Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

The popular press it seems is making this claim. CBS ran a story this evening based upon a new book publishing Mother Teresa’s letters to her spiritual director. This information is nothing new. It was in the Catholic press many years ago (e.g. see this Zenit article for example). Here is what CBS reports:

“Where is my faith?” she writes. “Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … If there be God — please forgive me.”

Eight years later, she’s still looking for the belief she’s lost.

“Such deep longing for God,” she writes. “… repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal.”

As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she says, is a mask.

“What do I labor for?” she asks. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

This is what this means to the reporter:

Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit leaves her.

I have not read the context but if you read St. Thérèse’s Story of a Soul, you will see very much the same thing.Again, the context is important but here you read her pouring out her sufferings in her many years of temptation against her faith.

The popular press goes beyond its competence in trying to explain what she wrote.What the passages mean depends upon what you understand faith to be.Because the press exists in an essentially emotivist culture, I suspect that they equate faith with affective experience, i.e., feelings. That is no doubt what they mean by “the spirit” leaving her.

This is not faith. Rather, as Mother Teresa, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Thérèse of Lisieux and a host of others witness, the strongest faith is that which presses on without the affective experience. So what is faith?

Faith is both a human act and it is also content. The act of faith is one of surrendering yourself to God in trust in order to believe what it is that He reveals and to do that which He wills. The content of faith is that which God reveals through His Church and as taught by the Magisterium.

However, faith is also a theological virtue. In other words, it is a gift of grace that supernaturally strengthens one’s act of faith and it provides (usually) a supernatural certitude that one’s faith is true. Recall that grace doesn’t force nature, but it heals, elevates, and perfects human nature. Thus, this grace takes the human act of faith, which is necessary because without it there is nothing for grace to work on, and grace supernaturalizes it.

Time magazine also did a rather longer article, which did do more research. In fact, unlike CBS, the reporter has heard of the dark night of the soul. With St. John of the Cross, he says that though St. John suffered for 45 years, he eventually recovered. Clearly this is a psychological experience as far as he is concerned. Here is how time magazine described it:

I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,’” she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had “[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one.” Jesus’ hunger, she said, is what “you and I must find” and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world “that radiating joy is real” because Christ is everywhere — “Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive.”

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured Van der Peet. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.”

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

Of course, Time had to go to Christopher Hitchens for his expert analysis. I will spare you Hitchen’s response as you can probably guess. So why do these reporters say that she lost her faith?Do any of the statements above show that she lost her faith?

Let’s look at the act of faith.Is there any evidence in the above that Blessed Teresa chose not to surrender herself to God? No, she continues to long for God but she does not experience His consoling gift.Let’s look at her public actions. They were continually vivified by faith, even when she did not experience it. She did not surrender to doubt or she would have not continued to suffer the doubts. In fact, to the end she preached the gospel in every occasion. So she never refuted the content. This is heroic faith, to perdure against the greatest of temptations. In fact, as the Zenit article above, as does a careful reading of the Time article, indicates that those closest to her did not have a clue that she was undergoing this intense suffering but that she did not stop offering herself to God. This is Christian heroism.

So if she did not stop offering herself to God in trust, she did not lose this aspect of her faith.  Then how about the theological virtue, the gift? Do we say that God did not give her this gift if she didn’t experience it. Given what she was able to continue to do and the experiences of grace people in her presence received while she was living, and finally, given the fact that we believe that this gift of grace is given in the Sacraments which she continued to receive, it must be assumed that she never lost this gift of faith. So what was there for her to lose, if anything?

The only thing she lost was the experience of consolation, the affective assurance of her faith that was always there. This is a universal experience of those who experience the dark night of the soul. One might ask why would God ask people to go through this experience?

Well, we are made in the image of total, self-giving Love. That is what the Trinity is. Thus, we are made to give ourselves totally to God and then to others. With respect to faith, when we experience affective reinforcement for our faith, there is always a part of us that is motivated to give itself to God for the positive feelings that we experience. These feelings, in a real way, deprive us of the opportunity to make this total, disinterested gift of ourselves.

Those, who in this life, experience this dark night, are those who God knows will remain faithful and so they are given the great grace of embracing the Cross and Christ’s dark night (”My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me”). They are given the opportunity to most perfectly give themselves totally. They continue to love God–they give themselves totally to Him for His sake and not for anything that they receive in return.

The press is understandably ignorant of this and interpret her experience from an emotivist and utilitarian (i.e. that something is only good if it results in pleasure) world view. Emotivism tells us that if we do not feel something then it is not there. If we do not “feel” sorry, then we are not sorry. If we do not “feel” in love, then we are not in love. This makes feelings the arbiter of truth. It is a very dangerous error because while our feelings are good, it is our reason and free will that make us human. To surrender our freedom to our feelings is to deny our humanity and make us slaves to ourselves and almost defenseless against Satan’s temptations.

It is no doubt why this is “important” news to the mass media. It helps them to placate the burning emptiness the vast majority of them (polls suggest) experience for their lack of faith. They want to believe that faith is not possible and so they think that this is their assurance–if a great Blessed like Mother Teresa seems to have lost her faith then faith must not be possible.

There is a great difference between the emptiness that Mother Teresa experienced in her dark night and the emptiness that those without faith experience. Mother Teresa experienced hers in love, knowing but not feeling that she was united to Christ and she was given the grace to press on in her mission and her growth in holiness. She did not try to fill the emptiness with material goods but left it there to be filled by God.

Those without faith attempt to fill their emptiness with “stuff” of the world. Eventually they will experience despair of this longing ever being filled.They do not grow in holiness but regress into selfishness and look with disdain at those who tell them that faith and peace are possible. They cannot receive the grace they need for their healing and so they continue to take when their healing only comes through giving.

It is not surprising that Satan can turn a great life of heroic faith into an argument against its possibility. This is simply because love is misunderstood in our society. Only those who experience self giving love can understand how the dark night can be God’s gift to those who He loves most. Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us!