Mother Teresa's Feast Day

I grew up hearing now and then about Mother Teresa. She's now Saint Teresa of Kolkata (which I'll never be able to think of except as Calcutta — the habits of hearing of her as Teresa of Calcutta over a lifetime die hard). Anyway, here's a bit of her story.

After a short course with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, Mother Teresa returned to Calcutta and found temporary lodging with the Little Sisters of the Poor. On 21 December she went for the first time to the slums. She visited families, washed the sores of some children, cared for an old man lying sick on the road and nursed a woman dying of hunger and TB. She started each day in communion with Jesus in the Eucharist and then went out, rosary in her hand, to find and serve Him in “the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for.” After some months, she was joined, one by one, by her former students.

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The whole of Mother Teresa’s life and labour bore witness to the joy of loving, the greatness and dignity of every human person, the value of little things done faithfully and with love, and the surpassing worth of friendship with God. But there was another heroic side of this great woman that was revealed only after her death. Hidden from all eyes, hidden even from those closest to her, was her interior life marked by an experience of a deep, painful and abiding feeling of being separated from God, even rejected by Him, along with an ever-increasing longing for His love. She called her inner experience, “the darkness.” The “painful night” of her soul, which began around the time she started her work for the poor and continued to the end of her life, led Mother Teresa to an ever more profound union with God. Through the darkness she mystically participated in the thirst of Jesus, in His painful and burning longing for love, and she shared in the interior desolation of the poor.

Read much more at CatholicCulture.org which is where the above excerpt came from.

For me, I think of how brave she was to begin her ministry simply by walking to the slums and taking action. So simple.

I know from having to get up my nerve to visit my ailing mother-in-law who suffered from mild dementia and often didn't respond to conversation. You must take your courage in your hands to make yourself that vulnerable to failure, to rejection. I was able to do so only because of Jesus' prodding through a disagreement with a pro-abortion friend and through Bilbo's journey in The Hobbit. Yes, believe it or not. Such weird influences, but God uses what tools He will and I am supremely grateful for that.

I also know of the tremendous rewards I received in doing so. It is one of the reasons I cried through her funeral. I loved not only the woman in her prime, but I had been allowed to love the much simpler person she had become in her extreme old age and illness.

One of Mother Teresa's most memorable acts that always comes to mind is when she spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. She spoke from her heart. She spoke what we needed to hear.

I am so used to seeing the smiles on our people, even the dying ones smile. And Sister said: "This is the way it is nearly everyday. They are expecting, they are hoping that a son or daughter will come to visit them. They are hurt because they are forgotten." And see, this neglect to love brings spiritual poverty. Maybe in our own family we have somebody who is feeling lonely, who is feeling sick, who is feeling worried. Are we there? Are we willing to give until it hurts in order to be with our families, or do we put our own interests first? These are the questions we must ask ourselves, especially as we begin this year of the family. We must remember that love begins at home and we must also remember that 'the future of humanity passes through the family.'

I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given to drugs. And I tried to find out why. Why is it like that, when those in the West have so many more things than those in the East? And the answer was: ‘Because there is no one in the family to receive them.' Our children depend on us for everything -- their health, their nutrition, their security, their coming to know and love God. For all of this, they look to us with trust, hope and expectation. But often father and mother are so busy they have no time for their children, or perhaps they are not even married or have given up on their marriage. So their children go to the streets and get involved in drugs or other things. We are talking of love of the child, which is were love and peace must begin. These are the things that break peace.

Read the whole talk at Catholic Education Resource Center.

Just as illuminating is Peggy Noonan's article about what it was like to be present at that talk.

Later I was to remember this part as Mother Teresa’s carpet bombing. Then she dropped the big one:

I know that couples have to plan their family, and for that there is natural family planning. The way to plan the family is natural family planning, not contraception. In destroying the power of giving life or loving through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self. This turns the attention to self, and so it destroys the gift of love in him and her. In loving, the husband and wife turn the attention to each other, as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception. Once that loving is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily. That’s why I never give a child to a family that has used contraception, because if the mother has destroyed the power of loving, how will she love my child?

It was at this point that the senator turned to his wife and asked if his jaw was still up.

It was something, the silence and surprise with which her words were received. Perhaps she didn’t know that we don’t talk about birth control in speeches in America. Perhaps she didn’t know, or care, that her words were, as they say, not “healing” but “divisive,” dividing not only Protestant from Catholic but Catholic from Catholic. It was all so unhappily unadorned, explicit, impolitic. And it was wonderful, like a big fresh drink of water, bracing in its directness and its uncompromising tone.

