The "Dark Night" of Theresa of Calcutta

If you're a person of faith, and particularly if you're a Roman Catholic, you might check out The Anchoress. Her explorations of the divine and her expressions of faith are thought-provoking and deeply intellectual.

She's writing about the publication of the letters of Mother Theresa, and how some people - particularly those who want to scorn and tear down people who believe - are using them as evidence that she was some sort of atheist.

This interpretation simply illustrates the willful lack of understanding which is sadly all to common.

St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila have both written of the “Dark Night of the Soul.” Mother Theresa of Calcutta and St. Therese of Lisieux wrote on it, as well. It seems to be a particularly scathing sort of dryness and loss that occurs at the unbreechable chasm between human and divine love. The suffering is very great. The blessing seems to be in that one only gets to that point - to that dark night - when one has advanced so far in love and in faith as to have perhaps exceeded human understanding…when perhaps all there is left is the ability not to praise or to do, but to simply be, and to be willing - humbly willing - to simply listen and be led, even to where - like Peter - you would rather not go.

http://theanchoressonline.com/

 

I'm just not sure that "doubt" is the word for it, at least in terms of belief.

Rather, and this is just how I see it, her doubt is in relation to herself. She doesn't spend a second wondering about the existence of God. That's a given and she would spend no time on it any more than she'd comment on the sun rising in the east. It is what it is.

Rather it seems to come from a desperate search for the unknowable. In striving to develop a Christlike character she - and John Paul II and you and I - are fated to fall short. But she and the saints went so much farther than the rest of us, right up to the brink of that "unbreechable chasm" that separates us from the divine.