THE DARKNESS OF FAITH
MotherTeresa [Check other versions of these: “Burning Heart” – Hebrews] [Brief on M Teresa and add Phoebe Palmer?]
In Brian Kolodiejchuk’s illuminating work, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” we meet a special lady known to most contemporary Christians for her ministry among the poor and the dying. In her later ministry the theme of “dark faith” that also characterized the life of Mother Teresa (1910--1997), Kolodiejchuk documents and describes how Mother Teresa in her own unique manner lived the spiritual heritage of the sixteenth century John of the Cross in the twentieth century.
At the age of fifty two, Mother Teresa made a “kind of ‘mission statement’” that helps us understand her spiritual life, indeed her whole life”:
“If I ever become a Saint—I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.”
And “light the light” of countless folk, she certainly did. For decades she was the object of public interest; attention was paid to her particularly at her death at the age of eighty-seven. As Kolodiejchuk asked, “What was the source of this attractive force drawing so many people to her?” How does this “source” relate to the heart of the Christian gospel as heard and practiced by Mother Teresa?
Three aspects of Mother Teresa’s interior life were revealed during the process of canonization (beatified October 19, 2003). In addition to her private vow as a nun (1942) and the mystical experiences (September 10, 1946) that led to the founding of the Missionaries of Charity was “her intimate sharing in the Cross of Christ through the long years of interior darkness.” This darkness as it became the greatest trial of her life relates to her “sharing in the Cross of Christ”—and to the power of the resurrection so evident in her ministry.
Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910, and at eighteen on September 26, 1928, she left her native Albania for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto in Calcutta. At age twelve in 1922, she knew that she “had a vocation to the poor.” The hand of God was on her life uniquely from childhood in ways that extend beyond what most of us know. When Mother Teresa joined the Loreto order she was named after Thérèse of Lisieux, “the Little Flower” (1873—1897). After a five week journey she arrived in Calcutta on January 6, 1929, and made her first profession of vows on May 25, 1931.
As she approached her final vows on May 24, 1937, although she had her share of sufferings, she was described as one for whom “the joy she radiated around her effectively hid her trials.” In a February 8, 1937, letter she wrote: “I have joyfully carried my cross with Jesus. . . . Now I embrace suffering even before it actually comes, and like this Jesus and I live in love.” Her identification with the Cross appears as a part of her early ministry as was the experience of darkness: “I have more often as my companion ‘darkness.’ And when the night becomes very thick . . . then I simply offer myself to Jesus.”
Mother Teresa’s experience during this period appears to be similar to the spiritual or purification processes of John of the Cross’ “night of the senses” and “night of the spirit.” What is obvious is that her unique spirituality and vocation was early in place as she was being prepared by Providence for an unusual ministry—a ministry that was more deeply than most grounded in or prepared to flow from the spiritual dynamic of the cross and resurrection of Jesus.
Crucial for Mother Teresa was the private vow made in April 1942: “I made a vow to God, binding under [pain of] mortal sin, to give to God anything that He may ask, ‘Not to refuse Him anything.’” This was one of her greatest secrets, which, she said, “hides everything in me,” as she revealed seventeen years later—“to say ‘Yes’ to God in all circumstances.” Irrevocable vows (besa) were a part of her Albanian heritage and a matter of honor: “She was determined to be faithful to her word given to God, even at the price of her life.” “The confidence to so abandon herself to God came out of her certainty that God loved her unconditionally. In fulfilling this vow she found her joy in life. She was a fun-loving and cheerful person for as one who knew her observed, “cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity.”
On the train September 10, 1946, as she journeyed for her annual retreat to the Loreto Convent in Darlington, she experienced a decisive mystical encounter with Christ. Although she kept the details veiled in silence, years later she did reveal to Malcom Muggenridge that
[It] was a call within my vocation. It was a second calling. It was a vocation to give up even Loreto where I was very happy and to go out in the streets to serve the poorest of the poor. It was in that train, I head the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums—to serve Him in the poorest of the poor. . . . There was no doubt that it was going to be His work.
This day, which she celebrated later as “Inspiration Day,” she considered to be the real beginning of the Missionaries of Charity. This mystical experience or call took place in the context of Calvary when Jesus, dying on the Cross, cried out “I thirst.” For her the expressed aim of the Missionaries of Charity was “to satiate the thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for Love and Souls.” Jesus’ saying, “I thirst,” became central to her calling and to what the Missionaries of Charity were to be.
The validity of Mother Teresa’s special call, however, had to be tested and discerned by her spiritual director and by her superiors in the monastic order and in the Church. Her spiritual director, for example, forbade her for a season to think or speak about it. After four months, however, he had no doubt that her inspiration was from God and gave her permission to write to the archbishop, which she did on January 1, 1947. After several pleading letters to the archbishop and a period of prayerful waiting on the part of those in authority, the permission came to her to found the Missionaries of Charity on January 6, 1948. The process of discerning the will of God for such a radical undertaken had taken a year and three and one-half months from when the call first came to her on September 10, 1946. Her desire to become a European nun living outside the convent walls identifying with the poor in their local culture and conditions was soon to reach fulfillment.
