Time Cover Story - The Secret Life of Mother Teresa

Excerpts from Time, 3 Sept 2007, Cover Story "The Secret Life of Mother Teresa" by David Van Biema:

A decade after Mother Teresa's death, her secret letters show that she spent almost 50 years without sensing the presence of God in her life. What does her experience teach us about the value of doubt?"

"Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me? I call, I cling, I want - and there is no One to answer - no One on Whom I can cling - no, No ONe. - Alone... Where is my Faith - even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness and darkness - My God - how painful is this unknown pain - I have no Faith - I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart - and make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them - beacause of the blasphemy. If there be God - please forgive me - When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven - there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my soul." Mother Teresa


There are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividness and remain its captive, or without necessarily "conquering" it, to gradually integrate it into the day-to-day. After more than a decade of open-wound agony, Teresa seems to hae begun regaining her spiritual equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. The Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she turned to him with her "darkness", he seems to have told her three things she needed to hear: there was no human remedy for it (that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving for God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work for Jesus.






"I accept not in my feelings - but with my will, the Will of God - I accept His will." Mother Teresa

Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk thinks that the book may act as an antidote to a cultural problem. "The tendency in our spiritual life but also inour more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on. And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4.30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms."

Rev James Martin: "Everything she's experiencing is what average believers experience in their lives writ large. I have known scores of people who have felt abandoned by God and had doubts about God's existence. And this book (Mother Teresa: Come be my life) expresses that in such a stunning way but shows her full of complete trust at the same time."


For full article, get a copy of Time magazine 3 Sept 2007 or read online here:

Time Cover Story: Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith