Book Review: Come Be My Light by Mother Teresa

“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.”

When Mother Teresa’s letters to her confessors and Spiritual Directors were published in the book Come Be My Light, many people, Christian or not, were surprised by what had been revealed as her spiritual journey.

Mother Teresa started ‘the work’ of the Missionaries of Charity in 1948. She writes about her second call: “It was on this day in 1946 in the train to Darjeeling that God gave me the “call within a call” to satiate the thirst of Jesus by serving Him in the poorest of the poor.” During the two years in which she waited obediently for the permission of Archbishop Périer to follow this call, Mother Teresa experienced a close union with God in her soul: “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.”

She feels that God is calling her in a special way to serve Him in the poorest of the poor, to “satiate his thirst for souls”, to make Jesus’ love known to the least of the people. To wait for the permission to leave her convent was painful for her. Years earlier, at the beginning of her life as a religious of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (the Loreto Sisters) she had made a secret vow not to refuse anything to God. She continued to ask for the permission to follow her call and to go into the slums, but she waited for the official approval that came only two years later. “I am ready to do whatever I am told – at any cost. Ready to go now or to wait years. It is for you to use me, to offer me to God for the poor.” (letter to Archbishop Périer in 1947)

In 1948 she was finally allowed to leave the convent and go to Patna City to start ‘the work’. Young Indian women joined her and the Missionaries of Charity grow quickly in numbers. Mother Teresa and her sisters followed the burning desire “to bring Christ into the unhappy holes of the slums of the Calcutta poor and later on of the other places.”

Only a short time after she started her work, she started experiencing an immense inner trial. She felt refused by God; she saw heaven ‘empty’; she wasn’t able to pray or to reveal her suffering to others. “There is so much contradiction in my soul, such deep longing for God, so deep that it is painful, a suffering continual – yet not wanted by God, repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. … Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place.”

She continuously experienced a great longing for God and wanted to love Him more than He had ever been loved. She wanted to hide her sufferings even from God and smile at him, as she smiled at every person she encountered. She was afraid to attract too much attention to herself. Even the people who were closest to her did not suspect anything until the end of this interior torment.

Theologians recognize in Mother Teresa’s experience a classic case of what the scholars of mysticism call “the dark night of the soul” (see John of the Cross)

It took years to come to the point of accepting this dark night in her soul as a mystical part of her calling. “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 I feel 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. - Yes-more than ever I will be at His disposal.” (Mother Teresa to her Spiritual Director Father Neuner)

Why this trial? Why this long and painful suffering? There are different ways of interpreting the dark night Mother Teresa was experiencing.

Brian Kolodiejchuck, M.C., editor and commentator in the book Come Be My Light sees its connection with her calling to bring light to the poor: “Her darkness was an identification 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. Years before, she had been willing to offer herself as a victim for even one soul. She was now called to be united in the pain, not only with one soul, but with a multitude of souls that suffered in this terrible darkness. … She was now one with the “great crowd … covered in darkness” that she had seen in the visions she had at the beginning of her new vocation… By embracing their darkness she was bringing them to the light – Jesus.”

The darkness she experienced also protected her from the publicity she received, especially after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. “The interior pain that I feel is so great that I don’t feel anything from all the publicity and people’s talking.”

In his Article The Atheism of Mother Teresa (2007-09-01 www.ncregister.com), the Capuchin priest and preacher to the Vatican Curia, P. Raniero Cantalamessa, ofmcap, offers another key for a better understanding of Mother Teresa’s experience. To his mind, she went through the same experience that certain atheists, like Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot or Samuel Beckett lived. Cantalamessa calls them the “atheists in good faith”, who live painfully the situation of the silence of God. They experience the same existential torment and lack of meaning of everything. Mother Teresa expresses their suffering in unbelievable words: “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.”

But Cantalamessa also points out: “The clearest sign that this is an atheism of a completely different nature is the unbearable suffering that it causes to the mystics. Normal atheists don’t torment themselves because of the absence of God.”

What is Mother Teresa’s message for us, young modern Christians on the journey of our lives?

Many times we too want to ‘feel’ our faith and are discouraged if we don’t find fulfillment in prayer and peace and light in our soul. Mother Teresa teaches us that faith and trust in God is not so much about feeling, but about a continuously renewed choice of God and to do His will – “not to refuse Him anything” as she would say. Mother Teresa experienced deep struggles and her faith was tested over many years. She felt how weak she was and that she could say No to God one day. That was her greatest fear. “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.” In Mother Teresa we have someone who understands our struggles, our doubts and the temptation to say ‘No’. We can ask her to help us to be faithful in the dark moments of our lives.

Over years Mother Teresa didn’t feel the presence of God. But, as Kolodiejchuck points out, “she did have faith, a biblical faith, a blind faith; a faith that had been tried and tested in the furnace of suffering, and that traced the path to Him through darkness. Undeterred by feelings, she continued living by the faith she felt as lost.” Through her experience Mother Teresa can give us a deeper understanding of the spiritual ‘night’ we experience in our world and society - a society that more and more distances itself from God. She can give us the courage to go ahead, to be faithful and concrete in our love for God and be His light in this world today.

Birgit Oberhofer