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Discover the profound truth behind Mother Teresa's long dark night and explore the mystery and meaning of her struggles with faith and despair. This book sheds light on her spiritual journey and offers insights on her enduring faith.
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Fr. Paul Murray, OP Mother Teresa died in 1997. Since that time, in slow and gradual leaks, astonishing evidence has emerged concerning her long dark night. This evidence (her ‘deepest secret’ as she called it), now that it has been fully revealed, has been for many people the cause of considerable shock and bewilderment. Questions unthinkable even a few years ago have begun to be raised, and not only by the secular media but also by a number of concerned believers. Is it possible, they ask, that Mother Teresa was somehow deceiving the world for years, feeling compelled to hide the truth of her distress? Or was she simply suffering from a form of depression? Or did she, in fact, actually lose her faith in the end? When, a number of years ago, I first began this work, my intention, apart from noting down a few personal recollections of Mother Teresa, was to offer a brief reflection on the mystery and meaning of the ‘darkness’ which she endured for so many years. That still remains my intention. But now, in the light of all the bewilderment and confusion which has arisen of late, I have an added hope: namely, that this small book might serve as the beginning of an answer to some of the most recent and most urgent questions concerning Mother Teresa’s dark night.
Fr. Joseph Langford, MC Emphatically, Mother Teresa’s dark night was not a crisis of faith, nor did it represent a wavering on her part. Far from being a loss of faith, her letters reveal instead her hard-fought victory of faith.
Rule 4: Spiritual desolation I call desolation all the contrary of the third rule (which was spiritual consolation), such as darkness of soul, disturbance in it, movement to low and earthly things, disquiet from various agitations and temptations, moving to a lack of confidence, without hope, without love, finding oneself totally slothful, tepid, sad and, as if separated from one’s Creator and Lord.
Mother Teresa “In my heart there is no faith – no love – no trust. There is so much pain, the pain of longing, the pain of not being wanted. I want God with all the powers of my soul, and yet there between us, there is terrible separation. I don’t pray any longer. I utter words of Community prayers, and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give. But my prayer of union is not there any longer. I no longer pray. My soul is not one with You. And yet when alone in the streets, I talk to You for hours, of my longing for You. How intimate are those words, and yet so empty, for they leave me far from You.”
Rule 4: Spiritual desolation • Darkness of soul, disturbance in it • Movement to low and earthly things • Disquiet from various agitations and temptations • Moving to a lack of confidence • Without hope, without love • Finding oneself totally slothful, tepid, and sad • Feeling as if separated from one’s Creator and Lord
Mother Teresa “For the first time in these eleven years, I have come to love the darkness, for I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth. Today really I felt a deep joy: that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony, but that He wants to go through it in me. More than ever I surrender myself to Him. Yes, more than ever I will be at His disposal.”
St. John of the Cross This dark night is an inflow of God into the soul, which purges it of its habitual ignorances and imperfections, natural and spiritual, and which the contemplatives call infused contemplation. Through this contemplation, God teaches the soul secretly and instructs it in the perfection of love without its doing anything or understanding how this happens . . . It is also evident that this dark contemplation is painful to the soul in these beginnings. Since this divine infused contemplation has many extremely good properties, and the still unpurged soul that receives it has many extreme miseries, and because two contraries cannot coexist in one subject, the soul must necessarily undergo affliction and suffering. Because of the purgation of its imperfections caused by this contemplation, the soul becomes a battlefield in which these two contraries combat one another.
Fr. Joseph Langford, MC As difficult and painful as her dark night became, Mother Teresa never allowed herself to become lost in her darkness. She never rebelled against it, nor against the God who laid it on her shoulders, nor against the poor of Calcutta with whom and for whom she bore it. On the contrary, she gradually came to understand its deeper meaning, and even to willingly embrace it for the sake of her God – who had borne that same agony for her sake in Gethsemane.
Fr. Joseph Langford, MC We need to be sure not to misconstrue her darkness – a darkness God allowed her to experience as a share in the inner night of Calcutta’s poorest of the poor. Mother Teresa was wounded with the inner wounds of her people; she bled with them and died with them. God was calling her to share the heavy, if forgotten, inner burdens of the poor, not only their material deprivation.
