by Cathy Norman Peterson

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I picked up Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday) after hearing a reviewer talk about Mother Teresa’s decades-long crisis of faith. Wrestling through questions of my own, I hoped to find solace or guidance or reassurance in these pages. I hardly anticipated the incredible journey within one woman’s soul I was about to undertake.

Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light is a glimpse into a soul stripped bare. In response, we readers are also exposed in all our deepest longings and our darkest fears. We see reflected in the pages of this book our truest desire for God, alongside a dread that God may not show himself except in our sufferings and the suffering of those we love and serve. This book challenges many of our assumptions about God and brings us to the heart of the matter—how do we love God and give him our deepest, truest self, even when we suffer intense trials of our faith?

People seem to be talking about “the Mother Teresa book” everywhere, especially about the long period of her life when God was painfully absent. The world is shocked by this well-kept secret in God’s servant, who sacrificed everything for the sake of her Lord and his people. If Mother Teresa doubted, who can be sure of anything?

Seeking to make sense of God’s distance from a truly holy woman, we try to soften the brutality of her story. Some critics write off Mother Teresa’s doubts as proof that God does not exist. Others say that she verifies the “inevitable result of a dogma that asks people to believe impossible things.” Commentators conjecture an undiagnosed depression. Still others criticize the decision to publish her most intimate correspondence in the face of her repeated pleas that it all be destroyed. Yet if a reader can manage to pick up Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light without preconceived expectations, they will discover a book that provides both insight into the life of a truly humble modern-day saint, as well as hope for their own journey of faith.

Thirsting for Jesus
Like her namesake, Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother Teresa wrote repeatedly of longing for nothing but Jesus. “If you could know how happy I am, as Jesus’ little spouse,” she once wrote. “No one, not even those who are enjoying some happiness which in the world seems perfect could I envy, because I am enjoying my complete happiness, even when I suffer something for my beloved Spouse.”

Such unmuted passion for God may sound uncomfortably foreign to twenty-first-century Western readers. It rings of intimacy that is generally reserved for lovers. Mother Teresa records words she believes that Jesus spoke to her: “You have been always saying ‘do with me whatever you wish.’ Now I want to act, let me do it—My little Spouse, My own little one. Do not fear—I shall be with you always. You will suffer and you suffer now—but if you are My own little Spouse—the Spouse of the crucified Jesus—you will have to bear these torments in your heart.”

This is not the way most of us approach God, and it is tempting to pull back from such intensity. Yet, rejecting that temptation can make room for revealing questions: What would it be like to pray this way? What would it look like to feel “this continual longing for God which gives me that pain deep down in my heart”? How many of us long for God so deeply that we ache?

Mother Teresa made her final vows to God and the church as a Loreto nun—an order also known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary—in 1937. Five years later, she made another, private, vow to God. Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, who edited Mother Teresa’s letters, discusses this act at length, calling it “exceptional” and one of her greatest secrets. “I made a vow to God,” she wrote to her spiritual director, “binding under [pain of] mortal sin, to give to God anything that He may ask, ‘Not to refuse Him anything.’”

Protestant readers might wonder what exactly was so momentous in those words. Don’t we all pray along these lines? I might wrestle a bit, but surely my intention is always to live this way. We may not make solemn vows, but isn’t our desire to obey just as valid?

But as her correspondence reveals, Mother Teresa’s vow was indeed different from merely well-intentioned prayers. She didn’t simply promise to let go of her longings for comfort, for human love, for material satisfaction. Rather, she gave Jesus everything—her physical comfort, the pleasure of her plans working out the way she hoped, her loneliness. “With her vow,” Kolodiejchuk writes, “Mother Teresa aimed at perfect interior compliance to what was most pleasing to God even in the smallest detail.”

Could we pray as this saint did? I try it: “Not to refuse him anything.” On a good day, I last until lunch. But Mother Teresa’s words are a guide: “I tell Him that my heart is free from everything and so it belongs completely to Him, and Him alone. He can use me just as it will please Him best. To please Him only is the joy I seek.” Is this the pure joy that is offering oneself fully to God? Do her words provide us a glimpse of a different kind of life in Christ, one that is far beyond comfortable or safe? 

Beginning the work
Once she had made her vow to God, Mother Teresa became impatient to fulfill it completely in every conceivable area of her work and mission. In 1946, she was on a spiritual retreat and received “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,” Mother Teresa wrote. “It was in that train, I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums—to serve Him in the poorest of the poor.” She marked that day as the origin of the Missionaries of Charity, the order of nuns that she founded.

After hearing this call, Mother Teresa began to pursue every possible means of obeying Christ’s command. She badgered her archbishop for permission to begin working with the poorest of the poor. She pled, cajoled, and argued with his concerns. While the archbishop was reasonable and appropriately cautious as he sought God’s will on this important question, Mother Teresa flooded him with letters. She did not proceed with caution or diplomacy, calling herself the persistent widow from Jesus’s parable.

