Moving into darkness

Now that we've passed the autumn solstice, we're moving into days of more darkness than light in this part of the world. We feel it when we get up in the morning, and when the sun sets four hours earlier than it did at its summer zenith. I don't much like darkness, and we've had a lot of it lately with our rainy autumn. I don't remember ever using the kitchen lights during the September daylight hours as I did this year. We've moved into winter darkness in a bigger hurry than usual, it seems.

So is it a God-incidence that I'm reading Mother Teresa - Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (2007, Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-52037-9)? I am finding myself amazed by the tiny saried woman many knew as Mother Teresa. While I have often found myself rather irritated by the overly-pious accounts of the lives of what the Church calls Saints with a capital S, this account of Mother Teresa, taken mostly from her own writings (with a bit too much commentary from Father Brian Kolodiejchuk) is awe-inspiring.

I have always loved Mother Teresa. What isn't to love? A quiet, humble, in-the-background kind of woman, she unobtrusively got a lot done in her 87 years, founding the Missionaries of Charity and caring for the poor in slums all over the world. I can't count the number of spammy emails I've received that quote her in some way, and I read recently somewhere that there's a Mother Teresa film festival happening in Mumbai.

But reading this book, I get the feeling that the world has trivialized her too much by holding her up as an icon of holiness without really understanding from where that holiness springs. When she was 32, she made a personal, private vow "not to refuse God anything." Then she spent the rest of her life quietly listening for what God wanted her to do. Not that God told her in so many words. She did have a short period of time where she listened to a "voice" that asked her to leave her comfortable life as a member of a European religious community and start an order that lived with the poorest of the poor among the people of India. But once the Missionaries of Charity began their work in the streets, the voice became silent, and Mother Teresa found herself in spiritual darkness and emptiness, trying to "Come, be my light" even when God seemed absent to her.

The thing that really moves me is that her "darkness" went on for almost 50 years, but she remained committed to her work and to God. I don't know about you, but I would probably give up on everything if I had a long-lasting sense that there was no God, or that God had forsaken me. Mother Teresa struggled with her darkness for a long time, but eventually came to understand it as God's way of helping her to identify with the poor that she served, many of whom had no one and nothing for support. She embraced the darkness, and kept on "smiling" for the sake of Jesus, her one true love. She kept her sense of humour and joy in the midst of the pain of feeling alienated from her God, admitting at one point that though she was "married" to Him, "I sometimes find it very difficult to smile at Jesus because He can be very demanding." (p. 281). Only a handful of people had any clue that Mother Teresa felt icy, empty and alone when it came to God's presence; the rest commented on how she radiated that presence everywhere she went.

My friend Charleen is going through something very similar to Mother Teresa's darkness... only worse in some ways. Charleen might be feeling like Job did after losing everything. But Mother Teresa showed us that it is possible to learn to embrace the emptiness and darkness and live, if not in the light, in peace and joy. I believe that it's possible. And I hope and wish and pray it for you too, Charleen.