So often, we think first of Mother Teresa's heroic embrace of poverty and service to the poorest of the poor. But her heroic service was inextricably woven into her equally heroic life of prayer. It was through prayer, her constant loving conversation with God, that God inflamed her heart with love for Him and revealed to her His Presence in all of creation. Mother Teresa's prayer life included receiving the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the recitation of prayers like the rosary, recitation of her favorite prayers, as well as meditation on Scripture, going on retreats, simple talking to God, and the prayer of silence, contemplation, in which God reached out to her and she experienced the deepest unity with God. It was in loving service that she saw the Face and heard the Voice of God in every person she met. She said once, "We may be doing social work in the eyes of the people, but we are really contemplatives in the heart of the world. For we are touching the body of Christ twenty-four hours."
Mother Teresa's decision to leave teaching to take care of the poorest of God's poor happened because of a life-changing train ride she took to Darjeeling to make a ten-day retreat. On the train ride, she heard Jesus speak clearly in her heart: "I thirst," and she felt God's overwhelming love for her. In St. John's Gospel, "I thirst" are almost the last words that Jesus speaks before his death on the cross. Father Leo Maasburg, a close friend of Mother Teresa and her spiritual director and confessor for many years, tells us,
"On that train journey to Darjeeling, Mother Teresa realized deep in her heart that God does not just love us in a general way, but that His words "I thirst" are the ultimate and supreme expression of His love, an expression of His longing for the love of His creation and for the salvation of their souls. Jesus spoke these words on the cross, for the Cross is the 'act' by which He tries to convince us of God's love, which is limitless and extends beyond death.
"This was the moment when Mother Teresa recognized the true core of her vocation. She used the ten-day retreat in Darjeeling to ponder this insight, and especially to reflect on the message she had received from Jesus. When she returned to Calcutta she was certain that her life was about to change. She was determined to serve Jesus in the poorest of the poor. And she wanted to identify with Him through a life of total poverty. She resolved to live a life of poverty among the poor, to possess nothing, and to trust entirely in God's Providence and guidance." (from "Mother Teresa of Calcutta, A Personal Portrait.")
By the time she left her convent to go out into the unknown, Mother Teresa already had an ongoing and intense prayer life. She had already pledged her heart to God alone, and pledged that she would never refuse God anything that He asked of her. In contemplation, she had experienced blissful union with Jesus. When she first decided to leave her convent (with her Superiors' permission) at first she had joyous visions of God asking her to help Him, to carry His Light into the world.
But, one year into that solitary ministry, interior darkness began. Doubting and second-guessing herself, tempted to self-pity, experiencing a great loneliness for God, she spent deep time in prayer and meditation on God and her ministry. Enlightened by her prayer, she wrote in her diary:
"Our Lord wants me to be a free nun covered with the poverty of the cross. Today, I learned a good lesson. The poverty of the poor must be so hard for them. While looking for a home I walked and walked till my arms and legs ached. I thought how much they must ache in body and soul, looking for a home, food and health. Then, the comfort of Loreto [her former congregation] came to tempt me. 'You have only to say the word and all that will be yours again,' the Tempter kept on saying ... Of free choice, my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your Holy will in my regard. I did not let a single tear come."
God rejoiced in and responded to her faithful perseverance. Others came to live with her and share her ministry. Eventually she founded a new religious order, the Missionaries of Charity, which, by the time of her death in 1997, numbered in the thousands. The Mother Teresa official Missionaries of Charity website tells us:
"In 1946, Mother Teresa received the inspiration to found the Missionaries of Charity in response to Christ’s plea that she make Him known to the poorest of the poor by her humble service of love. She envisioned a congregation of women and received her first companion in March 1949. The “little Society” of twelve members was officially established on 7 October 1950. The religious branches include the Sisters, followed by the Brothers on 25 March 1963, then the Contemplative Sisters on 25 June 1976, the Contemplative Brothers on 19 March 1979, and the Fathers on 31 October 1984.
"As a religious family the active and contemplative Sisters comprise one congregation, while the Brothers and Fathers are three separate congregations. All share in the charism of Mother Teresa to satiate God’s thirst for love by personal holiness and by working for the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor. For all of the Sisters, Brothers and Fathers, Mother Teresa is 'Mother.'
"For the laity, Mother Teresa established the co-workers on 29 March, 1969 and the Sick and Suffering co-workers on 13 January 1953.
"The Lay Missionaries of Charity were founded on 13 April 1987."
Colleen Carroll Campbell says of Mother Teresa:
"Mother Teresa won every honor from the Nobel Peace Prize to the U.S. Congressional Gold medal....She spent her days bathing AIDS orphans, emptying bedpans of homeless men, and picking maggots out of lepers' wounds, smiling all the while. She was the very picture of serene if unattainable sanctity." ( in her book "My Sisters the Saints.")
Today her Missionaries and their lay co-workers minister in 133 countries, operating hospices, homes for people with leprosy, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS, as well as soup kitchens, orphanages, counseling centers, and schools. For them, prayer has to be both spiritual and practical: wearing out both the knees of their habits and trousers in prayer, as well as wearing out the soles of their shoes in service to others.
A woman who, at the age of eighty-seven, exuded peace, joy, and a living flame of love, Mother Teresa died from heart problems on September 5, 1997, and was canonized by Pope Francis on September 4, 2016. Yearly, thousands of pilgrims visit her tomb in Calcutta.