On August 17, 1948, clad in a white saris with blue border, Mother Teresa set out, a European nun alone in India, to begin life as a Missionary of Charity. She possessed only five rupees, her entire capital. Her confidence was in the promise God made to her two years earlier: “Do not fear—I shall be with you always. . . . Trust me lovingly—trust me blindly.”
On December 21, 1948, for the first time Mother Teresa went to the slums as a Missionary of Charity—“a light has dawned in the darkness of the slums.” The poverty she met was staggering. As she had foreseen, “this new life was bringing her ‘for the most part only suffering.’ Yet she accepted that it had to be so, for this was ‘the dark night of the birth of the Society.’” Mother Teresa began her work with only volunteer help, but was soon praying for followers to help her and by June 1950, her community numbered twelve. On October 7, 1950, the archbishop officially established the Missionaries of Charity in the archdiocese of Calcutta.
Suffering was taken by Mother Teresa as a means in her vocation. The care for the poor became more and more demanding. Soon she found a place for the “hopeless” cases, the dying that no hospital would take. For her, “the neglected, the rejected, the underserved closely resembled the suffering Christ—‘Christ in distressing disguise—gave her the opportunity to put her love into living action.’” These sufferings, she took as her own, “uniting her with Christ in His Passion and with the poorest of the poor in their pain.”
By 1953, Mother Teresa’s inspiration of 1946 for a flourishing community serving the poorest of the poor was now a living reality, and all the challenges and sufferings had been worth it. Yet, she was experiencing a painful interior ordeal for which she repeatedly sought spiritual support and finally revealed. As she wrote on March 18, 1953, to the archbishop on her interior state that had been developing since the founding of the Missionaries of Charity:
Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started “the work.” Ask our Lord to give me courage.
The accomplishments of the community soon attracted admiration and praise, and accounts of their work soon appeared locally and internationally. This deeply concerned her for she was fearful that they were getting too much publicity.
In the midst of such fruitfulness, Mother Teresa’s darkness continued. Summed up, “Interior darkness was Mother Teresa’s privileged way of entering in the mystery of the Cross of Christ.” We are beginning to see the context of and the unique role her “darkness” played in her vocation: “Pray for me—for within me everything is icy cold.—It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness.”
Mother Teresa’s life was a contradiction in that she could not sense the presence of God in her life, yet she was in the throes of “a torturing longing for God.” But paradoxically “she clung steadfastly to the faith she professed, and without a drop of consolation, labored wholeheartedly in her daily service of the poorest of the poor.” Absence and presence go together as the hidden power of her ministry. Her darkness motivated the intensity of devotion that enabled her demanding ministry; it invigorated her impulse to mission.
Mother Teresa’s followers perceived her as a very balanced and joyful person, even when things went wrong. In response to the counsel of Father Neurner, Mother Teresa in 1961 even expressed gratitude for her darkness :
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. . . . Today really I felt a deep joy—that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony—but that He wants to go through it in me.—More than ever I surrender myself to Him.\
A turning point in her understanding of her darkness came with the realization that the darkness was the spiritual side of her work as she shared in Christ’s redemptive suffering identifying with those she served: “she was drawn mystically into the deep pain they experienced as a result of feeling unwanted and rejected and, above all, by living without faith in God. As the transformation was taking place in her soul, the darkness was actually the mysterious link that united her to Jesus.
John of the Cross’s “purificatory” night of the spirit was now being transformed into a “reparatory” night of the spirit. As she wrote to her sisters in July 1961, “My dear children—without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the redemption.” She had grasped the meaning of her trial and would say with the apostle Paul in Colossians 1:24: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”
Mother Teresa’s darkness, which she saw as the price of lighting “the fire of love,” seems to increase, “Pray for me—for the life within me is harder to live. To be in love & yet not to love, to live by faith and yet not to believe. To spend myself and yet be in total darkness.” Yet she could say, “Thank God we don’t serve God with our feelings, otherwise I don’t know where I would be.” It appears that she had not read John of the Cross carefully, and did not realize that her “agonizing and interminable darkness was reparatory rather than purgative,” that is, not to purify her faith, but to empower her ministry.
Kolodiejchuk’s work shows us clearly that Mother Teresa’s darkness was part and parcel of her unique anointing for her also unique, blessed of God, ministry. Even with this absence of a vivid sense of God’s presence in prayer, her life was one of uncompromising fidelity to prayer: “People were fascinated just watching Mother pray. They would sit there and watching her be really drawn into this mystery.” In November 1979, she was again elected superior general by the Missionaries of Charity. Shortly after, on December 11, 1979, she received the Nobel Peace Prize. Mother Teresa understood that the Nobel Peace Prize had helped many people find their way to the poor that prompted her to guard against any lessening of zeal in serving the poor. She handled the attention of the world’s great with great grace: “I am too small to understand it all.”
