WHO AM I? WHO WAS HE?:

Godforsakenness: 'Finding one's heart's desire' (John F. Kavanaugh, OCTOBER 1, 2007, America, the Catholic magazine)

Mother Teresa was living with a “great loss of certainty”—about herself, about her relationship to Christ, about her fate, about her very God. The feeling of not having faith is quite different from not having faith. Otherwise it would not be so harrowing to the believer, who cries out with nothing but trust.

It would be good if all of us, believer and nonbeliever alike, could learn once and for all that whatever faith is, it is not a crutch. Sometimes in faith, you have nothing to lean on. Nor is the “feeling” or consolation of faith something we can conjure up on our own. If anyone had such powers of conjuring it would be Mother Teresa. So much for feel-good religion—that “opiate of the masses.” Morphine is much more effective.

The real story, the deepest subtext, in Mother Teresa’s “dark night” is not that God was purifying her. God was actually giving her her heart’s desire.

Every Missionaries of Charity community I have visited has a large crucifix with the words “I thirst” over it. It is that broken man on the cross that Mother Teresa most wanted to identify with, the same Jesus she could see in the most bereft and seemingly unloved of her brothers and sisters on earth. In one of her desperate cries to Jesus she wrote, “Lord my God, who am I that you should forsake me?” Is it possible that she could not see that her very words were the same as those uttered by the man on the cross she so longed to be with? Could she not realize that she had finally found union with the man who cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Perhaps it is best that she did not appreciate the intensity with which her prayers were answered. Freed from her darkness, she would have left him to his cross. Such can be the paradox of finding one’s heart’s desire.