The darkest night of the soul
Mother Teresa's letters reveal decades of doubt
In 2007 a collection of Mother Teresa's private letters is published with the title Come Be My Light. The publication produces astonishment in some quarters and recognition in others.
For decades — most of her public ministry — Teresa experienced what she described as an interior darkness so complete that she could not feel God's presence at all. She wrote to her spiritual directors in terms that are almost unbearable to read from the outside: 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.
She continued. She picked up the dying. She ran the institutions. She spoke to audiences around the world about the love of God. And all the while, inside, there was silence.
She interpreted this darkness, eventually, as a participation in the spiritual poverty of the people she served — as a share in the desolation of those who have never heard or felt the love of God. The darkness was not the absence of God. It was a specific form of his presence: the presence of the one who cried my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.
The woman the world saw — radiant, certain, tireless — was sustained not by felt consolation but by raw faithfulness. She continued because she had committed, and because the people in the gutter needed her to continue, regardless of what she felt.
She is the patron saint of those who serve without feeling.
“The silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”
— Mother Teresa, private letter, c. 1950s AD
“My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don't answer; In the night season, and am not silent.”
Teresa picked up the dying for fifty years while feeling nothing.
This is the most important thing the publication of her letters reveals: that the most visible saint of the twentieth century sustained her ministry not on spiritual consolation but on faithfulness without it.
The felt presence of God is a gift. The absence of that feeling is not evidence of the absence of God. Teresa demonstrates — at enormous personal cost, across decades — that faithfulness is possible in the dark, that obedience does not require feeling, that love expressed in action is real even when the interior life is desert.
If you are in a dry season — if the prayers feel empty and the presence seems absent — you are in the company of Teresa, and David, and Jesus on the cross.
The darkness is not the end of the story. Keep going.