~Crisis of Faith~PART 2 * A MUST READ...

[Guest guest]

~Crisis of Faith~PART 2This is PART 2 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~KarmaExplanationsTell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my soul?— to the Rev. Lawrence Picachy, August 1959 Why

did 's communication with Jesus, so vivid and nourishing in the

months before the founding of the Missionaries, evaporate so suddenly?

Interestingly, secular and religious explanations travel for a while on

parallel tracks. Both understand (although only one celebrates) that

identification with Christ's extended suffering on the Cross,

undertaken to redeem humanity, is a key aspect of Catholic

spirituality. told her nuns that physical poverty ensured

empathy in "giving themselves" to the suffering poor and established a

stronger bond with Christ's redemptive agony. She

wrote in 1951 that the Passion was the only aspect of Jesus' life that

she was interested in sharing: "I want to ... drink ONLY [her emphasis]

from His chalice of pain." And so she did, although by all indications

not in a way she had expected. Kolodiejchuk

finds divine purpose in the fact that 's spiritual spigot went

dry just as she prevailed over her church's perceived hesitations and

saw a successful way to realize Jesus' call for her. "She

was a very strong personality," he suggests. "And a strong personality

needs stronger purification" as an antidote to pride. As proof that it

worked, he cites her written comment after receiving an important prize

in the Philippines in the 1960s: "This means nothing to me, because I

don't have Him." And yet "the question is, Who determined the

abandonment she experienced?" says Dr. Gottlieb, a teacher at

the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute who has written

about the church and who was provided a copy of the book by TIME.

"Could she have imposed it on herself?" Psychologists

have long recognized that people of a certain personality type are

conflicted about their high achievement and find ways to punish

themselves. Gottlieb notes that 's ambitions for her ministry

were tremendous. Both he and Kolodiejchuk are fascinated by her

statement, "I want to love Jesus as he has never been loved before."

Remarks the priest: "That's a kind of daring thing to say." Yet her

letters are full of inner conflict about her accomplishments. Rather

than simply giving all credit to God, Gottlieb observes, she agonizes

incessantly that "any taking credit for her accomplishments — if only

internally — is sinful" and hence, perhaps, requires a price to be

paid. A mild secular analog, he says, might be an executive who commits

a horrific social gaffe at the instant of a crucial promotion. For

, "an occasion for a modicum of joy initiated a significant

quantity of misery," and her subsequent successes led her to perpetuate

it. Gottlieb also suggests that starting her ministry "may have

marked a turning point in her relationship with Jesus," whose urgent

claims she was finally in a position to fulfill. Being the active

party, he speculates, might have scared her, and in the end, the only

way to accomplish great things might have been in the permanent and

less risky role of the spurned yet faithful lover. The

atheist position is simpler. In 1948, Hitchens ventures, finally

woke up, although she could not admit it. He likens her to die-hard

Western communists late in the cold war: "There was a huge amount of

cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union

is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is

meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And

I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he

says, was . Most religious readers will reject that

explanation, along with any that makes her the author of her own misery

— or even defines it as true misery. , responding to the

torch-song image of , counterproposes her as the heroically

constant spouse. "Let's say you're married and you fall in love and you

believe with all your heart that marriage is a sacrament. And your

wife, God forbid, gets a stroke and she's comatose. And you will never

experience her love again. It's like loving and caring for a person for

50 years and once in a while you complain to your spiritual director,

but you know on the deepest level that she loves you even though she's

silent and that what you're doing makes sense. Mother knew that what she was doing made sense." IntegrationI

can't express in words — the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to

me — for the first time in ... years — I have come to love the darkness

— for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of

Jesus' darkness & pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it

[as] a 'spiritual side of your work' as you wrote — Today really I felt

a deep joy — that Jesus can't go anymore through the agony — but that

He wants to go through it in me.— to Neuner, Circa 1961 There

are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividness and

remain its captive, or without necessarily "conquering" it, to

gradually integrate it into the day-by-day. After more than a decade of

open-wound agony, seems to have begun regaining her spiritual

equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. The

Rev. ph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in

somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she

turned to him with her "darkness," he seems to have told her the three

things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that

is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling

Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving

for God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; and

that the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work

for Jesus. This counsel clearly granted a tremendous sense

of release. For all that she had expected and even craved to share in

Christ's Passion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate

the particular moment on the Cross when he asks, "My God, My God, why

have you forsaken me?" The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum,

his felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her

perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross,

that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling,

made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, "It was the redeeming

experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart

was the special share she had in Jesus' passion." And she thanked

Neuner profusely:

"I can't express in words — the gratitude I owe you for your kindness

to me — for the first time in ... years — I have come to love the

darkness. " Not

that it didn't continue to torment her. Years later, describing the joy

in Jesus experienced by some of her nuns, she observed dryly to Neuner,

"I just have the joy of having nothing — not even the reality of the

Presence of God [in the Eucharist]." She described her soul as like an

"ice block." Yet she recognized Neuner's key distinction, writing,"I accept not in my feelings — but with my will, the Will of God — I accept His will." Although

she still occasionally worried that she might "turn a Judas to Jesus in

this painful darkness," with the passage of years the absence morphed

from a potential wrecking ball into a kind of ragged cornerstone. Says

Gottlieb, the psychoanalyst: "What is remarkable is that she

integrated it in a way that enabled her to make it the organizing

center of her personality, the beacon for her ongoing spiritual life."

