Chronicle No. 10

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Mother Theresa, Saint of Darkness

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What a bomb, when Mother Teresa's secret diaries were revealed to the press! She said there that for fifty years, she had lost her faith. She had doubted like an agnostic.

Twenty years ago, I was invited to Calcutta with street teams from Asia. I was supposed to meet Mother Teresa. Alas, I had to return in disaster because one of my young people was accused of murder. So I couldn't see Mother Teresa's smile, that bright smile about which she kept saying, "My smile is a mask."

She had indeed asked, and John Paul II had followed her, that her letters and notebooks be burned. So why were they finally revealed? Because these papers strengthen our faith. This is why the Church has ignored it.

Mother Teresa had added this very beautiful sentence: she feared that “people would think more of her than of Jesus”. She was very humble. The expression: "I am not Mother Teresa" (or "Abbé Pierre") has come into common parlance when we are confronted with a situation requiring elevation above ourselves. mother Teresa as an icon of unconditional and universal love.

We thought she was perfect. We would never have imagined it in doubt. Behind his luminous face, facing the immense and radiant extent of his action, his notebooks reveal a terrible night of faith… A night of fifty years! Sister Emmanuelle had said that she had known this suffering for three years… but fifty years!

Mother Teresa was beatified five years after her death, which is very rare, and she is running towards canonization, that is, she will be venerated by all Christians.

Doubt is not an obstacle to holiness. Benedict XVI said a short time ago, in front of 500,000 young people, in Lorette:
“Mother Teresa, despite all her charity and her strength of faith, suffered from the silence of God.”

The preacher of the pontifical household explained that mystics like Mother Teresa are the ideal evangelizers in our postmodern world where we live as if God did not exist. They arrived very close to the without-God, they experienced the vertigo of throwing themselves down. Mother Teresa reminds honest atheists that all they have to do is take a leap to cross over to the shore of the mystics.
Nothing at all.

In 1957 she wrote: "There are so many contradictions in my soul, such longing for God and continual suffering; I have no faith, no love, no zeal...Paradise means nothing to me: he is an empty place." She yearned for God, and she added: "I am perfectly happy to be nobody, even for God."

Fifty years in the love of Christ

These contradictions were experienced by other saints before her.

Mother Teresa said: "For me, the emptiness and the silence are so great that when I look, I do not see, when I listen, I do not hear." Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, close to her, confided: "I have never read the life of a saint where the saint lived in such intense and long spiritual darkness. No one knew that she was so tormented."

But let's not forget that she had very strong spiritual experiences. Despite these fifty years of desert, the unforgettable treasures she had felt in the love of God energized her fidelity. She would never have embarked on this road of love if she had not had these moments, these spiritual experiences. She believed without having proof of it, convinced that love is worth giving it everything.

She shared in the anguish of Christ in his passion. She said: "If one day I become a saint, I will surely be that of "darkness", I will be continually absent from paradise to light the lamp of those who are in darkness on Earth.
“Mother Teresa will be the saint of atheists and agnostics. Paradoxically, she is even greater, more convincing than before.

She consoles us for all the madmen of God who dare to kill in the name of God.

Guy GILBERT

 

 

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