Dark Night of the Soul?

Last night, I finally read Time magazine’s recent cover story on Mother Teresa.

The principle subject of the piece is not Teresa’s canonization, life story, nor even her great work among the poor but rather, her doubt. Papers and letters recently made public, paint a portrait of a woman of faith who had none; a woman the world thought close to God whose God was abysmally and chronically absent. Teresa’s torment is evident in her writings and one is struck by the stunning irony of it all. She was the saint without faith.

 

One has to question the motivation (not to mention the morality) of the Church and of trusted advisors who against her expressed wish to destroy the papers upon her death have instead chosen to publish them. The papers are startling in their revelatory descriptions of the state of Mother Teresa’s interior castles; bereft, hollow and tortuously empty:

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

In the Time article the previous passage is followed by a notation, which reads “addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated.” It seems less a prayer than a desperate experiment suggested by an advisor; that if she pretended God was there, He might actually appear.

In almost all of the world’s religions there is the acknowledgement of a phenomenon which affirms that emptiness and darkness may serve as vehicles to spiritual fulfillment. This phenomenon has many names in the many traditions; kenosis, sunyata, the Via Negativa. Simone Weil, the 20th century Christian mystic maintained that through affliction, the experience of abandonment by God may indeed work towards bringing God more sharply into focus; may in fact result in the experience of divine intimacy. Like the beloved who is on vacation and whose qualities become more vivid and more endearing in the memory of the lover, the memory of an absent God induces greater longing and invokes a more intimate divine presence. But ultimately, even for Weil, the beloved does return. For Saint John of the Cross who first used the phrase “dark night of the soul,” the “night” is a phase of spiritual growth, a phase that is marked by suffering, but a phase that passes. The experience of the absence of God in Teresa’s life spanned a period of almost 50 years and seems not to have changed even before death. Her Beloved never returned.

When does one concede that almost 50 years of spiritual desert, absence of faith, doubt in the existence of God, and the presence of Christ signify no longer a “dark night” but rather a perpetual condition of the soul? Night passes. Dawn comes. A fifty year night is hardly a night at all. It is an existential nightmare, particularly for one whose appearance in the world is in direct contradiction to her internal reality; the nightmare, which in Teresa’s own words was marked by the terrible realization of her own deceptive persona:

 

"The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Time magazine

I am not without sympathy for Teresa’s spiritual torture. That she obviously suffered arouses pity and compassion. I am however, not sympathetic to, nor am I convinced by those who would nonetheless interpret Teresa’s spiritual emptiness as a further indication of her “holiness,” and “sanctity.” I am not convinced by those who would insist that the absence of God in her life is ironic evidence of the presence of God in her life. I am instead reminded of the post-Holocaust theologian who argued that God’s “hiddenness” at Auschwitz was proof of God’s existence. And of Karl Rahner’s famous (or infamous) “anonymous Christian,” the title given to his claim that everyone is a Christian, they just don’t know it yet. I am very much aware of the presence of paradox in the field of religion, but in order for a paradox to be accepted it must somehow have the capacity to clear the hurdle of absurdity. It must somehow fill in the space where the contradiction might be held in believable tension, if not suspension.

 

Neither would I deny that the continuation of her work in the midst of such spiritual destitution was heroic in its persistence and determination. But if one would argue that the absence of God, while yet ministering to the poor are indications of holiness and saintliness, then how different is she from the thousands of others who commit their lives to a cause, who sacrifice body and “soul” in the service of others and who do so in living conditions from which most of us would flee? How different is she from those who also do so without the presence of faith and the experience of God (and yet, who do not claim God as their inspiration)? If a life of service in the absence of faith is grounds for beatification and canonization, then the litany of saints must surely be increased a hundred-fold.

And if, in the final stages of canonization the  requisite miracles needed forsainthood indeed be confirmed, upon whose faith did the miraculous events depend? Upon Teresa’s? Or upon those who had faith in Teresa?

 

I have never known of a saint whose principle spiritual characteristic was lack of faith. Perhaps it is time for one. Such a canonization might just crack the door open for the rest of us.