Mother Teresa
With malice towards one & all
I have great respect for Mother Teresa, for the outstanding work she has done to help the sick, poor and downtrodden.
A new book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light has published her letters that reveal that she faced a deep crisis of faith in God, as mentioned in one of her letters written to Rev Michael Van Der Peetin September 1979 that “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and 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.”
The book also states that Mother Teresa did not feel God “in her heart or in the Eucharist.” Even though she was perpetually outwardly cheerful, she struggled fiercely with her faith. She compared her problems to hell and admitted that she had begun to doubt the existence of Heaven and God. “The smile’” she wrote, “is a mask or a cloak that covers everything. I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God, a tender personal love. If you were there you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy’.”

Spiritual silence

In an increasingly raucous world it’s interesting to read her views of silence as a great tool for soul search and piece: “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in the noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…We need silence to be able to touch souls.”