*http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,294395,00.html*
Friday, August 24, 2007*
Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the
emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
*— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979*
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who has been put on the "fast track" to
sainthood, was so tormented by doubts about her faith that she felt "a
hypocrite," it has emerged from a book of her letters to friends and
confessors.
Shortly after beginning her work in the slums of Calcutta, she wrote:
"Where
is my faith? Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness.
If
there be a God — please forgive me."
In letters eight years later she was still expressing "such deep longing
for
God," adding that she felt "repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal."
Her smile to the world from her familiar weather-beaten face was a "mask"
or
a "cloak," she said. "What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can
be
no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html
Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 and was beatified in record time only six
years later, felt abandoned by God from the very start of the work that
made
her a global figure, in her sandals and blue and white sari. The doubts
persisted until her death.
The nun's crisis of faith was revealed four years ago by the Rev. Brian
Kolodiejchuk, the postutalor or advocate of her cause for sainthood, at
the
time of her beatification in October 2003. Now he has compiled a new
edition
of her letters, entitled, "Mother Teresa: Come be My Light," which reveals
the full extent of her long "dark night of the soul."
"I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness
and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul," she wrote at one
point. "I want God with all the power of my soul — and yet between us
there
is terrible separation." On another occasion she wrote: "I feel just that
terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God
not really existing."
Rev. Kolodiejchuk maintains that Mother Teresa did not suffer "a real
doubt
of faith," but that, on the contrary, her agonizing demonstrates her faith
in God's reality.
"We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us ... Now
we
have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and
for
me this seems to be the most heroic," he said.
The priest said that church authorities had decided to keep her letters
even
though one of her dying wishes was that they should be destroyed. In one,
written to a spiritual adviser, Michael van der Peet, shortly before she
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she wrote that: "Jesus has a very
special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great
that
I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves but does
not
speak."
The late Pope John Paul II, a great admirer of Mother Teresa, began the
process of beatification immediately after her death. This required proof
of
a miracle cure performed through her intercession, and in 2002 the Vatican
recognized as a miracle the healing of a stomach tumor in an Indian woman,
Monica Besra, who laid a locket containing Mother Teresa's picture on her
abdomen. A second miracle is required for the nun to proceed to
canonisation.
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