1 BOOK$REVIEW$ MOTHER TERESA Come Be My Light Edited and with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. Published by Doubleday 2007 404 pages
Reviewed and commented by Dr. Raymond Shekoury The book, which was published on August 29, 2007, contains primarily more than forty personal letters written by the Albanian-born Mother Teresa (1910-1997). Those letters revolve mainly around her personal crises of faith. The letters were addressed to her confessors, church superiors, and some theologians. She never intended to publish them. In fact, she always insisted on destroying them. However, the Catholic Church decided to publish them against her will. The letters were made public for the first time as a part of the investigation into her suitability for sainthood. Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who is the editor of this book under review, conducted the investigation and made several comments. He is the advocator of the cause of her beatification and canonization. In those exchanges of letters, Mother Teresa laments the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness,” and “torture” that she was undergoing. She compares her experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the
2 existence of heaven and even of God. Yet, at the same time, she was strongly aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public conduct. Mother Teresa’s skepticisms and doubts began soon after she embarked on her work in the slums of Calcutta. She started to feel the intense absence of Jesus; a state that lasted until her death. Crises of faith are not new ideas to Roman Catholics. In fact, the sixteenth century Saint John of the Cross—we are told—had experienced them too. In fact, he described them as “ dark night of the soul.” Also we are told that Saint Therese of Lisieux, the nineteenth-century French Carmelite who was the namesake of Mother Teresa, seemed to have died while enduring an experience of spiritual night that she described as a dark tunnel. Even Jesus Christ, as the scripture tell us, that he cried on the cross “My God, my God, why hast thou 1 forsaken me” However, the religious doubts of Mother Teresa were very different, they were not mere temporary bouts. In fact, she endured them for about fifty years and they lasted, until her death. Certainly, after the publication of this book, the numerous admirers of the God-intoxicated Mother Teresa would be greatly confused. The majority of people see in her an embodiment of all those virtues that people admire, yet they find them too difficult to achieve: selflessness, perseverance under continuous hard toil, fearlessness, hope, and consuming love for others. She had washed the sick, touched the untouchable, and sat near the dying. Therefore, she seemed to have an unwavering religious faith. What happened that made such an admirable devout woman to be agonized by intrinsic crises of faith reaching to atheism? She had completely hidden her inner self from public, as she had written in her letters. The stories of Mother Teresa’s problems, as related by her, were initiated on September 10, 1947. She was at that particular day a thirty-six years old nun, teaching at a convent school in India. She claimed that, while she was riding on a train in India, Jesus Christ Himself appeared to her had a dialogue with her. She writes that He said “ My own spouse for my love – You have come to India for me. Are you afraid to take one more step for your spouse? ” She reports that she replied: “Jesus my own Jesus – I am only thine – I am so stupid – I do not 2 know what to say, but do with me whatever you wish” She related that the one more step asked by Jesus Christ would be that she has to give up her teaching job to become a missionary in the slums of Calcutta to help the poorest of the poor. ‘Come be my light’ is what she said she 3 had heard from Jesus. “
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Jesus is supposed, by Christian believers, to be God, then one wonders to which God did he cries. The “sex- laden language of the thirty-six old “ Spouse” of Christ might be a good subject for Freudian Psychoanalysis. 3 Thus, the title of the book is based on this personal command. 2
3 Subsequently, she began to bombard her religious superiors with several petitions demanding to allow her to start her mission. At last, after about two years of solicitation she was given the permission. She started her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in the late 1940s. She got what she wanted. Soon afterwards, the doubts and skepticism, not about her missionary work but about her own faith, began to assail her mind, and lasted until her death (except for a few weeks in 1958.) One may read in the book under review some of things she had written or told her various theological advisors about her crises of faith. Quoting from the book:
• 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. • Such deep longing for God – and … repulsed – empty – no love – no zeal. • The saving of souls holds no attraction – Heaven means nothing. • What do I labor for? If there be no God – there can be no soul – If there is no Soul then Jesus – You are not true. • I call, I cling, I want and there is no one to answer. The darkness is so dark and I am alone. • I have no faith. I do not utter the words & crowd my heart & make me suffer untold agony. • The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. I feel pain terrible of this loss, I feel that God does not want me, and that God is not God and that God does not really exist. • So many unanswered questions live within me. I am 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 that hurts my very soul. I am told that God loves me and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the call of the Call of the Sacred Heart? 4
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This question must have been extremely difficult to face.
4 • [Addressing a bishop she writes;] I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God – tender, personal love … if you were [there], you would have said: “ what hypocrisy.”
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People say they are drawn closer to God – seeing my faith – is this not deceiving people. Every time I have wanted to tell the truth – – the word do not come – my mouth remains closed – and yet I keep smiling at God and all
Mother Teresa, in spite of working among the poorest of the poor of Calcutta, was keen in public to keep a perpetual smile. She wrote in 1958 to one of her superiors: “My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains. People thought my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and union with His will fill my heart. If only they knew.” (Note my emphasis). Is not this extreme hypocrisy?