Indeed, the archbishop expressed irritation when she accused him of hesitating to grant permission out of cowardice. “Please take off your imagination the idea that I am opposed to your scheme,” he wrote. And, “When I am morally certain of where my duty lies, rest assured that I shall not shrink from it, cost what it may.” She responded three weeks later, “You are afraid that the whole thing will be a failure—What about it? Don’t delay, Your Grace, don’t put it off. Souls are being lost for want of care, for want of love. What would [the Holy Father] say if he saw your poor, the poor of the slums of Calcutta? Do something about this before you leave, and let us take away from the Heart of Jesus His continual suffering.”

Of course, reading this correspondence fifty years hence provides a perspective that none of the participants had at the time. It’s easy now to believe that Mother Teresa’s dreams were God’s, but how could her superiors have been certain at the time?

It is striking to see Mother Teresa’s eagerness to obey Christ without a moment’s delay. Her words and tone are like an impetuous lover, and it is no surprise that her superiors responded with prudence. How many of us can act with such certainty in following God’s call on our lives?

She was not blind to the obstacles ahead. In fact, she was convinced that she would be mocked even by fellow believers, but her devotion was so complete that she entered the difficulties ahead, praying, “O Jesus, only love of my heart, I wish to suffer what I suffer and all Thou wilt have me suffer, for Thy pure love not because of the merits I may acquire, nor for the rewards Thou hast promised me but only to please Thee, to praise Thee, to bless Thee as well in sorrow as in joy.”

Suffering utter emptiness
Mother Teresa’s willingness to suffer with Christ was soon tested. What began as God’s intimate, felt presence in her life became a stark and abiding absence. Where once she experienced the consolation of the joy of Jesus, even to the point of mystical experiences and visions, eventually she prayed in anguish that rivals the psalmist’s. “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. . . . That darkness is so dark—and I am alone.”

Does it help us to name that utter darkness depression? Does such deep anguish in this woman of God become more palatable when we say, “Oh, she was depressed. She probably needed medication”? Does that soften the blow? Perhaps. Otherwise, it is a bit horrifying to consider God’s turning his back on his beloved child.

My secret fear is that if Mother Teresa could feel abandoned, what hope do I have? If Mother Teresa despaired in her quest for intimacy with God, then how can any of us “regular” folks dare to hope for better? What if I were able somehow to clear away everything that I’ve piled up between Jesus and me? And then God stopped responding in any visible way to my prayers? Could a more isolated, desolate place exist on earth? Wouldn’t such a sense of abandonment provoke depression?

Mother Teresa’s spiritual directors wisely listened and waited with her. They walked through the blackness with her as much as they could. They pointed to clear evidence of God’s hand on her life even when she could not feel his presence. One wrote later, “There was no indication of any serious failure on her part which could explain the spiritual dryness. It was simply the dark night of which all masters of spiritual life know—though I never found it so deeply, and for so many years as in her. There is no human remedy against it. It can be borne only in the assurance of God’s hidden presence and of the union with Jesus who in His passion had to bear the burden and darkness of the sinful world for our salvation.”

These priests who were her companions in the darkness of her soul’s night were the body of Christ for her. They accompanied her, upheld her, and assured her of God’s presence when she had no assurance of her own. They also suggested that her suffering was “reparatory rather than purgative.”

As a Protestant, I am both wary and intrigued by this idea. It is foreign, even mystical, to consider that one woman’s suffering can affect good for others. Yet that belief is what allowed Mother Teresa to endure her inner anguish.

“Suffering in itself is nothing,” she once wrote, “but suffering shared with Christ’s Passion is a wonderful gift.” Her spiritual director wrote later, “I really believe that the reason Mother Teresa had to undergo so much darkness in her life is that it would bring about a greater identification with the poor.”

This idea flies in the face of the gospel of prosperity and success that so seduces many of us. Instead of relying on the comforts of God’s presence to validate her work and her life, Mother Teresa repeatedly turned to the cross of Christ.

A few years before her death, she reminded her followers: “Jesus wants me to tell you again . . . how much is the love He has for each one of you—beyond all what you can imagine.” Even more, she wrote, “He Longs for you. He misses you when you don’t come close. He thirsts for you.” These are not the words of a merely compassionate servant. They are the life-giving faith and hope of a Christ-follower like I have seldom known.

Mother Teresa is not “just” a book about the absence of God. Rather it is an intimate portrait of a woman who refused God absolutely nothing. We see her willingly submit to his will as communicated by her superiors. We see her regularly practice prayer and retreat. We see her sacrifice rest and physical comfort for the sake of Jesus. We see her give all to satiate Christ’s thirst. Mother Teresa’s honest confessions are stark, but they are also solace to those of us who struggle on our own to obey God, to remain faithful when we cannot sense his presence, and who suffer our own dark nights.

Cathy Norman Peterson is a freelance writer living in Chicago. She and her family attend Winnetka (Illinois) Covenant Church.

Copyright ©2008 The Covenant Companion