Mother
Teresa: Come Be My Light
by Mother Teresa, edited and with
commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C.
Doubleday, 2007
review
by Jon M. Sweeney
Most
of the biggest bestsellers today are written by critics of religion,
rather than by devotees. An entire industry has popped up around
people like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher
Hitchens (Why God Is Not Great), and Sam Harris (Letter
to a Christian Nation). The anti-religion book has become
the hottest sub-genre in the Religion section at your local
bookstore.
I wonder... will the spinoff products be coming soon—replacement
kitsch for those who were once religious but are no longer? Huggable
Darwin plush toys (I’ve actually seen these), human brains
on silver pendants, icon cards of Nietszche or maybe even of Dawkins,
Hitchens, and Harris?
These
authors are the new champions of the newest round of religion debunking.
Or, perhaps better put, faith debunking. According to their thinking,
if you still have some sort of faith in God, you are supposed to
feel somehow foolish, or even, dangerous, to the rest of the world.
Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris believe that faith is what caused 9/11;
faith is what has caused wars, conflict, and prejudice throughout
history. And of course, they are right, but only in part. They only
tell part of the story of faith and its effects.
The
crowd who eats up this anti-religion stuff is all excited, too,
about revelations that Mother Teresa of Calcutta had serious doubts
in her faith over the last 50 years of her life. This story hit
the cover of Time magazine in late August, just before
the publication of the book under review here. A couple of weeks
later, in Newsweek, Hitchens reviewed Mother Teresa:
Come Be My Light and, in his final sentence, concluded,
The
Church should have had the elementary decency to let the earth
lie lightly on this troubled and miserable lady, and not to invoke
her long anguish to recruit the credulous to a blind faith in
which she herself long ceased to believe.
But
not so fast. This book of Mother Teresa’s personal letters
to her confessors is now atop the bestseller lists. Believe
me, she does not advocate a loss of faith, or the foolishness of
faith. Quite the contrary. So, why are so many people—including
those who want to debunk the purpose of faith in God—reading
these letters of a dead saint?
We
want to know what her “darkness” was all about, and
how someone who for years on end said to her confessors that she
did not feel God’s presence, and even doubted that God loved
her, could do what she did with her life day after day. How is that
possible?!
Which
of course, returns us to faith. Like it or not—and the following
statement is, I realize, an example of what makes Dawkins and Hitchens
most infuriated—this is where the world divides between those
who have a relationship with God and those who do not. Ask a person
of faith, with a commitment to faith, “How often do you have
doubts?” and I suppose you will be surprised by the answer.
“All of the time!”
Mother
Teresa: Come Be My Light may get the critics of religion excited—as
if it demonstrates that the saint of Calcutta’s faith was
pretended—but in so thinking, they demonstrate how they misunderstand
religion and spiritual people altogether, at least of the Christian
variety.
Faith and doubt are flipsides
of the same coin. The credulous “Christian” who is characterized
in a book by Richard Dawkins rarely exists in real life.
More
common is the person of faith who is still able to juggle the biblical
books of Job and Ecclesiastes in her worldview; you don’t
find a lot of faith in there. More common is the person of faith
who also understands how some of the disciples, the very closest
friends of Jesus, doubted his existence as the risen Lord after
the crucifixion and resurrection. Matthew 28 says “some doubted”
or “some hesitated,” depending on the translation. This
is normal stuff, and doubt and darkness are parts of faith, even
at moments that, for others, seem to be so clear.
Mother
Teresa’s doubting began long before she became “Mother”
anything, and even before she established the Missionaries of Charity
in India. Early on, she recognized
how her union with God in Christ would often be dark. “Do
not think that my spiritual life is strewn with roses—that
is the flower which I hardly ever find on my way. Quite the contrary,
I have more often as my companion, ‘darkness.’
And when the night becomes very thick—and it seems to me as
if I will end up in hell—then I simply offer myself to Jesus,”
she wrote to her confessor back home, as a young woman. And, she
says over and over in other letters to her confessors, she rarely
heard an answer from Jesus when she would offer herself and ask
for guidance in these matters.
Doesn’t
that sound familiar to you, person of faith? For so many of us,
and for so many reasons, faith is a dark road. That doesn’t
make it wrong, or foolish. But it can be dry and without much in
the way of clear consolation.
Years
later, while she was in the midst of her darkness, Mother Teresa
wrote to another confessor, “For the first time in this 11
years—I have come to love the darkness.—For I believe
now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness
& pain on earth.”
And
then comes the passage from one of her letters that this reviewer
appreciates more than any other. This is, in fact, a passage that
highlights how Mother Teresa never wanted these letters to see the
light of day. For decades, she begged her confessors to either burn
them, or return them to her, so that she could do the same. “I
do not believe…in that continual digging into one’s
spiritual life—by long & frequent visits & talks,”
she writes to her confessor, whose job it is to listen to her spiritual
troubles. She continues, illuminating how her spiritual darkness
became the environment for her work among the poorest of the poor
in Calcutta: “The help you have given me—will carry
me for a long time.—Our spiritual life must remain simple—so
as to be able to understand the mind of our poor.”
We
never really knew that Mother Teresa was a mystic, until now, with
the publication of these letters. They were gathered by the editor
of this volume, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, in the process of preparing
briefs for Mother Teresa’s beatification, and soon to come,
canonization.
Kolodiejchuk
is a Canadian, and the postulator for Mother Teresa’s Cause
of Beatification and Canonization. In the end, I believe that these
letters and this book will probably lead to a declaration of Mother
Teresa as a theological “Doctor” of the Church, a rare
honor, especially for a woman in the Roman Catholic Church.
But
most relevant today is the way in which this entire discussion illuminates
how there are aspects of faith that will never make sense to people
like Dawkins and Hitchens. Mystics
describe personal faith in terms that can never work in discussions
of what is logical and illogical, true and false, verifiable or
not. The faith of Mother Teresa was in the ground
of her being; it was a mystical union. This being and this union
take place in ways that are beyond good explanation, and sometimes
only metaphors will suffice; it is like a river running quietly
below the surface of the earth—churches drink from this river,
and so do people of faith of all kinds, but mystics travel it intimately,
and sometimes do so, in darkness.
Copyright ©2007
Jon M. Sweeney
Jon
M. Sweeney is the author of several books including Strange
Heaven: The Virgin Mary as Woman, Mother, Disciple, and Advocate,
and Light in the Dark Ages; The Friendship of Francis and Clare
of Assisi, which was just published and is a selection of
History Book Club and Book-of-the-Month Club. He writes regularly
for explorefaith,
and lives in Vermont.
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