That too is available at Catholic Education Resource Center.

There are so many people all around us who need our bravery, our willingness to be vulnerable and give of ourselves. Many of them are not poor. Many are our friends, our family, those we see every day. Today is a good day to look at our lives and see where we can follow Jesus' example, as did his devoted daughter, Blessed Teresa, and ask where we can show his love.

Saint Teresa, pray for us.

Deep Prayer and Pearl Diving

This discussion of deep prayer from Mother Teresa's Secret Fire (discussed here) has come to my mind continually since I read it some weeks ago. There is something about that idea of diving beneath the tumultuous surface into the calmer, deeper waters that makes distractions easier to brush off somehow.

The first means is to use silence. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence. We cannot put ourselves directly in the presence of God if we do not practice internal and external silence. (Mother Teresa)

Engaging in deep prayer is much like diving for pearls. Some minimal effort is required for a pearl diver to overcome his natural buoyancy, to arrive at the depths where the treasure lies -- and to remain there for the duration. In prayer as well, there is a kind of natural buoyancy at work, drawing us back to the surface. like the diver, we need some simple, persevering effort to remain there in the depths, where all is quiet and peace in God's presence.

A storm of thoughts and distractions may go on above us, but as long as we provide that minimal inner movement that allows us to stay below. the storms of distraction cannot touch us; they do not affect or interrupt our prayer. Whenever we experience turbulence, whenever we find ourselves buffeted by thoughts, it is a sign that we have been imperceptibly returning to the surface. We need only that small effort once again to return below, like the small kick of the diver's fins, and again we are at peace in an inward Eden. What this means for prayer, and our perennial battle with distractions, is that thoughts and distractions are no longer an obstacle -- we merely stay beneath them, consistently seeking this deeper "place of the heart."

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We need to create our own inner hermitage, an inner sanctum where nothing and no one but God can enter -- where God can abide alone, "face-to-face" with the soul. This is the motive behind Jesus' teaching: "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father... in secret (Mt 6:6).

Finding the "place of the heart" builds on the practice of establishing faith-contact with God at the outset of prayer. Before engaging in prayer, we first take a brief moment to enter into conscious and deliberate contact -- not with a God hidden above the clouds, nor floating on the mind's ruminations, but with the living God abiding in the depths of our soul.

Once we have taken this first step and consciously established faith-contact with God, we simply begin to move the focus of our awareness away from the surface, towards the center of the soul. We shift our attention from the level of the head to the level of the heart. There is nothing difficult or mysterious abut this at all. Though the "heart" referred to here is not the physical heart per se, there is such an intimate, God-made connection between soul and body that by shifting our focus inward, to a level corresponding to the are of the heart, we find ourselves moving towards a deeper level of the soul as well.

This also hit a chord with me because I have found that if I do not say my two customary prayers at the very beginning, then I struggle in prayer much more. I realized this some time before Father Langford's words put it into true focus for me. First I seek God deliberately, using those prayers repeatedly if necessary to calm my mind and soul so that I may attempt to duck my head beneath the surface and begin to listen as well as to talk.

Divine Thirst and the Ardor of Divine Love

From Mother Teresa's Secret Fire (discussed here) comes more about God's thirst for us being a sign of his divine love. This is deep stuff well worth contemplating. However, Father Langford makes it as easy as possible for us to understand. Here's a bit to give you an idea of what that might mean.

St. Catherine of Siena, the great mystic and Doctor of the Church, shared many of Mother Teresa's intuitions regarding the divine thirst. She speaks of the crucified Jesus as "slain with such fire of love ... as seems insatiable. Yet still he thirsts, as if saying: 'I have greater ardor and desire and thirst for our salvation than I am able to show you, [even] with my Passion.'" From her own mystical experience, Catherine could only describe the God she had encountered with her own analogies: as "pazzo d'amore; ebbro d'amore" -- as "crazed with love, drunk with love."

If we derive anything from the ardor of divine love described in Scripture, in the Song of Songs, in the spousal language of the Old Testament, or in the role of Jesus as Bridegroom of Israel, it is that in some inconceivable way, God not only loves us, but he is also in love with us. This profound mystery lies at the core of Mother Teresa's discovery. There is a definite eros in God's love for us, which must be correctly understood (as we shall see) but not discarded, lest we reduce divine love to mere benevolence. His love revealed in Scripture, even in the Old Testament, is a "passionate" love, a love Mother Teresa fully understood, appreciated, and made bold to proclaim: The boy and girl who fall in love with each other, that love is "I thirst." You have to experience it. Same thing -- we come to that conviction ... His love is thirst.

