22nd Sunday of the Year—C Cycle
Sir. 3: 17-18; Heb 12: 18-19, 22-24a: Lk 14: 1, 7-14
Many of you may be aware of the recent controversy about Mother Teresa.
The controversy comes from a new book titled: Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. The book is made up of letters from Mother Teresa to her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. Time Magazine devoted a cover story based on this book for its September 3rd issue. The controversy is about the secret letters Mother Teresa wrote that show she spent 50 years without sensing the presence of God in her life.
Before I read the story, and only heard about it in the news, I was taken aback. I thought, “Oh no, another scandal in our Church.” How could it be that Mother Teresa, was denied the experience of God’s presence, grace and love for the last 50 years of her long life of 87 years? This seemed shocking to me. Then I read the story and was relieved. For me there is no controversy. The story of Mother Teresa’s struggle, for me, offers hope.
Mother Teresa life was based on hope. Almost 60 years ago she was called by God to go to Calcutta in India. She arrived in sandals and a sari and began to help the poorest of the poor, the sick, the dying and the orphaned by herself with no support, no income, no shelter or food. She begged for food and shelter.
Today her Sisters of Charity order has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices, and charity centers worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, along with victims of floods, epidemics, and famine.
Mother Teresa preached a gospel of love and joy and said that Christ is to be found everywhere: in our hearts, in the poor, in the smile we give and the smile we receive. Yet, she writes this about how Jesus was absent to her: “The silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear…” For a half-century Mother Teresa felt no presence of God in her heart or in the Eucharist. Although she was cheerful in public, she lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In this regard, she wrote: “Tell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my soul.” She wrote of her ongoing spiritual dryness, loneliness and torture. She compares the experience to hell and at one point begins to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. Her public smile, she writes, “is a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.” She wonders whether she is deceiving others when she writes this to an advisor: “I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God—tender, personal love.
If you were there, you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.’ ”
How do we find hope for ourselves to experience the love of God when a saint such as Mother Teresa lived with such poverty of spirit?
It is true that most people experience periods of emptiness in their relationship with God in the same way they experience emptiness in relationships with loved ones.
The story of my aunt Teresa from Rhode Island is an example. For seven years she sat at the bedside of her husband who lived in a coma in a nursing home. For seven years he did not say a word. He did not respond to her in any way. Yet, she spent hours with him each day. She prayed the rosary with him and spoke to him. She got no response, but she still had hope. She still had love for him even though he could not return her love. And surely she knew he loved her even though he could not respond to her.
I believe Mother Teresa loved God and knew in her mind that God loved her, even though she experienced no intimacy with God in her heart. In other words, the experience of God letting her know she was loved was not the only way she could know she was loved. She could know God’s love in her mind even if it was not in her heart.
What I find hopeful about the recent news of Mother Teresa is that before the revelation of her experience of God’s absence, I thought of her as a saint. Someone beyond anything I could ever hope to be or even get near. It is as if she stood on a cloud above us all with her simple way of living with the poor, her Nobel Peace Prize, her power to influence popes and presidents and her absolute dedication and success in serving the least among us.
But now, knowing her real poverty was a great poverty of spirit, she seems more approachable, more human, more like so many of us who sometimes
go for long periods without experiencing God’s love or even the love of a spouse. In a way, she was even more dependent on God knowing that all her worldly success had no value without God’s love. After receiving an important prize in the 1960’s Mother Teresa wrote: “This means nothing to me, because I don’t have [Jesus].” Mother Teresa was not only more dependent on God by God’s absence, but was also kept humble by the absence of God in her life.
Well, what does this have to do with our readings for today? In our gospel reading, Jesus tells us that those who exalt themselves will be humbled and that those who humble themselves will be exalted. He tells us to go and take the lowest place. And with our humility we will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.
Note that Jesus does not say we will be repaid in this life. He tells us today that we will be repaid in our next life. He doesn’t promise us that we will experience God’s love or grace. God’s grace is a gift we cannot control.
We don’t earn God’s grace by the works we do. Even Mother Teresa could not earn grace. Not even her great humility was enough to demand God’s grace.
Yet humility helps us to find grace. Being humble about ourselves helps to get our egos out of the way so that when grace arrives we’re ready to experience it.
There is evidence that Mother Teresa struggled with the sin of pride. But she managed to keep herself humble so she would be ready to experience God’s love when it finally arrived. But that she still did not experience God’s love does not discourage me. Instead, it gives me hope that when I have such periods of emptiness, I’m not alone. My experience is in tune with the saints. Because the experience of Mother Teresa fits with a long tradition of saints such as John of the Cross who had what he called “the dark night of the soul.” Periods of the kind of emptiness Mother Teresa describes. Such periods are when we most deeply experience the sharing of the passion of Christ.
Even Jesus had a period of emptiness with the presence of God. While on the Cross he cried out in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Mt 27:46
The suffering of Jesus was offered up for the salvation of the world. Mother Teresa’s perseverance in the face of long suffering, in a way, was how she shared in the suffering of Christ. As she began to understand this more deeply, she later said to a priest counselor, “I have come to love the darkness.”
In the end, Mother Teresa accepted God’s will for her life and that was finally enough for her. Feelings and experience mattered less than fidelity, commitment and surrender to God. And what is evident despite her doubts about God is her absolute trust in God. It never wavered. She kept it to the end.
As with so many losses in our life, which can become our greatest gift, Mother Teresa’s loss of God may be her greatest gift to the world. Even greater than all she did for the poor. She lets us know that doubt is a normal part of a life of faith. That doubt is not an enemy. And that humility in accepting our losses while continuing to trust in God is what finally redeems us and may even make each of us a saint.