How is this possible? I make a tentative conjecture to explain her irrational contradicting behavior. I am of the opinion that it all stated with the alleged train-mystical, most probably, hallucinationary encounter of Mother Teresa with Jesus Christ. She, because of that claimed dialogue, began to expect that Christ would work through her some great supernatural miracle; a miracle is so great, that it might shake the whole world and spread her Catholic faith throughout the whole globe. Time passed and no miracle happened 5. The more time passing the more Mother Teresa persevered in her unselfish work of toil for the poorest of the poor in order to demonstrate to her “ spouse” Jesus Christ how obedient and how loving she is to Him. However, her “Heavenly Spouse” seemed to have turned off the lights. As further time elapsed with no indication of that great miracle, a psychological bifurcational moment was reached. Consequently, the frustrated and disillusioned Mother Teresa began to experience torture, loneliness, darkness, and crises of faith, which she had described in her letters. Throughout her life, she never lost hope of the occurrence of that supernatural miracle to take place; As a result, she endured her troubles all her life. This is my conjecture. However, a “miracle” did happen, but on a very different plain, an earthlylevel miracle occurred. The down to earth miracle was her successful establishment of the Missionary of Charity, which was founded by her singlehanded efforts. Ironically, the Missionary of Charity was a great achievement. It
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Believers should learn that the greatest miracle is that miracles do not happen.
5 now claims to have great many volunteers from over forty countries, comforting the sick, the poor, and the orphaned. That success brought admiration from the whole world to its founder, Mother Teresa. Consequently, she became a global celebrity, described as the angel of mercy; she emerged as one of the most famous outspoken personalities. She addressed Presidents of countries, and she was invited by some them (of course, they were unaware of her inner doubts, troubles and agonies.) Her public messages were always fanatic religious discourses, but never hinting on her intrinsic turmoil. In 1979, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her acceptance speech was expected to deal with issues of war and peace. However, her lengthy address for the prize at the Nobel ceremonies, took on the form of a religious sermon. The only time she mentioned the words “war” and “peace” was in the following: “I think that today peace is threatened by abortion, too, which is a true war, a direct killing of a child by its own mother … Today, abortion is the worst destroyer to peace . . .. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing.” Is’nt this a most crooked logic? Her Nobel-address reveals a woman, who has a very simplistic fanatical fundamentalist frame of mind, thoroughly saturated with primitive religious worldview shown to the outside world, but hidden behind a mask of inner doubts, skepticism and anguish. She talked on one level while she was possessed by intrinsic tortures on another. We do know that Catholics are supposed to regard abortion with disgust, but surely, it takes someone both troubled and fanatical to exceed even the official teachings of her Church. She always spoke, in spite of her inner turmoil, as more Catholic than even the Pope himself! The Vatican has a traditional rule that prohibits any investigation for the cause of beatification until five years has elapsed after the death of the subject. However, Pope John II waived this rule in the case of Mother Teresa and began the investigations a year after her death. h. It was the first time the rule had been put aside in recent memory. He started the process for Mother Teresa beatification. There are people who believe that this book will help in canonizing the nun of the slums of Calcutta, In fact, it was published for that very purpose. The 6 believers see her painful darkness mysteriously uniting her so intimately with her Crucified Spouse that He became the sole “object of her thoughts and affections, the subject of her conversations, the end of her actions and the model of her life.” Her total surrender to His will and her determination not to refuse Him anything allowed Him to manifest through her His love for each individual. It was the light and love of Jesus Himself that radiated from her – in the midst of her own darkness – and that had such an impact on others. Thus, most believers tend to think the book would lead to her canonization.
6 The rest of the paragraph is a direct quotation from the book.
6 On the other hand, I think that the majority of nonbelievers, (including myself) and freethinkers would discern that the book reveals an entirely different view of her. It is true that she great job in helping the sick and poor but her letters betray a confused woman, who ceased to be a true believer, but in public, she pretended to be a fanatic fundamentalist preacher of the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, instead of being truthful to herself and others, she admitted to her religious superiors that she had put a mask on her face to conceal her inner perplexing disturbances. In other words, she chose to be a hypocrite. The Church participated in this duplicity; the book mentions that some of Mother Teresa’s Church superiors privately advised her that her darkness was a “blessing” granted by God that would let her experience some of what Jesus felt on the cross. As for myself, cannot stomach such nonsense. I believe the book is worth reading for all: believers, nonbelievers, and freethinkers. In order to reach a conclusion, I recommend the reader to go through the book and decide himself or herself. She herself had written, “If I become a Saint - I surely be one of “darkness. ”I will continually be absent from Heaven – to light the light of those in darkness on earth.“ If she will be canonized then let her be the Patron Saint of the skeptics, atheists, and hypocrites! If I were asked to review the book by one paragraph, I would say: It ironic that the book is written to prepare for her canonization, but reveals that in the last fifth years of her life she was a hypocrite atheist, who was able to hide her inner beliefs from the public by advocating fanatic Catholicism.