Your wrath lies heavily on me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves. Psalm 88:6–7
It is abundantly clear from her own letters and notes that Mother Teresa – the most celebrated saint of her time, a woman who not long after her death was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church – that she suffered painfully from the darkness which that descends on believers who feel banished from the presence of the Lord God is abundantly clear from her own letter and notes. About As to her doubt there is none. Often, in fact, “the bride of Christ” felt herself abandoned at the altar of life itself.
How on earth can such a humble, faithful servant of Christ be so adamant that his beloved presence has simply passed her by? How can someone who sacrificed her life to follow Jesus’s own directions into the holes of the poor see, before her, all-encompassing darkness?
Thoughtful psychologists and psychologists may well have substantial, convincing theories, theories I’d love to hear by the way, because the conundrum will be, or so it seems to me, forever a mystery: how can someone so close to Christ feel him so irretrievably gone?
To me, there is no easy answer, save one. Simply stated, Mother Teresa, officially a saint, was human, and as such subject to the score of weaknesses our mutual flesh is heir to. She doubted because, often as not, all of us do. Think not? Read the psalms.
Some like to believe that her darkness was, in fact, a blessing. Here’s the way Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the editor of Come Be My Light, understands the burden of doubt that attended Mother’s life: “Interior darkness was Mother Teresa’s privileged way of entering into the mystery of the Cross of Christ” (156).
It’s a paradox, yet greatly understandable. I spoke to a man just last week who told me that his grandson’s cancer was a horror, save one thing – the immense blessing of prayers and gifts of friends and strangers who helped his own daughter and her husband through the struggle. Once upon a time, a young woman told me that nothing in her life had changed her so fully, remade her into someone who had begun to care for others, as her cancer. Her boyfriend, a research chemist studying cancer itself, grimaced, I remember, as she said it because he didn’t see those cancer cells as haloed as she did.
That suffering can be a blessing seems, to me, irrefutable. But we take the reality of suffering to another level when we see it as “a privileged way of entering into the mystery of the Cross of Christ.”
If that’s true, the utter spiritual darkness in which she found herself would have to be pure blessing – and it wasn’t. She may well have had moments when she considered her estrangement from God to be exactly that; but if that was so, would suffering be suffering? If suffering is totally a blessing, then is it suffering at all? If it was, then why did she so clearly seek relief?
Fr. Kolodiejchuk would like it to be so, and he may well be right.
But there are moments when the Protestant that I am much prefers the empty cross to the crucifix, the risen Lord to the suffering Christ; and this is one of those moments. In my life at least, the despair that accompanies an across-the-board loss of hope has never been a better means by which to understand the mystery of Christ’s suffering. It’s always been a horrifying black hole.
To me, the wonderful good news of the gospel, here and always, is that even those we know as saints are human, not divine, subject to sin’s own horrors; but, by way of grace alone, brought radiantly back into communion with the Lord, only by his hand.
Stuff happens in life, bad stuff. But he loves us, always. That’s the real blessing.
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