Reading Mother Teresa--Darkness

I am overwhelmed with troubles 

and my life draws near to death. 

I am counted among those who go down to the pit; 

I am like one without strength. Psalm 88:3–4. 

So the sermon yesterday was on worry, and the preacher was agin’ it. Like sin. It was the kind of sermon lifelong churchgoers like me could have written ourselves, or at least outlined, once the scripture was read. Same old, same old. Our old preacher used to say that “Fear not!” was among, if not the greatest of, all the commandments, at least the one most repeated in scripture. I knew that.

Yet, we fear. Yet, we worry. Yet, we feel abandoned. Yet, we know darkness.

We’re human, I guess, all of us.

Somewhere in To Be Near Unto God, Abraham Kuyper says that those who are troubled by insomnia – which often means troubled by something other than not sleeping – should learn, simply enough, to take advantage of the night’s long and empty spaces by reading, by doing worthwhile stuff. Instead of just lying there worrying, he says, spend the time in prayer or in the Word. Read a book.

Abraham Kuyper taught me a great deal in that wonderful devotional book of his, but I remember that advice particularly because it seemed to be to fit under the category my college would students would label “Duh,” as in, “good night, that's startlingly obvious.”

I’ve said it before, – and I must admit it’s an attribute of Come Be My Light that drew me to the life of Mother Teresa, – that this saintly woman, this saint, literally, experienced profound periods of midnight darkness created by her sure conviction that God almighty, the Creator of Universe, and Jesus, his son, had walked away and left her completely alone – that they simply were not to be found. This woman, doing his work, felt at times totally abandoned.

What do we do with that fact? How can we understand someone whose devotion to the Lord Jesus flags so fully? There were times in her life when half the world looked to her as the model of Christian living. By her own confession, she’d walked and talked with Jesus, listened to his very voice, heard his outline for how she and her Daughters of Charity should live. Who on earth could have been closer?

Yet, frequently, she felt alone in a darkness so complete that it seemed all-encompassing. She told few. How could she? After all, to millions she was the purest, shining light of the love of Jesus.

“My own soul remains in deep darkness & desolation,” she confessed to the archbishop (154).

Somewhere in The Treasury of David, Charles H. Spurgeon says that what Mother Teresa experienced is a form of darkness known only to believers, because only those who know the comfort of God’s abiding love can feel the horror of being somehow bereft of his grace.

Whether we call it worry or anxiety or even depression – maybe even despair – it was, in her, very, very real, by her own admission and confession. Her biographers claim she used it – that horrific darkness – to more fully empathize with others. She guided her own personal suffering into the suffering of others, which, they say – and history may well prove – enabled her heart to grow, even as her spirit appeared to wither with the absence of her savior’s voice.

Whether she prayed or read on those awful sleepless nights we’ll never know, but if those who tell her story are right – (and no one but Mother Teresa will ever know if they are) – she used her own despair – and I don’t use that word without regard – to understand the estrangement from God that others admitted. Thus, if we believe them, her biographers might say that she turned her own utter weakness into longsuffering strength.

But there will be more to say about the utter darkness that’s here, almost unbelievingly, in a book of private writings titled by her editor, thoughtfully, Come Be My Light.