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| Book reveals Mother Teresa's crisis |
| A new book being released ahead of Mother Teresa's 10th death anniversary shows that she went through a crisis of faith for nearly half her life.
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| INDIA
, 3-September-2007
6:28:58 AM |
| A new book being released ahead of Mother Teresa's 10th death anniversary shows that she went through a crisis of faith for nearly half her life.
The book, which is titled Come Be My Light, is a collection of 40-odd letters written by Mother Teresa to her spiritual guides through the years.
The letters express that for 40 years of her 87-year-long life, Mother Teresa could not feel the presence of God.
They show that for almost half her life, Mother Teresa went through a spiritual torment that would have driven most ordinary mortals to abandon their faith.
For instance, in 1979, Mother Teresa wrote, ''The silence is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves in prayer but does not speak.''
''First time when I read some of her letters on this matter, I was very surprised that she went through all this and we knew nothing. And the fact that she went through this immediately made me believe she was a great saint, like Jesus on the cross.''
''He also felt the same thing, abandoned by the Father. Mother also felt abandoned by the Father, but she did not stop believing in him, she did not stop loving him, she did not stop doing his will,'' said Sister Nirmala, Sister Superior, Missionaries of Charity.
For the layman, such as Hiranath Das who has been a volunteer at Nirmal Hriday - Mother Teresa's home for the dying - for 30 years, this spiritual crisis is only human.
''Obviously there were ups and downs. She possibly felt she wanted to do things, but she couldn't do them. There were frustrations like we all feel sometime. As I said, she was a superwoman but she was a woman after all - a human being,'' said Hiranath Das.
But in Christian spirituality, there is a long history of the kind of spiritual crisis that had Mother Teresa in its grip.
It is called the dark night of the soul - a phrase first used by a 16th century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross.
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