[BalaGire]

I have just finished reading an article in this week's Time Magazine about Mother Teresa.

The introduction :

"Her Agony
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?"

Apparently she was unable to speak about this absence of faith to her confessors in 1948 until one of them asked her to write down her confession.

This she continued to do all her life and these letters have now been published. In 1959 she asked that the letters she had written up to then, be destroyed but apparently they weren't. First question : I thought that anything revealed during a confession was not allowed to be made public.

Reading this article and the excerpts from Mother Teresa's writings I felt so confused. Was she a fraud? Or was she really a holy person who struggled on courageously in spite of the fact that she no longer felt the presence of Christ in her life? We all go through phases of doubt but she endured this state for over 50 years! There was only a short period after the death of Pope Pius in 1958 when she prayed to the dead pope for "proof that God is pleased with the Society" (I think she meant her Missionaries of Charity).

"And "then and there," she rejoiced, "disappeared the long darkness .. that strange suffering of 10 years." 5 weeks later she reported being "in the tunnel" again."

What do the fathers say about "dark nights of the soul"? Should we ask for proof of God's existence?

In 1959 she wrote : "What do I labour for? If there be no God - there can be no soul - if there be no Soul then Jesus - You also are not true".

Mother Teresa finally came to the conclusion that this "darkness" was the way God wanted her to share in some way Christ's agony when he cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

She also wrote : "I accept not in my feelings - but with my will, the Will of God - I accept his Will."

I realize this is a very difficult subject but, with the help of our Catholic friends on this forum, I believe that we could learn much i.e. why such a saintly woman had to go through such agony and the role of doubt in our religious life.

Effie