Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, postulator for Mother Teresa’s cause for sainthood, says that in Mother Teresa’s case, her experience went deeper than just a trial of faith. It is more fitting to say it was, “a trial of love.”

Mother Teresa of Calcutta has captivated a multitude of people and continues to do so, even though over ten years have passed since her death. This woman, who defined herself saying, “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus,” was very well known and loved. Yet, in spite of this popularity, she was capable of hiding, even from her own sisters, the most intimate part of her life: her relationship with God, together with the profound desolation and interior trial that she lived for almost her entire life.

All this has recently been made known, thanks to the September 2007 publication of a book entitled, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” written by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, postulator for Mother’s canonization. The book’s title makes reference to the very same words that Jesus spoke to Mother Teresa in 1947. 

This historical work reveals the previously unknown aspects of Mother Teresa’s interior life, evident in the correspondence she maintained with spiritual directors and superiors for almost 60 years. For years, she lived in constant “darkness,” feeling as though she had been rejected by God and yet, determined to “love Him more than He had ever been loved before.” Her firm and heroic faith, her fidelity, courage, and joy during this long and painful time of trial make her sanctity even more evident and become for us an example. The book also speaks of her identification with the poorest of the poor whom she served. She understood that the “darkness” was “the spiritual side of her work.” She also experienced the feeling of being “unloved, unwanted, and uncared for,” describing it as the greatest poverty that exists in the world today.

The book reveals the heroism of this small and fragile woman, who only after her death entered into the light. The painful night that Mother Teresa experienced in her soul, beginning more or less when she started working with the poor and continuing up to the end of her life, lead her to an ever more profound union with God. Through this darkness, she participated in Jesus’ thirst, in the painful and ardent desires of His love.

In the midst of that interior darkness that she experienced, as the entire world admired her radiant joy, Mother Teresa relayed her personal life to her spiritual directors alone, with the order that her letters be later destroyed. Thanks be to God, many of these letters were saved by the spiritual director who, with her permission, had made copies for the Archbishop and later Cardinal Trevor Lawrence Picachy. Following his death, among his many letters were found letters from Mother Teresa, as well. Fortunately for us, the archbishop refused to acquiesce to the request made also to him by Mother to destroy them.

What exactly took place in Mother Teresa, after she gave her affirmative response to the call that the Lord had made to her? In 1942, when Mother was still with the Sisters of Loreto, 5 years after making her perpetual vows, she made a vow to “never deny God anything,” with the condition that lack of compliance with the vow would be for her a mortal sin. Four years later, on the train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, she received the inspiration to begin working with the poorest of the poor. From what the letters reveal, it seems that everything began September 10. Jesus spoke to her through an interior locution. He asked her to leave Loreto and start working among the poorest of the poor. The first words that Jesus spoke to her made reference to the vow that she had made to him 4 years before. His words are: “Are you not going to deny me anything? I am asking this of you…you are not going to deny me this.” Clearly, she was not going to refuse to do something that she saw was God’s will for her. Jesus continued to speak with Mother Teresa over the course of many months. His last words to her were spoken in 1947. He told her, “Come be My light. I cannot go alone. They don't know Me, so they don't want Me. Come, go amongst them, carry Me with you into them. How I long to enter their holes, their dark unhappy homes.” In the months that followed, Mother Teresa, then 36 years old, experienced a profound mystical union. She would later describe it as, “He just gave Himself entirely to me.” 

However, in 1949, as she began the work that Jesus had asked of her, she began to experience a profound darkness in her soul. Interestingly enough, it seems that with the beginning of her work at the service of the poor, came a darkness that enveloped her soul. It was an arduous trial that led her to say, “There is so much contradiction in my soul, such deep longing for God, so deep that it is painful, a continual suffering — yet not wanted by God, repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. ... Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place.” This interior trial took unique form in the life of Mother Teresa, as it was not simply an initial stage in her process of purification that led her to a profound mystical union after a few years, as has been the case with many saints. On the contrary, it was to be for her a permanent state, until her death.
During these years, Mother Teresa had words that no one would ever have expected from her: “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. Jesus please forgive the blasphemy.” She experienced the overwhelming possibility that she could deny God: “I have been on the verge of saying, “No”. ... I feel as if something will break in me one day. ... Pray for me that I may not refuse God in this hour — I don’t want to do it, but I am afraid I may do it.”

She felt a deep solitude that seems to have made even her faith waiver: “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? [...]I call, I cling, I want, and there is no One to answer, no One on Whom I can cling, no, No One. Alone. Where is my Faith - even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness. My God...” What invaded her soul is not doubt, but rather the desolation of her soul, like Jesus’ cry on the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”.

In spite of all this, she was not discouraged in her activities, and wrote to her sisters, “My dear children, Without suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful but it would not be the work of Jesus, not part of redemption. Jesus wanted to help us by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony and death. All this, He took upon himself and has carried it in the darkest night. Only by being one of us, he has redeemed us. We are able to do the same: all the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution must be redeemed and we must have our share in it. I wish to live in this world that is so far from God, which has turned so much from the light of Jesus, to help them — to take upon myself something of their suffering.”
She never lost her faith nor her desire to fulfill God’s Will: “Jesus hear My prayer -- if this pleases You -- If my pain and suffering -- my darkness and separation gives You a drop of Consolation -- My own Jesus do with me as You wish -- as long as You wish without a single glance at my feelings and Pain.” On another occasion, she wrote, “If my separation from You, brings others to You and in their love and company -- you find joy and pleasure -- why Jesus, I am willing with all my heart to suffer all that I suffer -- not only now, but for all eternity, if this was possible.”
Reading her letters, it seems that this darkness stayed with Mother Teresa until her death, excluding a brief interval in 1958, during which she joyfully wrote, “Today my soul is filled with love, with joy untold, with an unbroken union of love.” It is not because her night was over that she ceased to speak of it, but rather it is that she has learned to live in that darkness. She not only accepted it, but she also recognized that it supposed an extraordinary grace for her. “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 earth.”

Reading these lines, one is profoundly moved to think that a woman that gave her entire life to serve the poorest of the poor, that seemed to radiate the love of Jesus in everything she did, that transmitted God merely through her presence, could live in such a profound darkness and desolation. What is even more extraordinary, is that she was able to live all this not for a year or two, but for 50 years, keeping it hidden from the public eye. Her silence is precisely what makes her night even more beautiful. She was afraid that, in speaking of her experience, she would call attention to herself. Even her closest acquaintances suspected nothing of her interior torment until the end. With the grace of God, she was able to hide all this torment under her perpetual smile. “The whole time smiling — sisters and people pass such remarks — they think my faith, trust and love are filling my very being. Could they but know… how my cheerfulness is the cloak by which I cover the emptiness and misery,” And on another occasion, she writes, “The smile is a mask or a cloak that covers everything.”

©HM Magazine No. 140 January/February 2008