Here is a nice Commonweal essay by my friend, Notre Dame philosopher John O’Callaghan, called “Her Dark Night.” A bit:
The media was agog that Mother Teresa suffered fifty years of anguish. Time, NPR, and other middlebrow oracles reported solemnly, but with great fascination, that Mother Teresa had a fifty-year spiritual drought during which God seemed to be absent. In the view of at least some observers, she was a closet atheist persevering in good works despite the fact that her original motivation had disappeared. What greater modern story of unbelief could there be-the Nobel Prize-winning nun, founder of a flourishing religious order, serving a God she no longer believed in. . . .
Among the Catholics I know the response was, perhaps predictably, quite different. At Notre Dame, where I teach, we have Catholics of all stripes: lefty and righty, pious and impious, and those who could best be described as impious-pious. Here the reaction to the big news about Mother Teresa was fairly unanimous: “Well, of course: after all, she’s a saint.”
. . . It is a sign of the fundamental health of the church that, amid all its scandals and spats, we all seem to know that the story of Mother Teresa’s desolation lies close to the heart of what the church is about: waiting in eagerness, and sometimes agony, for the return of the beloved who often seems to have left us. It is the greatest lovers who feel this agony of absence most acutely and will settle for nothing less than eternity with the one they love.
Faith, in the sense of fidelity, is neither emotional stability nor an attitude to a set of propositions. It is an adherence of the will to some good; it is constancy. No one has claimed that Teresa of Calcutta ever ceased to adhere to the object of her faith, whatever her mood, whatever Her doubts. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that she stood fast from the day God first bound her to himself. The depth of Mother Teresa’s sense of abandonment would seem to be a measure of her love-and of the strength of her initial union with God. . . .
. . . Maybe God withheld every consolation from Teresa so that she would not become preoccupied with her own undeniable holiness. Maybe he laid bare the extraordinary gift of faith he gave her so that she would look for the glorified Christ not within her own religious experience, but in the faces of the poor. Glory to God in the lowest. By giving us saints like Mother Teresa, he keeps us from mistaking spiritual comfort for fidelity.
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