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After completing her vows, Agnes took the name Teresa after Saints Teresa
of Avila (1525-1582) and
Therese of Lisieux (1872-1897). You know woman as the famed nun
who spent much of her life in Calcutta
caring for the poorest of the poor. “By blood and origin, I am
all Albanian,” Mother Teresa often said. “As
to my heart, I belong entirely to Jesus.”
In preparation for her beatification in Rome on October 19, every detail
of her life has been studied for
evidence that she is the great saint so many in the world believed
her to be.
In making the plea for Mother Teresa’s beatification, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk
has produced “The Soul of
Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life.” Drawn
largely from the letters sent to her spiritual
directors in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, a new portrait of Mother Teresa’s
interior life emerged. Mother Teresa
wanted the letters destroyed, but they were preserved nonetheless.
Father Kolodiejchuk’s work shows us a nun deeply in love with Jesus,
but whose faithfulness repeatedly was
tested and purified by an intense trial of faith, a true dark night
of the soul.
In Father Kolodiejchuk’s view, Mother Teresa’s life unfolded in four phases:
1. Her childhood and youth. From the time of Mother Teresa’s
First Communion at age five-and-a-half, she
felt her heart captivated by the love of Jesus. By age 12 she knew
she would be a missionary.
2. Her Vow. In 1942 at age 32, with the permission of her
spiritual director, Mother Teresa made a
magnanimous private vow to give herself to Christ without reservation.
She later explained that she “wanted
to give Jesus something very beautiful,” to “give God anything that
He may ask ... not to refuse Him
anything.”
3. Her Call within a Call. In 1946 Mother Teresa took a
train trip from Calcutta to a retreat house in
Darjeeling. On the trip, the realization came to her that Jesus
was calling her to serve him radically among the
poorest of the poor and to start a congregation of sisters called the
Missionaries of Charity. In letters to her
spiritual director, Mother Teresa revealed that this time Jesus’ call
was more than just an inner prompting.
He spoke to her through a series of visions, asking her to establish
a religious community that would be
dedicated to the service of the destitute and dying. Mother Teresa
always referred to this turning point in her
life as a “call within a call.”
4. Her Dark Night. Though Mother Teresa experienced a profound
union with Jesus in 1946 and began her
work among the impoverished, soon her visions ceased, and she experienced
a spiritual darkness that
remained with her off and on until her death in 1997.
Father Kolodiejchuk writes, “Mother Teresa’s acceptance of and living
in darkness was a specially graced
means of being united and identified with Jesus on the cross and of
satiating Jesus’ painful thirst and for
souls.” A letter to her spiritual director states: “Sometimes
the pain is so great that I feel as if everything will
break. The smile is a big cloak which covers a multitude of pains.
… I want to smile even at Jesus and so
hide if possible the pain and the darkness of my soul even from Him.”
Hiding her darkness from Jesus, of course, was impossible. But
she did successfully hide it from others, even
those closest to her.
“Mother Teresa learned to deal with her trail of faith by converting
her feeling of abandonment by God into
an act of abandonment to God,” writes Father Kolodiejchuk. “It
would be her Gethsemane, she came to
believe, and her participation in the thirst Jesus suffered on the
Cross.”
The childhood faith of Mother Teresa, her vow to not refuse God anything,
the visions from Jesus to reach
out to the dying and her enduring spiritual darkness reveal, as Father
Kolodiejchuk poignantly notes, “her
previously unknown depth of holiness and place her among the ranks
of the great mystics of the Church.”
Don Follis is an Urbana pastor and member of Vineyard Christian Fellowship
in Urbana, Ill. His column
appears on Fridays. Copyright © 2003 by the Champaign-Urbana
News-Gazette.