[Assam] Saintly Mother Teresa wrote, “…..If there be God…..” ! Should not ALL people in Assam be given the opportunity to access materials to help them in such inquiries if they choose to do so?

Fri Sep 7 01:42:45 CDT 2007

 Was Mother Teresa an atheist?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2007/08/was_mother_teresa_an_atheist.html

Letters from one of the Catholic church's best known figures reveal the
crisis of faith that afflicted her.

August 24, 2007 2:30 PM | Printable
version<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2007/08/was_mother_teresa_an_atheist.html.printer.friendly>

I will always be grateful to Mother Teresa because, the only time I met her,
she said something so monumentally silly as to release me from all reverence
for saints. She clasped my hand and looked up at me with her bright blue
eyes, in which the sincerity was cranked up to 11, and said: "Please tell
your readers ... that contraception murders love."

Now we have learned<http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1655415,00.html>that
the world-changing sincerity felt fake from the inside, too: even as
she was receiving the Nobel prize, she asked her confessor to pray for her
because she could feel nothing when she prayed herself and no longer had any
experience of God. In a letter, written to Jesus at her confessor's request,
she sounds like an adolescent Dawkins:

*I call, I cling, I want ... and there is no One to answer ... no One on
Whom I can cling ... no, No One. Alone ... Where is my Faith ... even deep
down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness ... My God ... how
painful is this unknown pain ... I have no Faith ... I dare not utter the
words & thoughts that crowd in my heart ... & make me suffer untold agony.**

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.*

Nor was this written before she found her vocation among the poor. In the
period before she started her work in Calcutta, she was intimate with Jesus,
and did not mind telling her confessors and superiors all the details.
Jesus, she believed, had told her - she had heard his voice - to go and work
among the poor. The dialogue seems to have come from a bodice-ripper: Jesus
tells the nun, in her 30s: "You are, I know, the most incapable person, weak
and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use You for My glory.
Wilt thou refuse?" She responds as the heroine should: "I want to love Jesus
as he has never been loved before."

Her confessor, watching these efforts, observed that "[Her] union with Our
Lord has been continual and so deep and violent that rapture does not seem
very far". She was at last able to announce to him that "Jesus gave himself
to me."

And after that, almost all through the next 50 years, He never wrote; He
never called. Her friends all talked to Him, or said they did. But He was
never there for her. She just kept working, getting more and more famous and
powerful - and rich, if she had wanted it - while He ignored her every plea.
The only time her sense of despair and abandonment lifted was for five weeks
after Pope Pius XII died. She had prayed for a sign that God was pleased
with her work.

Told just by itself, the story would be interesting enough: a peasant woman
of extraordinary tenacity and drive moves halfway around the world, using
religion to lift her out of obscurity and give her a fulfilling and
important life, even though the faith and its consolations are taken away
from her when she gets the autonomy she really wanted.

What makes it really extraordinary, though, is that the letters have not
been revealed by one of her avowed enemies, like Christopher Hitchens, but
by the man who is responsible for promoting her
canonisation,<http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,1065775,00.html>the
Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk, who has prepared an edition of her letters as
part of the evidence that she really was a saint. "It will give a whole new
dimension to the way that people understand her," he told Time magazine.

But, of course, it hasn't shaken his faith at all. Perhaps a man in his
position would have to see her loss of faith, or at least its replacement by
willpower, as evidence of her true closeness to God. Even so, only the most
hardened atheists will not be shocked by the ease with which the Catholic
church has assimilated the news that its most famous saint thought of
herself as a hypocrite when she talked about the love of God. But if you are
a sufficiently hardened atheist, the story takes yet another twist. After
all, suppose religion is a purely manmade lie: could Agnes Bojaxhiu possibly
have struck a better bargain with anything manmade than she did with the
Catholic church?

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Comments

Comments have now been closed on this entry.

undead

Comment No. 776330<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2007/08/was_mother_teresa_an_atheist.html#comment-776330>

August 24 15:04<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2007/08/was_mother_teresa_an_atheist.html#comment-776330>

It's not an unusual experience amongst religious people, it's what St. John
of the Cross called 'the dark night of the soul.' So what?

[Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this
comment.<comment.is.free at guardian.co.uk?subject=A%20problem%20with%20http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2007/08/was_mother_teresa_an_atheist.html&body=Please%20tell%20us%20the%20problem.%20For%20our%20reference,%20internally%20this%25%20>
]

DomVine

Comment No. 776337<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2007/08/was_mother_teresa_an_atheist.html#comment-776337>

August 24 15:06<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2007/08/was_mother_teresa_an_atheist.html#comment-776337>

*GBR*

It's not really surprising. She was in the business of self-promotion and
celebrity. she used an absurd Malcolm Muggerdige documentary to promote
herself as a saint, even though she achieved precisely nothing for "the
poor", or for anybody else. She made sure that her orphanages were as basic,
uncomfortable and threadbare as possible. Donors would have given her
orphanages proper furniture, medical equipment, etc, but she rejected all of
it.

The woman was the embodiment of evil, and a self-publicising egoist. She
contributed nothing to the world other than lecturing better people than
herself on the evils of birth control.
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