In July 1997, Mother Teresa returned to Calcutta after a journey to Rome, New York, and Washington, D.C., quietly observing, “My work is done.” On September 5, in the evening, the electricity failed, and thus “while Calcutta was in darkness, the earthly life of the one who had brought so much light to this city and to the whole world was extinguished.
The fruit of silence is prayer, The fruit of prayer is faith, The fruit of faith is love, The fruit of love is service, The fruit of service is peace.
Appendix: Georgia Harkness
An admirable 20th century theologian whose life and work illustrates our concerns is the pioneering, Georgia Elma Harkness (1891-1974). This brilliant Methodist lady fought the cultural restrictions on women in the male-dominated world of theological education and ministry as she obtained an education and sought a career as a theologian in academia. She became the first woman to obtain a full professorship in an American theological Seminary. As Professor of Applied Theology she was concerned in her teaching and prolific writing to communicate the Christian faith in an accessible manner to her students and the educated laity. For this she endured criticism and non-acceptance as not being a scholar’s scholar! As a Christian and a scholar, she was a churchman of prophetic courage.
Our concern is to see Georgia Harkness as a Christian. As a framework for understanding her, we note that she was an ecumenist, a pacifist, and deeply interested in social justice, for example, women’s rights, civil rights, and justice for both Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. Georgia grew up in an evangelical church and a church-going family. Her education, a story in itself, climaxed in graduate work at Boston University under the influence of Edgar S. Brightman, a Personalist philosopher and a churchman. These were years that continued her development in the understanding of Christianity and who she was as a Christian.
Georgia Harkness’ Christian faith as it matured before the 1940s was summed up by her biographer as “Triumphant Religion.” Her religion was “a way of life” that functioned in her words “to make men better and make men stronger.” To provide, in her words, “keenness of moral vision, strength to meet the storms and battles of life—these have been the dual gifts of religion.” She was an ethical idealist with an emphasis on moral effort.
Consistent with this Georgia Harkness thought of the death of Jesus on the cross as “the eternal symbol of a loving suffering God.” Jesus’ resurrection was “the means to ‘triumphant living’ that Christianity calls salvation.” The primary gift that Jesus gives to those who would follow him is “the model of a ‘Christlike personality.’” As her biographer puts it, “the Christlike personality added up to a beautiful well-rounded way of life and grew out of a solid biblical base,” Georgia, however, “believed that a person came to such a personality through high moral striving.”
Georgia Harness, at the age of forty-eight, in 1939, had her faith journey neatly and rationally all-together. Her career and calling appeared to be on the rise. She was viewed as “a woman of almost invincible physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual strength.” Not only did she have “the satisfaction of living her life in service to God,” she “stood alone as the famed woman theologian in a field dominated by men”; to continue such success, however, “would continue to be an uphill climb.”
But unaware of it as yet, writes her biographer, “Georgia was setting forth on a deeply inward spiritual journey, a dark night of her soul, that would extend for several years until the mid-1940s.” She began to question if she had fallen far short of the goals of her triumphant religion and of her calling. Her use of the language of triumphant religion, significantly, had come “primarily from Georgia’s academic study of philosophy, not from her evangelical background.”
Although still working out of the perspective of philosophical idealism, Georgia Harkness had not forgotten “the essential language of her evangelical Christian background rooted in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ” while she “held fast to the precept of triumphant religion that ‘I can do all things through Christ.’” In early 1937, when her father became seriously ill, her pace of work came to a sudden halt. In his lingering days he asked Georgia “to recover the roots of her Christian faith” and to “write more about Jesus Christ.” Her father’s death began to release the hold of triumphant religion over her “and she began her journey towards spiritual maturity.”
The process was a lengthy one extending to mid-1944 when Georgia Harkness wrote The Dark Night of the Soul (1945), one of her most important books. This period was marked by physical problems and depression for which she put herself under the care of physicians and psychiatrists, and by a sense of the absence of the presence of God. As her biographer describes it, “at its heart, her dark night was a spiritual crisis. ‘And this is no way for a Christian to be!” she wrote out of the depth of her pain—physical, emotional, and spiritual.” As she studied the saints and their similar experiences, she was gradually coming to terms with her long-held faith in triumphant faith and life. Her biographer sums it up for us:
Before she worked out of a faith that human beings gained their own spiritual victory, that salvation lay in the ability to live out of high ideals. Through the redemptive experience at the heart of the dark night, Georgia now knew that the victory was in God’s gracious giving of divine grace—and in human acceptance.
May we say that Georgia’s life of believing “with Christ” became transformed into believing “in Christ” as she came to the end of saving herself in dedicated quality Christian service and saw her life and service as fully dependent on the grace of God in Jesus crucified and risen?