Spiritual direction lesson: example M. Teresa

While shopping today I bought a copy of the Mother Teresa book “Come Be My Light.” I’ve blogged twice about the controversy already and will continue to do so because I think it is so important and pertinent to the extreme challenge of faith in these oversaturated modern times. While I plan to do a sequential read of the book, opening at random I found a letter that is for me one of those, “Yeah, that’s what I thought” examples. Here it is:

(February 1956)

Your Grace,

I want to say to you something-but I do not know how to express it. I am longing-with a painful longing to be all for God-to be holy in such a way that Jesus can live His life to the full in me. The more I want Him-the less I am wanted.-I want to love Him as he has not been loved-and yet there is that separation-that terrible emptiness, that feeling of absence of God…. (page 164)

Yikes. It’s alright that she wants to live in a way that Jesus can be fully expressed in her. (I think “be expressed” would be a healthier way for her to think of it rather than she is giving Jesus his life to live, but that may just be an awkwardness of thought on her part). And the more she wants something the less she feels wanted, and the description of her feeling absence and emptiness, those are all understandable of her state of feeling. But notice the huge incredible red light of error in thinking that is right in the middle of this paragraph, almost breathtaking in its presumption? She wrote, “I want to love Him as he has not been loved.” Goodness, the archbishop seems to have totally missed this incredible red flag in his reply. If I had been spiritual directing all conversation would have halted and focused on that phrase. Exactly how could she “want to love Him as he has not been loved?” Who has not loved Jesus so insufficiently that a human could fill the gap? Is she actually saying she could love Jesus more than God the Father? Than the Mother of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary? Than the Holy Spirit? Than those who followed him in the flesh even to their own crosses? By saying that Jesus has not been loved to the fullest and that she, Teresa, or any human could plug that gap is an amazing error of thought that in psychology we call “inflation.” It’s not sound theology at all. Um, no wonder she did not feel the extent of response she had hoped for. She’s just said that she wants to love Jesus the way no one else has, not even God.

Now I am not bashing her in the least. But this is so instructive that I must point this out, as my hair stands on end, of the misery that is generated when there is “an inflation” in one’s presumed relationship with God. The archbishop should have picked up on this immediately. He immediately went into prescriptive mode, the St. John of the Cross quotes par usual, without noticing the dingy inflated position that she had gotten herself into that was a large part of the cause of the pain! If I had been spiritual directing she would not have budged one step further until relieved of the incredible burden of thinking that Jesus had “not been loved” as much as she could love him. No wonder she was crushed. If one thinks that Jesus was unloved (and other writings of hers emphasize his poverty and suffering, ignoring the many examples in the Bible of well adjusted and happy day to day life) and that she is going to love him more than either celestial being or human, it is an untenable maladjustment and misunderstanding of Jesus Christ and God himself. Anyone who reads the Gospels and thinks that Jesus lived a life without love and with only the basest suffering and poverty is missing 95 percent of the Gospel content! My heart really goes out to her. Imagine if this burden of inflation and error had been lifted and corrected before she did her wonderful work. People, read and learn about why everyone needs the best spiritual direction and the dangers of thinking that one is “handling something for God” or “plugging a gap that God seems to not been able to do himself.” Yikes. I’ll write up more examples as I find ones that may be instructive. But join me in a little stunned silence about how anyone can believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and has who read about his life in the Gospels, and still concludes that Jesus “has not been loved.” What a profound and mortal (to the peacefulness of her soul) error to not have been caught so many years ago in the beginning of her faith formation. Oy vey!!