Mother Teresa’s Moment of Truth

Darkness is such that I really do not see – neither with my mind nor with my reason – the place of God in my soul is blank – There is no God in me – when the pain of longing is so great – I just long and long and long for God – The torture and pain I can’t explain. (Mother Teresa)

In more than 40 communications, many of which have nevr been published, she (Mother Teresa) 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. (David van Biema, Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith, August 23, 2997, Time Archive)

Mother Teresa’s doubts and skepticism began soon after she started “her work in the slums of Calcutta” and “began to feel the intense absence of Jesus – a state that lasted until her death, according to her letters,” Shona Crabtree, Mother Teresa’s spiritual darkness brought to light, http://www.reporternews.com/news/2007/aug/30/mother-teresa-spiritual-darkness-br ought-..).

She repeatedly expressed her doubts, despairs, and loneliness in her letters (which she did not wish to publish) and confessions. This skepticism was not a transitional thing nor a short-lived experience; it spanned a period of some sixty years. It may not be entirely incorrect to say that she died in doubt and darkness, For a majority of people she was piety–incarnate, a symbol of religious devotion and dedication and every good thing that religion stands for. She is already beatified and is due to be made a Saint. Personally, she suffered miserably from the pangs of doubt in the darkness of her soul as the letters (soon to be published in a book, Mother Teresa: Come be My light, compiled by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk) show again and again. She wrote, “If I ever become a Saint, I will surely be one of ‘darkness’.”

According to Helen Kennedy (Mother Teresa’s shocking struggle with faith, NYDAILYNEWS.COM, August 24, 2997), “Teresa was a 36-year-old convent teacher riding on a train, when she said Christ spoke to her to become a missionary in the slums of Calcutta to help the poorest of the poor. ‘Come be My light’ is what she heard.” Thus the title of the forthcoming book is based on this personal injunction to her by Christ. She started her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in the late 1940s. Soon afterwards the doubts and skepticism, not about her missionary work but her faith, began to assail her mind and lasted until her death with a brief respite around 1959.

Many religious people have tried to rationalize and explain away her doubts in different ways. “Pope Benedict said on Saturday (September 1, 2007) that even the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta suffered from the silence of God… He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God in order to understand the situation of people who do not believe,” (Pope says Mother Teresa felt God’s silence, Yahoo!News, September 1, 2007). But Teresa’s commiseration was life long; there is no apparent evidence that she was able to reconcile her ‘unbelief’ in the end.

If one starts using reason to understand the unfathomable curiosities of religion, one is inevitably led to unbelief. If one relinquishes religion’s romanticism with God and tries to explain the “Virgin Birth,” for instance, with reason, one is liable to doubt the foundations of faith. Pregnancies do not occur due to personal wishes, even the wish of God. A pregnancy needs fertilization of a woman’s egg by a male sperm. Until the two mate successfully, pregnancy is out of question. A virgin woman is therefore unable to become pregnant. Millions of people believe routinely in the virgin birth of Christ by virtue of their blind faith in the “Word of God.” Similarly, faith in trinity is a complicated quiz. According to blind faith, Jesus is both the Son of God and God Himself. How is this possible? On the Cross, Jesus experienced loneliness when he cried, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” If He is (was) God, which God did he invoke on the Cross? The believers explain it away using defective rational statements. In the end, if you want to remain a believer you have to take it on faith.

It is not suggested here that precisely these were the questions which created “emptiness” in Mother Teresa’s soul; she had her own reasons which have not come to light so far. It is not only the atheists and agnostics who are confronted by these queer issues, all of us, including Mother Teresa, have been invaded by them and several other of similar kind; the believers choose to quell and push them aside while the skeptics choose to pursue them to the end no matter where they lead.