Mother Teresa's aridity of faith

Book about Mother Teresa's aridity of faith

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html
And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated.
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I am totally not surprised at the news that seems to shock so many others, that Mother Teresa had a nearly lifelong period of spiritual aridity that coincides exactly with her work as tending the poor and dying in Calcutta. Here is why.

Being close to Jesus and hearing God is not the same as being "the ultimate social worker." This is a colossal error that has developed during the liberalized laity and religious of the Church. The more one fills one's head and one's hands with the sorrows of the world, to the exclusion of lengthy sabbaticals of prayer and living life for one's own good and one's own relationship with God, the farther apart one can grow from God. God means for people to live fulfilled vocations, either personal or religious, and not to recreate within oneself an extended and inflated period of "trying to be Jesus" or "carrying the burdens of the world on one's shoulders." When one wallows, no matter how well intended, in the hardest aspects of life, everyone knows that "compassion fatigue" sets in, among both secular and religious care givers. The same is true when one turns into a societal workaholic so that your family partner - God - can no longer be heard. God was speaking to her, Jesus was speaking to her, but like the kid who plays his music too loud, her hearing was damaged by being saturated in the woes of the world, and not allocating the majority of her life to her relationship with God. This is an ego inflation that those who seem the most humble must guard against. Trying to be exactly like one imagines Jesus to be in a literal lifestyle choice is impossible and not desirable.

Thinking that you have a special mission to solve the world's problem is also an ego inflation. She fell into the very human tendency to measure herself by her achievements, rather than by her peace of mind and relationship with God. This is one of Satan's interesting spins. He tempts the good to think that they must be more and more and more "good" in what soon becomes a hamster wheel of endless carrying of the burdens of the world. (Is that not God's job actually? Are people called to love and obey God first, and love neighbor, and give charity and alms, and serve... but are they meant to be a slave to a societal cause?) I have felt uneasy about her for her entire life, because you could see that love of God was an effort for her. Remember: blessed are the poor of spirit. This is because if you empty yourself with humility, God will fill that space with holy spirit and grace. She crammed so much of unrelieved social work into her spirit, that there was really barely a finger's space for God to infuse spirit. This is why I've been against classic liberation theology and other dogma that tempts people to fill their hearts with exclusively works of social merit, thinking one is imitating Jesus, and what is instead happening is parched aridity of communion with God and the Holy Spirit. Who is holier? The average Joe or Sally who has a religious or secular vocation, devotion to community, love of the Lord and a tithed of time donation of service to social causes, or the person who swaps devotion to their community, love of the Lord, and care giving to their own self for a one hundred percent struggle against social forces and ills that no one person can hope to solve? I think the answer is obvious. Whenever I looked at her over the past decades, I was troubled by her struggle and how the model she was setting was not the way to communion and personal relationship with the Lord. Well, rest her soul.