When we look at Jesus during His humiliating Passion & death we ask -- why all this? for what purpose. ... No one, not even Jesus could have gone through all that humiliating suffering if He was not in love."

This ardent love is not only the domain of the Son, who shares our humanity; its source is the Father. It is staggering to realize that the Father loves all of mankind with the same love, with the same magnitude and the same intensity, with which he loves his divine Son. Mother Teresa understood that it is God's nature to love this way, to love us with the entirety of his being, and that he cannot love us any less. For this reason she so often came back to the word "infinite," to clarify the nature of his thirst. "Jesus is God therefore His love, His thirst is infinite. ... [We are called to] quench this infinite thirst of a God made Man."

"I Thirst": A Window on the Heart of God

These thoughts on God's thirst from Mother Teresa's Secret Fire (discussed here) proved to be surprisingly enlightening during this advent, especially when we consider that we are waiting for God to come into the world in the person of Jesus. Here's a nugget to give you an idea of what hit me.

First of all, what does the thirst of Jesus tell us about God? The symbol of thirst is neither complicated nor hard to understand: As the burning desert yearns for water, so God yearns for our love. As a thirsty man longs for water, so God longs for each of us. As a thirsty man seeks after water, so God seeks after us. As a thirsty man thinks only of water, so God thinks constantly of us: "Even thehairs of your head are all numbered" (Lk 12:7). As a thirsty man will give anything in exchange for water, so God gladly gives all he has, and all he is, in exchange for us: his divinity for our humanity, his holiness for our sin, his paradise in exchange for our pain. ...

Since it would be impossible to give an adequate sense of the infinite longing in the heart of God in mere words, or theological descriptions, God chose to communicate this mystery in metaphor -- that of a burning, relentless, divine "thirst."

Mother Teresa was given a symbol to lift up before the poor that was entirely simple, yet many-faceted; simple enough to touch the hearts of the poor, yet deep enough to engage the intellect of scholars. The Holy spirit portrays God's longing in the most accessible language possible -- that of human experience.

Mother Teresa: Choosing to believe despite the darkness

I have long meant to share some of the sections from Mother Teresa's Secret Fire (discussed here) that have really spoken to me. This one is so well put that it essentially sums up Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul. Those who care to read more about that might be interested in this review of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. However, for those who do not wish to delve to that extent, this section of the book is enlightening. Here's a bit.

But before we move on to explore the secrets of Mother Teresa's interior life, we first 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. She was to be fixed to the hidden inward cross of the poor, and to be riven by the same interior anguish that Jesus himself had undergone.

But painful as her darkness was, theirs was the true night, the darkness that eats away at faith. In Mother Teresa's time, millions of Calcutta's street population drew their dying breath under the dusty feet of passersby, after having spend an entire existence deprived of any human evidence of a loving God. This was a tragedy not of God's making, but man's -- yet one that burdened not man's heart, but God's. This was the ultimate sense of Mother Teresa's dark night, borne in the name of her God and her poor.

But what of reports that suggested that Mother Teresa had undergone a crisis of faith, or worse, that her smile and her devotion to God and neighbor were little more than hypocrisy? 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, the triumph of faith's light that shines even in the darkness, for "the darkness has not ovecome it" (Jn 1:5).

The same letters that recount her darkness at the feeling level (not at the level of faith) testify, too, to her unshakable belief, even when she no longer sensed God's presence. Her letters reveal a supreme, even heroic exercise of faith at its zenith, free of dependence on circumstance or feelings. She consistently chose to believe, refusing to turn away from a brilliance once beheld, simply because clouds had covered her inner sky. No matter how long the hours of her night, never once did she suspect that the sun existed no more. Even in the deepest night of her inner Calcutta, she kept her course towards the Day Star, and never lost her way. ...

Mother Teresa's trial of faith is not without precedence in Christian tradition, nor without parallels in Scripture. Recall Jesus' challenge to the Canaanite woman, who, after begging that he cure her daughter, was seemingly rebuffed in the harshest terms. In both cases, Jesus used what appeared to be rejection in order to draw out the fullness of their faith, precisely by challenging that faith to the maximum. Jesus gave each one the chance to surmount his challenges one by one and to stand triumphant as a model for the rest of us. His appreciation of the Canaanite woman could have been addressed just as easily, two thousand years later, to Mother Teresa: "O woman, great is your faith!" (Mt 15:28).

As For Me, I'll Be Spending Advent with Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa's Secret Fire by Joseph Langford

This isn't a review because I'm only on page 91 of this 300 or so page book. However, I can tell this is one I'll be reading into Advent and sharing with y'all.