Anyone would think that such a heroic saint would live a prayer life of continuous bliss and union with Our Lord, overflowing with spiritual comforts and consolations. But, once Mother Teresa began her heroic ministry to the dying and destitute, she began to experience what Jesus wanted of her, as exemplified in her diary section above: "to be a free nun covered by the poverty of the cross." As a young nun, she had yearned to drink the chalice of Christ's suffering to the last drop. And so, during all those years of heroic, hard physical labor for the poor, she spiritually - and equally heroically - experienced the darkness and inner torment and feelings of abandonment by the Father which Jesus experienced during his physical torments and his crucifixion. During one of her letters she speaks of this great inner darkness and spiritual dryness:
"When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven - there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. - Love - the word - it brings nothing. - I am told God loves me - and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Before the work started, - there was so much union - love - faith - trust - prayer - sacrifice - Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the call of the Sacred Heart?"
Mother Teresa was not experiencing a case of depression, or the "blues." She was also not experiencing a loss of faith. What Mother Teresa was enduring was what St. John of the Cross describes as "a specific set of spiritual trials that God allows in the souls of those who love Him so they can learn to love Him more....Souls already purged of obvious sins may find God leading them through four increasingly intense 'nights' to purify them of hidden sins and attachments, and bring them into closer union with Himself....Souls passing through this dark night feel the desolation that consumed Jesus when he cried out from the cross: 'My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?'"
(Campbell)
The Mother Teresa Official website of her Order confirms this understanding by telling us what was revealed in the letters to her friends which were only published after her death:
"But there was another heroic side of this great woman that was revealed only after her death. Hidden from all eyes, hidden even from those closest to her, was her interior life marked by an experience of a deep, painful and abiding feeling of being separated from God, even rejected by Him, along with an ever-increasing longing for His love. She called her inner experience, 'the darkness.' The 'painful night' of her soul, which began around the time she started her work for the poor and continued to the end of her life, led Mother Teresa to an ever more profound union with God. Through the darkness she mystically participated in the thirst of Jesus, in His painful and burning longing for love, and she shared in the interior desolation of the poor....
"Jesuit Father Joseph Neuner, who was a spiritual advisor to Mother Teresa, offered a key insight into Mother Teresa’s life in 1961. He said that Mother’s darkness was her way of union with Jesus and the 'spiritual side of her work.'
"'Mother Teresa often stated that the greatest poverty in the world today is to be 'unloved, unwanted, and uncared for' — and she experienced this with Jesus. In this regard, it is important to note that Mother Teresa did not have a crisis of faith — that is, a real existential or intellectual question, as if on an intellectual or volitional level she entertained the possibility that God really did not exist. Instead, Mother Teresa experienced a trial of faith and, even more, a trial of love.
"'Nonetheless, her faith, hope and love remained unshakable, even though she could not feel them. It was for this reason that Christ could share for so long and so intensely his most painful suffering –– the 'torments of his heart' — that he underwent during his agony and crucifixion. And because Mother Teresa was so united to Jesus, she also identified with the spiritually poorest of the poor, sharing their spiritual destitution.'"
For Mother Teresa to continue her arduous missionary work in spite of this profound inner darkness shows us what real heroic love is - to persevere on in doing what God's Will is for us in spite of inner suffering. We may not be at the spiritual level of experiencing a purifying true inner darkness of the soul such as St. John of the Cross describes. But - how often do we have to persevere in doing our daily tasks in spite of our personal inner darkness? it may be the darkness of depression or grief, of feeling unloved or unwanted, or of being rejected and misunderstood. It may be the darkness of intense anxiety about loved ones. But - as God's love is faithful to us, we know in faith that God calls us to continue to be faithful in love to the people whom He gives to us.
How often we fall short of loving others the way that God calls us to love! How often we are called to pray "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
And - it's important to realize that the closer we come to God, the more God will ask us to share the suffering of Jesus on the cross, his thirst for souls, his sense of abandonment by his Father.
Colleen Carroll Campbell interviewed Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a Missionary of Charity priest who published a collection of Mother Teresa's letters describing her inner darkness. During her televised interview, Colleen asked Fr. Brian,
"A believer is watching this show...trying to grow closer to Christ and thinking: Okay, so what if I were to achieve the heights and do everything I can for God. Is this what I have to look forward to? Because it seems, frankly, reading her letters, kind of terrifying."
Fr. Brian paused, and then replied, "The closer you get, the more you're going to be suffering. But the focus is not on the suffering. The focus and the most important thing is the love with which that suffering is accepted and lived. And that's what really shows through all of these letters, is Mother Teresa's heroic faith...and just a real, heroic love, which tells us that ...as important as it is to feel love, in the end, love is not in feelings. It's in the will: in what I do, how I act, and what I choose. And Mother Teresa is a great example for reminding us and teaching us, once more, what love is." (Campbell)
Here is one of Mother Teresa's favorite prayers which she used to pray and meditate on:
Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go.
Flood our souls with Your Spirit and Life.
Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly
that our lives may only be a radiance of Yours.
Shine through us and be so in us
that every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our souls.
Let them look up, and see no longer us, but only Jesus!
Stay with us and then we shall begin to shine as You shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others.
The light, O Jesus, will be all from You; none of it will be ours.
It will be You, shining on others through us.
Let us thus praise You in the way You love best, by shining on those around us.
Let us preach You without preaching, not by words but by example,
by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do,
the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear for You. Amen.
(CARDINAL JOHN HENRY NEWMAN)