Mother Teresa: the crisis and the scandal
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New Statesman - The squalid truth behind the legacy of Mother TeresaIt was the 10th anniversary of Mother Teresa's death yesterday, as shown on this BBC News article, but it's noticeable that everybody is concentrating on her supposed "crisis of faith", the spiritual emptiness she described in various letters that have been published, but which she wanted destroyed. (Umm Zaid has written a bit about this, with reference to Muslims who experience crises of faith.)
Christopher Hitchens called her agonised doubts "the inevitable result of a dogma that asks people to believe impossible things and then makes them feel abject and guilty when their innate reason rebels"; Catholic commentators explain it thus:
The argument goes something like this: when you feel the absence of God, that's actually a sign of His presence. The logic of spirituality is paradoxical: where emptiness lies is plentitude. One theologian tries to console Mother Theresa by telling her that a loving Jesus makes himself known by not attending to her suffering.
Mother Theresa says she was grateful for this consolation. She even wrote that she had come to "love the darkness." But as Van Biema points out, that didn't stop her torment.
Another possibility was that she was suffering from straightforward depression. However, her Catholic admirers still don't want to admit that there is anything wrong with the way Teresa and her order "cared" for the people they cared for, or the fact that huge amounts of money were sitting in bank accounts while the people in their institutions were in pain, that people are being tied to beds and trees, and that children are handled roughly and abandoned on toilets for 20 minutes. People make excuses such as that the Missionaries of Charity aren't a primary care organisation, of which many exist, including some run by the Catholic church, but an organisation dedicated to giving "solace" to the dying. So what excuse is that for an orphanage to be in the pitiful state described in the above article? And why do people make excuses for the Missionaries of Charity that they would not make for any other Church-run facility, like a Christian Brothers school or a home for unmarried mothers, let alone any state-run facility?
If conditions in Teresa's institutions then were as bad as these reporters claim, it's no wonder that they were not exactly sources of spiritual solace. Has anyone inquired into the spiritual state of the inmates?
Comments
Dear People:
The public response to the “revelation” that Mother Theresa was subject to doubts and long periods of spiritual dryness says more about the spiritual state of our culture than it does about her. People nowadays can't understand why she would remain a Catholic if she wasn't "getting off" on it. Where's the euphoria? Where's the payoff? If Catholicism was such a "downer" for her, why didn't she just move on? The idea of suffering for one's Beloved (human or Divine!) as being a high privilege is meaningless to such people.
(Remember Don Novello's character of Guido Sarducci, gossip columnist for La O'sservatore Romano on Saturday Night Live? In one of his sketches he talked about a plan to remove the cross from Catholic churches because "the logo is a downer." I'm not sure people could understand the humor of that today.)
It may be that God was calling Mother Theresa, who in "natural" terms was a "cataphatic" contemplative, subject to visions and auditions and sensible consolations, to a different vocation: that of the apophatic contemplative, who encounters God in the barrenness, mortification and dark night of all the faculties of the soul -- until he or she learns that the feeling of God's absence is the very SIGN of His presence. And she may not have fully understood everything that such a call might entail.
We mustn't forget that Christ felt abandoned by God too: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Clearly he never doubted God's existence; atheists never feel "abandoned by God." And I'm sure that Mother Theresa never doubted His existence either; she simply mourned His felt absence, like John of the Cross, and Rumi, and so many other mystics always have. So what else is new? What else is new is that people are clueless nowadays about the fundamentals of the spiritual life.
Sincerely, Charles Upton cupton@qx.net
Posted by: Charles Upton | September 7, 2007 6:12 PM
Hmm...
"His felt absence"?
What absence? Truly, He is nearer to you than your jugular vein.
However, spiritual post mortems on dead persons strike me as somewhat unseemly... Let Allah be her judge.
Posted by: Zanjabila | September 8, 2007 12:24 AM
Anyone who has ever felt 'abandoned by God' will draw great encouragement from Mother Theresa's acknowledgement that she had these feelings. It helps others who are having these same feelings to feel not so quite alone. God, thru these letters, is still using her to minister to His own.
Posted by: Jacqueline | July 21, 2008 2:02 AM