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I asked Father James if he had known of Mother’s inner darkness. “Never, never, ever,” he answered. “In the life of the saint, what is most important is what is going on in their heart and their relationship to God. What they do is the fruit of who they are. Who they are is who they are in relationship to God. So for us to simply look at Mother Teresa, the woman of charity who fed the poor and worked in the slums — it lets us see the external woman but it doesn’t let us see the secret that kept captivating us with those good works. Now in her inner life, the pain helped her to identify with Jesus in his pain. Jesus did not have a good feeling of his relationship with his Father when he was on Calvary. He felt abandoned. He said, ‘My God, my God why have you abandoned me.’ In a sense, Mother experienced that same interior abandonment by God. She knew she wasn’t abandoned, but she didn’t have a warm, cozy feeling in her relationship to God, so it gave authenticity to her work and truth to her inner life. Her inner life wasn’t based on self-satisfaction but on conformity to God’s will.”
Sisters taking their final vows to the Order of the Missionaries of Charity are deep in prayer during the Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Calcutta. (December 1995)
Mother Teresa outside Sacred Heart Parish after a Mass on the day of her visit to Atlanta, Georgia. The church has since been named Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. (June 15, 1995)
“Her inner life wasn’t based on self-satisfaction but on conformity to God’s will.”
He continued, “Mother Teresa concealed from her sisters and from the world that she was going through that dark night for so many years. Her smile radiated joy and brought Christ into the lives of so many. Behind that smile was an experience of darkness that even the sisters who were closest to her did not know about.” The records of her letters, including correspondence with two archbishops of Calcutta, were only revealed after her death. Archbishops Ferdinand Perier (archbishop of Calcutta from 1924 to 1960) and Lawrence Picachy (archbishop of Calcutta from 1969 to 1986) were among the few privy to the mystery of Mother Teresa’s darkness because, as Father James explained, she was a “spiritual daughter to them.”
Father James compared Mother’s interior darkness to that experience which all go through as they grow closer in their relationship to God. In a person’s relationship with God, the early emotions cannot be sustained on a daily basis. “You can’t live your life on a spiritual high,” explained Father James. “There has to be a purification, so the reason you are praying and serving others isn’t because you get a good feeling out of it but because God is glorified — because Jesus is being praised and honored through your prayer and service. The focus shifts from fulfilling my needs to serving his. Jesus is thirsting for me to be his servant. If you are serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, they are suffering too much to say ‘thank you.’ As you grow in your spirituality, God says, ‘I am enough for you,’ and he takes away the consolations. Mother Teresa zeroed in on that theme of Jesus thirsting. What was Jesus thirsting for? He was thirsting for this woman to love him and serve him.”
Based on her letters, it is evident that this period of darkness commenced shortly after she began her ministry of serving the poorest of the poor.
Mother Teresa’s personal relationship with God became more and more difficult, as Father James explained to me. “She did not have a honeymoon experience with Jesus. She knew with a raw faith that she was doing what he wanted her to do both when she prayed and when she worked, but she did not get a sense of satisfaction from it.” Based on her letters, it is evident that this period of darkness commenced shortly after she began her ministry of serving the poorest of the poor.
Father James went on: “There is a second dark night that Saint John of the Cross describes. Besides the dark night of the senses, there is even a darker night: that of the spirit, where you do not even have the spiritual experience of God’s presence. You have the experience of God’s absence.” I asked Father James if this darkness is the same darkness most people in the world experience. “That is why Mother Teresa has become a beacon of light for the world in its darkness. There is a secular darkness where the world has forgotten about God, and the world tries to operate as though its creator was not important. Mother Teresa talked about that to the world in her Nobel Peace Prize speech. Everywhere she went, she testified that God is alive and active in the world. However, her experience of God is absent. … She is thirsting for a communion with this God who has called her to be his beloved. She never doubted that God existed.”
Father James told me that once Mother Teresa pulled him aside and provided him “the only glimpse I had of her dark night. She took my hand in her hand and said, ‘Repeat after me: I will, I wish, with God’s blessing to be holy.’ She then wrote down the words on a piece of paper and numbered each line to go with each finger.” Father James sensed at that moment that she had a deep desire to be connected to God. That meeting came a few years before she died. “Then she took my other hand and said, ‘But that is not enough; repeat after me.’” Father James repeated on each finger, “You did it to me.” “We have to match that willingness with concrete actions. She then said, ‘Easy to say, harder to do.’ She said, ‘Jesus said I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty, you gave me drink; I was naked, you clothed me; I was homeless, you sheltered me; I was sick or in prison, you visited me. When? When you did it to the poorest of the poor.’ Then she took my two hands folded in prayer and clasped them between hers and said, ‘Put together, you will be holy.’”
Home for the Dying in Kalighat with the iconic statue of the crucified Jesus and the hand-painted words “I thirst.” Mother Teresa founded the home in 1952, next to a Hindu temple. She called it Nirmal Hriday (“the Home of the Pure Heart”). Renovations to the home began in 2013, and today this crucifix has been replaced with statues encased in glass.
“I want to love Him as He has not been loved.”
Father James told me her formula with this gesture was to bring the intention and prayers together with the actions of the works of charity. The prayer could be said on ten fingers:
1. I will
2. I wish
3. With God’s blessing
4. To be
5. Holy
6. You
7. Did
8. It
9. To
10. Me
When the two hands are clasped, the intention and the actions are joined together.
During my conversation with Father James, I read an excerpt from one of Mother Teresa’s letters that had not been published yet. She wrote, “Only blind faith carries me … the more I want Him, the less I am wanted … I want to love Him as He has not been loved … yet there is that terrible feeling of the absence of God.” I asked Father James if Mother Teresa’s experience could be compared to that of Saint John of the Cross. “It might be easier to compare her experience of the dark night with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. She was Mother Teresa’s patron saint. She had a great love for the way of spiritual childhood. Saint John of the Cross is the spiritual master in our understanding