The Bombshell Heard From Here to Calcutta: Mother Teresa not so sure about that whole God thing after all

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.— Mother Teresa in a letter to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979 ... just a few weeks before she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her charitable work.

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, consisting primarily of correspondence between Mother Teresa and pals 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 - how sweet), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

Although perpetually cheery in public, the Mother Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain.

In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing.

She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God.

She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything."

Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were there, you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"

"I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." said Rev. James Martin.

In another letter Teresa scribes: "Calcutta is hot as fuck and I'm craving some real pizza, like bad. Get me outta here!"

"I read one letter to the Sisters of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity, and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."

Naturally, the dude who wrote the book is basically trying to spin it like "isn't it so wonderful how she lived a lie for so long for the good of others" but uh, I think it's fucking crazy.

Read: Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith {Time Magazine}
Mother Teresa's '40-year faith crisis' {The Telegraph UK}





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