph of locating a space for her

headquarters, Kolodiejchuk's files find her troubled. "What tortures of

loneliness," she wrote. "I wonder how long will my heart suffer this?"

This complaint could be understood as an initial response to solitude

and hardship were it not for subsequent letters. The more

success 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.'" Périer

may have missed the note of desperation. "God guides you, dear Mother,"

he answered avuncularly. "You are not so much in the dark as you think

.... You have exterior facts enough to see that God blesses your work

.... Feelings are not required and often may be misleading." And yet

feelings — or rather, their lack — became her life's secret torment.

How can you assume the lover's ardor when he no longer grants you his

voice, his touch, his very presence? The problem was

exacerbated by an inhibition to even describe it. reported on

several occasions inviting a confessor to visit and then being unable

to speak. Eventually, one thought to ask her to write the problem down,

and she complied. "The more I want him — the less I am wanted," she

wrote Périer in 1955. A year later she sounded desolate: "Such deep

longing for God — and ... repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no

zeal. — [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction — Heaven means

nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of

everything." At the suggestion of a confessor, she wrote the

agonized plea that begins this section, in which she explored the

theological worst-possible-case implications of her dilemma. That

letter and another one from 1959 ("What do I labour for? If there be no

God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then Jesus — You also

are not true") are the only two that sound any note of doubt of God's

existence. But she frequently bemoaned an inability to pray: "I utter

words of Community prayers — and try my utmost to get out of every word

the sweetness it has to give — But my prayer of union is not there any

longer — I no longer pray." As the Missionaries of Charity

flourished and gradually gained the attention of her church and the

world at large, progressed from confessor to confessor the way

some patients move through their psychoanalysts. Van Exem gave way to

Périer, who gave way in 1959 to the Rev. (later Cardinal) Lawrence

Picachy, who was succeeded by the Rev. ph Neuner in 1961. By the

1980s the chain included figures such as Bishop Curlin of

Charlotte, N.C. For these confessors, she developed a kind of shorthand

of pain, referring almost casually to "my darkness" and to Jesus as

"the Absent One." There was one respite. In October 1958, Pope Pius XII died, and requiem Masses were celebrated around the Catholic world.

prayed to the deceased Pope for a "proof that God is pleased with the

Society." And "then and there," she rejoiced, "disappeared the long

darkness ... that strange suffering of 10 years." Unfortunately,

five weeks later she reported being "in the tunnel" once more. And

although, as we shall see, she found a way to accept the absence, it

never lifted again. 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." A 1995 letter discussed her "spiritual dryness." She died in 1997. Love~All~Ways*~Karma*

October 5, 2007

Dearest ,

Thank you so very much for this post. It helped me realize

that we are all truly human. Mother is such a loving and

compassionate woman. I learned so much from this of her loss of

faith and it truly took me into her world of turmoil behind

her " mask " /smile. This was so very bittersweet and I learned much!

I do look forward to the 2nd part of this, dear!! Thank you

again! Love and light, LUNA

--- In , " karmarqu69 " <karmarqu69@...>

wrote:

>

> [Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket]

> <http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vcGhvdG9idWNrZXQuY29t>

>

> This is just part 1 of an article that I read in TIME magazine..

>

> I was so humbled and enlightened that I felt I needed to share…

> I know this is a bit long but I come to you and ask that you read

this..

>

> I feel that this will bring you to some understanding of this

sometimes

> dark and lonely spiritual journey we are on..

>

> Mother was an amazing soul and touched so many in her life..

Her

> life and path was set by way of sacrifice. This sacrifice as you

will

> read left her empty.. Truly empty..

>

> After reading this.. I sat in silent prayer and tears..What Mother

> fulfilled and sacrificed drained her faith..

>

> What kept going through my mind over and over as I read this, were

the

> words given to God while on the cross.. " Why have you forsaken

> me " ?

>

> While hearing this many different thoughts came rushing through

me.. As

> they will you..

>

> This is a story of our light, our faith, our darkness, and our lack

of

> faith as we sit in darkness at times..

> Many, many of our Spiritual leaders have been on this very path,

and it

> is well documented..

>

> We are not alone at those times of darkness as we struggle to

continue

> on this journey..

>

> Enough said.. Please take a moment and read..

>

> I will be sending out part two in a little while..

> I send much love to all of you!

> Love

> ~Karma

>

> Mother 's Crisis of Faith [Mother ] Jesus has a very

> special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so

> great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.

> — Mother to the Rev. Van Der Peet, September 1979

>

> On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother , the " Saint of the Gutters, " went to

> Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in

sandals

> despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received

that

> ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance

> lecture, , whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a

> one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of

> self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had

come

> to expect from her.

