My brother sent me a link to an extraordinary article at Time entitled, Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith. The article speaks of a new book by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk entitled, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, in which Kolodiejchuk compiles a lifetime of letters from Mother Teresa to her confessors in which she reveals the darkness of her soul.

I have tried to explain this situation to others, and have often been misunderstood. The tendency of those that are not experiencing a “dark night of the soul”, a term coined by St. John of the Cross in the 16th century, often mistake such an experience as a lack of faith, or proof that a person does not believe in a personal relationship with Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not guaranteed a “feelings based” relation ship with our Lord, and indeed the dark night of one may be a week, while the dark night of another may last a lifetime.

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.–Mother Teresa

You are not so much in the dark as you think … You have exterior facts enough to see that God blesses your work … Feelings are not required and often may be misleading.–Archbishop Ferdinand Périer

I can’t express in words — the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me — for the first time in … years — I have come to love the darkness — for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness & pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a ’spiritual side of your work’ as you wrote — Today really I felt a deep joy — that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony — but that He wants to go through it in me.–Mother Teresa

I accept not in my feelings — but with my will, the Will of God — I accept His will.–Mother Teresa

The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on,…And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn’t ‘feeling’ Christ’s love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, ‘Your happiness is all I want.’–Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk