The silence of God
Read the cover story in this week’s Time Magazine about Mother Teresa’s crisis of faith. A dark night of the soul that lasted 50 years. The article is based on a new book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. According to Time:
“The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”
The story provides plenty of fodder for reflection on the meaning of Christian happiness. The questions are endless. What is Christian joy? How do our feelings feed or hamper our faith? Can doubt ever be a strength? How narrow (and painful) is the door into the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus talked about? For a society use to the gospel of prosperity, where material success and emotional fulfillment are considered signs of grace, these questions are worth wrestling with.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
[…] To read more on this, check out The Time Magazine article and Lilian Calles Barger’s site, where I first saw the story. […]