>

> " It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my

> neighbor,' " she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had " [made]

> himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one. "

> Jesus' hunger, she said, is what " you and I must find " and

alleviate.

> She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the

West.

> Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should

remind

> the world " that radiating joy is real " because Christ is everywhere

> — " Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the

> smile we give and in the smile that we receive. "

>

> [Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket]

> <http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vcGhvdG9idWNrZXQuY29t>

>

> Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual

> confidant, the Rev. van der Peet, that is only now being

made

> public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an

> absent one. " Jesus has a very special love for you, " she assured

Van der

> Peet. " [but] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great,

that

> I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue

> moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me —

> that I let Him have [a] free hand. "

>

> 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.

> And in fact, that appears to be the case.

>

> A new, innocuously titled book, Mother : Come Be My Light

> (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between

and

> her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the

> spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The

> letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had

requested

> that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal

that for

> the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God

> whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev.

> Kolodiejchuk, writes, " neither in her heart or in the eucharist. "

>

> That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she

> began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a

> five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery

> in public, the of the letters lived in a state of deep and

> abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of

which

> have never before been published, she bemoans

the " dryness, " " darkness, "

> " loneliness " and " torture " she is undergoing.

>

> She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has

driven

> her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely

> aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public

> demeanor.

>

> " The smile, " she writes, is " a mask " or " a cloak that covers

> everything. " Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal

> deception. " I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God —

> tender, personal love, " she remarks to an adviser. " If you were

[there],

> you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.' " Says the Rev. ,

an

> editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life

with the

> Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of

's

> doubts:

>

> " I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense

> spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented. " Recalls

> Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: " I read one letter to the

> Sisters [of 's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just

> dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people

> understand her. "

>

> [Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket]

> <http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vcGhvdG9idWNrZXQuY29t>

>

> The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative

reporter

> who Dumpster-dived for 's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a

senior

> Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for

> petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting

materials.

> (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.)

The

> letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.

>

> The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the

Spanish

> mystic St. of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the

> " dark night " of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the

> growth of some spiritual masters. 's may be the most extensive

> such case on record. (The " dark night " of the 18th century mystic

St.

> of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet

> Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. 's context, as darkness within

faith.

> found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and

> abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the

> book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her

most

> spiritually heroic act.

>

> Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a

landmark.

> The Rev. Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the

> conservative Ave University in Florida, thinks Come Be My

Light

> will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and

> Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual

> ascent. of America, a much more liberal institution, calls

the

> book " a new ministry for Mother , a written ministry of her

> interior life, " and says, " 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. "

>

> [Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket]

> <http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vcGhvdG9idWNrZXQuY29t>

>

> Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and

> assume that 's inability to perceive Christ in her life did

not

> mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the

> divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s

> increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem

> absurd. They will see the book's more like the woman in the

> archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her

husband 30

> years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned.

Says

> Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing

> polemic on , and more recently of the atheist manifesto God

Is Not

> Great:

>

> " 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 that

she

> had dug for herself. " Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling

mother's

> extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God

> than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of

humility: she

> punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her

great

> successes.

>

> Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that

> could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure —

> one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the

engine

> behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and

human.

> That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a

> hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave

> readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they

> are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern

> saint.

>

> [Jesus:] Wilt thou refuse to do this for me? ... You have become my

> Spouse for my love — you have come to India for Me. The thirst you

> had for souls brought you so far — Are you afraid to take one more

> step for Your Spouse — for me — for souls? Is your generosity

> grown cold? Am I a second to you?

> [:] Jesus, my own Jesus — I am only Thine — I am so stupid

> — I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You wish —

> as You wish — as long as you wish. [but] why can't I be a perfect

> Loreto Nun — here — why can't I be like everybody else.

> [Jesus:] I want Indian Nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be

my

> fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little

> children ... 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?

> — in a prayer dialogue recounted to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier,

> January 1947

>

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>

> On Sept. 10, 1946, after 17 years as a teacher in Calcutta with the

> Loreto Sisters (an uncloistered, education-oriented community based

in

> Ireland), Mother , 36, took the 400-mile (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 — as Kolodiejchuk puts it, " 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. "

>

> It was wildly audacious — an unfunded, single-handed crusade (

> stipulated that she and her nuns would share their beneficiaries'

