Dark Passages
Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”
by Mother Teresa
Doubleday, 2007
(416 pages, $22.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Denyse O’Leary
Over a decade ago, almost unnoticed in the frenzy around the death of Princess Di, Mother Teresa, 87, slipped away. Like Di, she was an international icon, but unlike Di, she was sparing of personal information. Last fall, her letters to her spiritual directors—letters she had wanted destroyed—were published as Come Be My Light, in support of naming her a saint.
Written over the course of half a century, they illuminate the mystical experiences that led her to found the Missionaries of Charity, reaching out to the poorest, least loved people. They also first revealed to the world the personal cost.
The reactions were predictable: Atheists claimed her trials as support for their views. Christopher Hitchens, who has written much against her (“a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud”), insisted in Time that “she was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.”
Some Christians merely asked, “So? Who doesn’t have bad days?” But Mother Teresa had hardly any good days for fifty years, and that requires some explanation.
A Harrowing Revelation
Light is a harrowing revelation of a dark, dense, decades-long night of the soul, interspersed with biographical details provided by her postulator for sainthood, Brian Kolodiejchuk. The evidence vindicates neither Hitchens nor believers in the tranquil plaster saint for sale at the variety store. It reminded me most of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ.
Actually, Mother Teresa had a marked capacity for happiness. As a young nun in Calcutta in the 1930s, she sometimes felt like Jesus’ “spoiled bride” at Nazareth, far from Calvary. She was deeply troubled by the fact that her convent catered to Europeanized middle-class girls amid an ocean of misery.
Then, famously, on a 1946 retreat, she had a series of “interior locutions” (visions) in which Jesus (“the Voice”) showed her throngs of desperately poor people and pleaded, “Come, come, carry me into the holes of the poor. Come be My light.” When she hesitated, the Voice gently reproached her: “You did not die for souls—that is why you don’t care what happens to them.”
The Voice also warned of suffering, to be endured in blind trust: “You will suffer and you suffer now—but if you are my own little Spouse . . . you will have to bear these torments on your heart. . . . Trust me lovingly—trust me blindly.” Despite the radical nature of the call, the Voice suggested no risk of failure, only of disobedience.
Denyse O'Leary is a columnist for Salvo magazine, and co-author, with Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain (HarperOne).
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