Counting it all as joy

Unless you're Christopher Hitchens -- who has made hating Mother Teresa a sacrament in his very urbane, very clever worship of nothingness -- the more you learn about the little nun from Calcutta, the more you are convicted that you're a really, really crappy human being.

Not to mention Christian.

Hitchens, being a first-rate atheist, doesn't have to worry about being a crappy Christian. But I do. And, thus, yours truly stands double convicted of rottenness and sloth.

All it took was an article from Godspy.com. Here's a snippet:

In one of those long-secret letters, from 1957, she bared her soul to a spiritual director:

"In the darkness . . . Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? . . 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 . . . 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."

Other saints have confessed feelings of abandonment by God. In the sixteenth century, St. John of the Cross coined a phrase that now describes the experience — "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.

To quote again from those long-secret letters:

"They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God... In my soul I feel just this terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing. That terrible longing keeps growing, and I feel as if something will break in me one day."

But why would God permit such suffering in one who had given her life so completely to do his will? The answer may lie in the question.

We learned from her letters, that in 1942, while still serving as principal at a private girls' school in Calcutta, Mother Teresa had made a secret vow — "to give to God anything that He may ask, 'not to refuse Him anything.'"

God apparently took her at her word, and put her vow to the test. In 1946, when her locutions began, Jesus told her to quit her comfortable job and go serve the poor: "There are convents... caring for the rich and able-to-do people, but for my very poor there is absolutely none." She did what she was told. Then she didn't hear his voice again for another half-century.

As harsh and dreadful as it sounds, it's a pattern familiar in the Bible and in the lives of the saints. The servants of the Lord often undergo an ordeal, some test of their commitment and faithfulness. Think of Jeremiah or Hosea, or how much of the New Testament concerns suffering for the Lord's sake. "When you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials," the Book of Sirach says.

From her letters, we see that Mother Teresa understood herself to be enduring such a trial—a martyrdom less physical than psychological and spiritual.

So, what are we to make of her happiness and joy—was it all a front, an act? There's no evidence of that. She appears to have been giving us a modern day, flesh-and-blood lesson in the meaning of Christian joy. The fact that while she was alive we never had any inkling of how much she suffered only makes her witness that much more challenging to our complacencies.

Mother Teresa wrote a lot about joy. It comes, she said, from being close to Jesus. Or as she put it: "Joy is a sign of union with God—of God's presence." Knowing what we now know about her feelings of divine rejection, this sounds like an inside joke, or a deliciously dark irony. But she had no guile about her. She always told us that joy wasn't a matter of attitude adjustment or putting on a happy face. Joy was hard work: "It is always hard, all the more reason why we should try to acquire it and make it grow in our hearts."

In the logic of the saints, which is the logic of the Scriptures, this makes sense. We're supposed to strive to get closer to Jesus, to become more like him. To imitate Jesus means to offer ourselves in love to God—to accept suffering and even death, as he did on the cross. St. Paul wrote that we should offer our bodies as "living sacrifices" to God.

That's how Mother Teresa lived. Even the littlest task could be a beautiful sacrifice she offered to God. And she came to believe that her spiritual anguish was a sign of her deepening union with Jesus, a sharing in his experience of being forsaken on the cross.

This growing awareness, too, is reflected in her letters: "I have begun to love my darkness, for I believe now that it is a part, a very small part, of Jesus' darkness and pain on the earth."

HAT TIP: Parousian Post