Media fascination

….with Mother Teresa. Just returning from weekend travel, I turned on the news and the story of the moment is Mother Teresa….and her ‘crisis of faith’…..still.

This is “pack journalism” in action.

Time has made it the cover story this week. It starts off with this:

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

So, if you reflect on that for a moment, you realize the powerful witness of the woman the world knew and loved as the saint of the streets and gutters, who tended the poorest of the poor, who exemplified the love of God better than most of us, who…..what? In her private time and inner life suffered excruciating desolation, spiritual dryness, wrenching inner struggles?

Wow. How much more a saint she seems when you realize what she had to overcome.

But the media are fascinated with the fact that she struggled. They must think sainthood is only for the untried and untested.

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain.

In the spiritual life, that’s known as the “dark night of the soul“, made known and famous by the amazing St. John of the Cross.

St. John of the Cross depicts the “dark night of the soul” as “an inflowing of God into the soul, which purges it from its ignorances and imperfections, habitual, natural, and spiritual, and which is called by contemplatives infused contemplation or mystical theology.” The phrase “dark night of the soul” has since become a reference to the state of intense personal spiritual struggle including the experience of utter hopelessness and isolation.

St. Therese of Lisieux experienced terrible darkness and doubt for a period during her illness, when she doubted everything. It’s unimagineable agony, and overcoming it takes uncommon holiness.

That’s a foreign concept to the modern media. So they continue to treat this book, about her private writings, as a scandal. Especially since she didn’t want the papers released.

This has already come up in an earlier book this year. She didn’t want her private papers released because she didn’t want the attention that would attract by the world’s media. Which turned out to be prophetic….