Reading Mother Teresa--The Companion of Darkness

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. Psalm 13:1–4

I would like to believe that the two are not somehow related. I would like not to believe that the height my faith can reach is somehow conversely proportional to, a backwards mirror image, of, the depths to which that faith can fall or fail.

In Mother Teresa’s case, however, it seems sadly true.

My mother told me that my father told her in one of those late-night talks all marrieds have that he had never once in his life ever doubted that God was there with him, that Jesus was everything his Word said he was and is, and that God loved him truly – my father. We chose “Blessed Assurance” at his funeral because each of his children knew perfectly well that what that old hymn claims was true of our loving father--he was blessedly assured.

I don’t look like my father. I’m almost a head taller and probably uncomfortably close to a 100 pounds heavier. I certainly don’t see the world the way he did. He was a rock-solid conservative Republican. My father was a wise investor, a hard-worker who simply assumed that everyone else should be too. The two of us got along warmly, and even though we often disagreed, he was never disagreeable, a wonderful father.

I like to think I might have inherited at least a bit of his abounding graciousness, even if he and I didn’t protect the same political turf he did so aggressively. About that, however, I’m a lousy judge. I also like to believe his greatest gift to his only son was a faith that ambles through life like the Eveready bunny, somehow protected from the energy failure that creates bouts in some of us of horrific, crippling doubt.

Mother Teresa was not so blessed, a fact of her life that some, I’m sure, would much rather not stumble upon. The same letter that “bedews” Indian souls contains the first mention of the darkness to which she was more than occasionally subject. “Do not think my life is strewn with roses,” she writes, “that is the flower which I hardly ever find on my way. . . . I have more often as my companion ‘darkness’” (20). 

Darkness, she says, was her companion. The heights to which her faith and her spirits could climb had to be incredible; but somehow I’m not surprised that when she would fall, that descent would take her into darkness deeper and more profound than most of us will ever see.

It’s really hard to think of this tiny little saint suffering that way, to think of anyone suffering that way; but it’s comforting too to know that we all suffer, that Psalm 13 isn’t just David on a bad day, or Psalm 88 isn’t the ravings of an infidel.

Even though I swear I’ve not been there to the level of darkness Mother Teresa knew too well, my own unquestioned faith is richer, deeper, and fuller by way of her testimony that hers was. I don’t want to sound vainglorious, but I think I am made stronger by way of her weakness.

It saddens me to know that somehow this little bride of Christ suffered the profound doubt that grows from a perception of abandonment by the almighty. Yet, somehow her darkness – and her testimony about it, just like that of King David – brings me light.