I feel as if I'm being haunted by Mother Teresa (or is that "hunted"?).

Not that other people probably don't feel as if they bump into Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (her "other" name) everywhere they turn. She is a saint for our time, one whose actions spoke to us more personally than any other about the preciousness of each human being, whether man gave value to that soul or not. She spoke also to our poverty of spirit in the West, where we may wallow in material riches but be bereft spiritually, bereft of any true love. Plenty of books have been written about her and doubtless will continue to be written.

In my own case, I have never felt particularly attracted to Mother Teresa. I have never felt like reading about her. Certainly, I have never wanted to know as much as I now do about her life and ministry. Oh, I acknowledged her saintliness, her goodness, and all that. However, I never felt drawn to her or her message in the way, say, that the author of this book, Father Langford did. Early on, he was drawn to a photograph of her, then to the goodness radiating from her work, and then to the words painted on the wall of the convent in Calcutta, "I thirst." Pondering these, he eventually met her and wound up helping found the Missionary of Charity Fathers.

I remember at my in-laws house long ago I picked up Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. I never had heard of him and had only the slightest acquaintance with the details of Mother Teresa's ministry. I had brought a book with me to read but wound up devouring this one. I actually wound up more interested in Muggeridge to the extent of noticing quotes by him and finding out that he converted to Catholicism due to his encounter with Mother Teresa.

Later I read Revolution of Love by David Scott. Honestly I read that only because I had become friends with David by that time and he sent it to me. Never has an obligation of friendship been more richly rewarded than the many ways I have since been able to see the crying need for Mother Teresa's influence in our society and in our world. That book is very underappreciated and I urge you to seek it out.

Like so many I was sent a copy of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light and I was definitely curious to read about a modern saint's experience of the "dark night of the soul" as St. John of the Cross called it. What I didn't expect was how it would expand my horizons not only about Mother Teresa but about simple human nature and God's love.

I looked at Mother Teresa's Secret Fire in The Catholic Company's list of items reviewers could choose and thought, "No way. I have read enough books about Mother Teresa, thank you very much." It took a very nice and flattering email from Our Sunday Visitor's PR person to make me rethink reading this book (yes, I am sadly susceptible to flattery just as much, if not more, than the next person).

Last night I was reading and came across this in her "Varanasi Letter":

Be careful of all that can block that personal being in touch with the living Jesus. The hurts of life, and sometimes your own mistakes -- [may] make you feel it is impossible that Jesus reeally loves you, is really clinging to you. This is a danger for all of you. And so sad, because it is completely opposite of what Jesis is really wanting, waiting to tell you.

Not only He loves you, even more -- He longs for you. He misses you when you don't come close. He thirsts for you. He loves you always, even when you don't feel worthy. Even if you are not accepted by others, even yourself sometimes--He is the one who always accepts you. ...

Somehow it clicked. I understood on a level that was hard to verbalize, hard to grasp fully. I connected with that feeling of "the beloved," of being newly in love and yearning to be with your beloved so much that it hurt whenever you were apart.

Shaken, I was thinking of this and began flipping through the pages of the book toward the end (something I never do). I came across Appendix Three which points out that Mother Teresa is merely the latest in a long line of witnesses to Jesus' thirst for us. St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Padre Pio, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and very many more ... even the Catechism of the Catholic Church ... all attest to God's thirst for us.

2560 "If you knew the gift of God!" (Jn 4:10). The wonder of prayer is revealed beside the well where we come seeking water: there, Christ comes to meet every human being. It is he who first seeks us and asks us for a drink. Jesus thirsts; his asking arises from the depths of God's desier for us. Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God's thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him...

I was further shaken. I never knew of this far-reaching testimony to the sheer depths of Love's desire ... thirst ... for the true fullness of reciprocated love, and all for the sake of those God loves. I suddenly felt very little. Not that I felt less. But little in the face of the overwhelming thirst of Jesus for each and every one of us. Including me.

There is much more than that in the first 91 pages alone and I do not want to rush this. Therefore, I present this as a long introduction to what I will be contemplating during Advent. Rest assured that along the way I will be sharing the nuggets I feel can stand somewhat alone.

OTHER EXCERPTS

• No One to Blame But Ourselves
• Choosing to Believe Despite the Darkness
• "I Thirst": a Window on the Heart of God
• Divine Thirst and the Ardor of Divine Love
• 10,000 Hours, Prayer, and Mother Teresa
• Just How Much Does God Love You?
• Deep Prayer and Pearl Diving