> poverty and started out alone) to provide individualized service to

the

> poorest in a poor city made desperate by riots. The local

Archbishop,

> Ferdinand Périer, was initially skeptical. But her letters to him,

> preserved, illustrate two linked characteristics — extreme tenacity

> and a profound personal bond to Christ. When Périer hesitated,

> , while calling herself a " little nothing, " bombarded him with

> notes suggesting that he refer the question to an escalating list of

> authorities — the local apostolic delegation, her Mother General,

> the Pope. And when she felt all else had failed, she revealed the

> spiritual topper: a dramatic (melodramatic, really) dialogue with a

> " Voice " she eventually revealed to be Christ's. It ended with Jesus'

> emphatic reiteration of his call 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? "

>

> Mother had visions, including one of herself conversing with

> Christ on the Cross. Her confessor, Father Celeste Van Exem, was

> convinced that her mystical experiences were genuine. " [Her] union

with

> Our Lord has been continual and so deep and violent that rapture

does

> not seem very far, " he commented. later wrote simply, " Jesus

gave

> Himself to me. "

> Then on Jan. 6, 1948, Périer, after consulting the Vatican, finally

> gave permission for to embark on her second calling. And

Jesus

> took himself away again.

>

> The Onset

> 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. 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 & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer

> untold agony.

>

> So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them —

> because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me

> — 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?

> — addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated

> In the first half of 1948,

>

> took a basic medical course before launching herself alone

onto

> the streets of Calcutta. She wrote, " My soul at present is in

perfect

> peace and joy. " Kolodiejchuk includes her moving description of her

> first day on the job:

>

> " The old man lying on the street — not wanted — all alone just

> sick and dying — I gave him carborsone and water to drink and the

> old Man — was so strangely grateful ... Then we went to Taltala

> Bazaar, and there was a very poor woman dying I think of starvation

more

> than TB ... I gave her something which will help her to sleep. — I

> wonder how long she will last. " But two months later, shortly after

her

> major triumph of locating a space for her headquarters,

Kolodiejchuk's

> files find her troubled. " What tortures of loneliness, " she

wrote. " I

> wonder how long will my heart suffer this? " This complaint could be

> understood as an initial response to solitude and hardship were it

not

> for subsequent letters.

>

> The more success 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.' "

> Périer may have missed the note of desperation. " God guides you,

dear

> Mother, " he answered avuncularly. " You are not so much in the dark

as

> you think ... You have exterior facts enough to see that God blesses

> your work ... Feelings are not required and often may be

misleading. "

> And yet feelings — or rather, their lack — became her life's

> secret torment. How can you assume the lover's ardor when he no

longer

> grants you his voice, his touch, his very presence?

>

> The problem was exacerbated by an inhibition to even describe it.

> reported on several occasions inviting a confessor to visit and then

> being unable to speak. Eventually, one thought to ask her to write

the

> problem down, and she complied. " The more I want him — the less I am

> wanted, " she wrote Périer in 1955. A year later she sounded

desolate:

> " Such deep longing for God — and ... repulsed — empty — no

> faith — no love — no zeal. — [The saving of] Souls holds no

> attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I

> keep smiling at Him in spite of everything. "

> At the suggestion of a confessor, she wrote the agonized plea that

> begins this section, in which she explored the theological

> worst-possible-case implications of her dilemma.

>

> That letter and another one from 1959 ( " What do I labour for? If

there

> be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then

> Jesus — You also are not true " ) are the only two that sound any note

> of doubt of God's existence. But she frequently bemoaned an

inability to

> pray: " I utter words of Community prayers — and try my utmost to get

> out of every word the sweetness it has to give — But my prayer of

> union is not there any longer — I no longer pray. "

> As the Missionaries of Charity flourished and gradually gained the

> attention of her church and the world at large, progressed

from

> confessor to confessor the way some patients move through their

> psychoanalysts. Van Exem gave way to Périer, who gave way in 1959 to

> the Rev. (later Cardinal) Lawrence Picachy, who was succeeded by the

> Rev. ph Neuner in 1961. By the 1980s the chain included figures

such

> as Bishop Curlin of Charlotte, N.C. For these confessors,

she

> developed a kind of shorthand of pain, referring almost casually

to " my

> darkness " and to Jesus as " the Absent One. "

> There was one respite. In October 1958, Pope Pius XII died, and

requiem

> Masses were celebrated around the Catholic world.

>

> prayed to the deceased Pope for a " proof that God is pleased

with

> the Society. " And " then and there, " she rejoiced, " disappeared the

long

> darkness ... that strange suffering of 10 years. "

>

> Unfortunately, five weeks later she reported being " in the tunnel "

once

> more. And although, as we shall see, she found a way to accept the

> absence, it never lifted again. 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. " A 1995 letter discussed her " spiritual

dryness. "

>

> She died in 1997.

>

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>

> Love~All~Ways

> *~Karma*

>

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>

October 5, 2007