atleast she did good work - what did you do? So what if she never was made the
Pope.
Umesh
Bartta Bistar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 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
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 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, 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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undead
Comment No. 776330
August 24 15:04
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?
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DomVine
Comment No. 776337
August 24 15:06
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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Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
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www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
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