Certainly, she understood it as essential enough to project it into her

afterlife. "If

I ever become a Saint — I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I will

continually be absent from Heaven — to [light] the light of those in

darkness on earth," she wrote in 1962. Theologically,

this is a bit odd since most orthodox Christianity defines heaven as

God's eternal presence and doesn't really provide for regular no-shows

at the heavenly feast. But it is, Kolodiejchuk suggests, her most

moving statement, since the sacrifice involved is infinite. "When she

wrote, 'I am willing to suffer ... for all eternity, if this [is] possible,'" he says, "I said, Wow." He

contends that the letters reveal her as holier than anyone knew.

However formidable her efforts on Christ's behalf, it is even more

astounding to realize that she achieved them when he was not available

to her — a bit like a person who believes she can't walk winning the

Olympic 100 meters. Kolodiejchuk goes even further. Catholic

theologians recognize two types of "dark night": the first is

purgative, cleansing the contemplative for a "final union" with Christ;

the second is "reparative," and continues after such a union, so that

he or she may participate in a state of purity even closer to that of

Jesus and , who suffered for human salvation despite being without

sin. By the end, writes Kolodiejchuk, "by all indications this was the case with Mother ." That puts her in rarefied company. A New MinistryIf this brings You glory — if souls are brought to you — with joy I accept all to the end of my life.— to Jesus, undated But

for most people, 's ranking among Catholic saints may be less

important than a more general implication of Come Be My Light: that if

she could carry on for a half-century without God in her head or heart,

then perhaps people not quite as saintly can cope with less extreme

versions of the same problem. One powerful instance of this may have

occurred very early on. In 1968, British writer-turned-filmmaker

Malcolm Muggeridge visited . Muggeridge had been an outspoken

agnostic, but by the time he arrived with a film crew in Calcutta he

was in full spiritual-search mode. Beyond impressing him with her work

and her holiness, she wrote a letter to him in 1970 that addressed his

doubts full-bore. "Your longing for God is so deep and yet He keeps

Himself away from you," she wrote. "He must be forcing Himself to do so

— because he loves you so much — the personal love Christ has for you

is infinite — The Small difficulty you have re His Church is finite —

Overcome the finite with the infinite." Muggeridge apparently did. He

became an outspoken Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in

1982. His 1969 film, Something Beautiful for God, supported by a 1971

book of the same title, made an international sensation. At

the time, Muggeridge was something of a unique case. A child of

privilege who became a minor celebrity, he was hardly 's target

audience. Now, with the publication of Come Be My Light, we can all

play Muggeridge. Kolodiejchuk thinks the book may act as an antidote to

a cultural problem. "The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our

more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is

going on," he says. "And so to us the totality of love is what we feel.

But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and

vulnerability. Mother wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she

could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus,

and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a

powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious

terms." America's wants to talk precisely in religious

terms. "Everything she's experiencing," he says, "is what average

believers experience in their spiritual lives writ large. I have known

scores of people who have felt abandoned by God and had doubts about

God's existence. And this book expresses that in such a stunning way

but shows her full of complete trust at the same time." He takes a

breath. "Who would have thought that the person who was considered the

most faithful woman in the world struggled like that with her faith?"

he asks. "And who would have thought that the one thought to be the

most ardent of believers could be a saint to the skeptics?" has

long used as an example to parishioners of self-emptying love.

Now, he says, he will use her extraordinary faith in the face of

overwhelming silence to illustrate how doubt is a natural part of

everyone's life, be it an average believer's or a world-famous saint's.

Into the Light of DayPlease destroy any letters or anything I have written.— to Picachy, April 1959 Consistent

with her ongoing fight against pride, 's rationale for

suppressing her personal correspondence was "I want the work to remain

only His." If the letters became public, she explained to Picachy,

"people will think more of me — less of Jesus." The particularly

holy are no less prone than the rest of us to misjudge the workings of

history — or, if you will, of God's providence. considered the

perceived absence of God in her life as her most shameful secret but

eventually learned that it could be seen as a gift abetting her

calling. If her worries about publicizing it also turn out to be

misplaced — if a book of hasty, troubled notes turns out to ease the

spiritual road of thousands of fellow believers, there would be no

shame in having been wrong — but happily, even wonderfully wrong —

twice. Love~All~Ways*~Karma*