"This is the first true interpretation of Mother Teresa's life." - Mike Aquilina chapter 17 from The Love That Made Mother Teresa by David Scott For m...
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For more than fifty years following her initial visions and locutions, Mother Teresa was wrapped in a dark, pitiless silence.
She only once more heard the voice of God, and she believed the doors of heaven had been closed and bolted against her. The more she longed for some sign of his presence, the more empty and desolate she became.
We always saw her smiling. She had a playful smile, mischievous, as if privy to some secret joke. Especially when she was around children, she beamed with delight. In private, she had a quick, self-deprecating sense of humor, and sometimes doubled over from laughing so hard. So many people who spent time with her came away saying that she was the most joyful person they had ever met.
Now we know that in secret her life was a living hell. As she confided to her spiritual director in 1957:
In the darkness . . . Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me? The child of your love — and now become as the most hated one. The one — you have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer . . . Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love — the word — it brings nothing. I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.
Mother Teresa lived in a spiritual desert, panicked that God had rejected her, or worse, that he was there in the dark hiding from her. As if by some strange formula, the greater her success and public adulation, the more abandoned, humiliated, and desperate she felt.
There was a brief period, one month in 1958, when she was able to pierce the darkness. Her light came during a requiem Mass celebrated the day after the death of Pope Pius XII, the pope who had granted her permission to leave Loreto and go among the poor.
“There and then disappeared that long darkness, that pain of loss, of loneliness, of that strange suffering of ten years,” she wrote. “Today my soul is filled with love, with joy untold, with an unbroken union of love.” Four weeks later, the darkness had descended: “He is gone again, leaving me alone.” She lived in this darkness until the end of her life.
Other saints have told of their spiritual torments and feelings of abandonment by God. In the sixteenth century, St. John of the Cross described the experience as “the dark night of the soul.” But we would be hard-pressed to find another saint who suffered a darkness so thick or a night so long as Mother Teresa suffered.
John of the Cross and others wrote poems and spiritual canticles to describe their sufferings in God’s absence and their frustrated longings for the embrace of his love. Mother Teresa never did. In fact, only her spiritual directors knew of her anguish.
