Mother Teresa and the Darkness

"I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." (John 8:12)

The Time article about the published letters of Mother Teresa that has provoked the recent brouhaha over her has a psychoanalyst saying she struggled with pride. “Rather than simply giving all credit to God, Gottlieb observes, she agonizes incessantly that ‘any taking credit for her accomplishments — if only internally — is sinful…’" To say this sort of agonizing went on unceasingly her whole life long is to imply she was not winning that struggle with pride.

The very title of the book containing her letters seems to corroborate this idea. It is Come be My Light. That is what Mother Teresa thought she heard Jesus saying to her, “Come be My light.” Now it is true that Jesus said, “Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), but do you know any saint (any Orthodox saint, that is) who ever thought of himself that way? Quite the opposite.

Mother Teresa’s statement of her ambition was, “I want to love Jesus as He has never been loved before.” What? You really think you are going to outdo St. Paul, St. Peter, St. John, or His own mother? Perhaps it is telling that her sense of God’s absence began at very time she set out to accomplish this ambition. The Time article says, “The more success Teresa had … the worse she felt.”

If the portrait of pride in this book is anywhere near accurate – and the article in Time, perhaps unwittingly, cites several other apparent examples – it would indeed account for all the data. Most of us have experienced that pride is one of the strongest motivators in the world; it sneaks into us under humble-sounding words; it loves to be pious; and it will drive out the sense of God’s presence faster than anything else. “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (Proverbs 3:34)

The book should raise a question among Catholics whether she ought to be canonized. Although anyone who is honest has wrestled with doubt, and although the Orthodox, too, sometimes undergo a “dark night,” we have not known it to be permanent unless something is very much amiss. Is a soul that feels herself permanently bereft of faith and love, out of touch with God, and filled with darkness, loneliness, and “torment” (her word) a condition to which other Christians ought to aspire, much less a paragon of deification?

She herself thought it was. According to one of her confessors, she eagerly accepted his opinion that “the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus' passion” and this gratifying thought became, in the words of the psychoanalyst, “the organizing center of her personality.” In 1962 she wrote, "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.” As the article notes, “Theologically, this is a bit odd.” It is actually more than a bit odd.

The larger question this raises for all of us is: what is the difference between a “dark night of the soul” and real, if subtle, wandering away from God? If we don’t know it, or if our spiritual fathers cannot discern it for us, we’re all in real danger.

The book’s very existence raises a smaller question, too: how do these letters come to be published? Mother Teresa had written them to her confessors and confidants and had requested they be destroyed. (Her remarkable thinking was, “If the letters became public, people will think more of me — less of Jesus.") I don’t care if these letters weren’t technically “under the seal” of confession; that is a mere technicality, to insist upon which would be fatuous. The letters most certainly should have been treated as confessions, honoring her request. If you say she likely didn’t mean it about destroying them and secretly hoped they would be published some day, so it’s okay, no, it is not okay. All the more, in such a case, should she have been protected from their publication.

Bad enough that the Vatican should ever even have been made aware of the existence of these letters; worse that Rome apparently approved or instigated this breach of confidentiality, this stripping of a soul before the whole world, this comfort for atheists, this scandal for some, and this diminishing of her reputation among others.