[CS-FSLUG] OT: Blessed (Mother) Teresa of Calcutta once said:

[Michael Bradley, Jr.]

On 3/13/06, doc <edoc7 at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > Found this quote yesterday.
> >
> > Two points I think are fantastic.
> > The line; "So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped
> > to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time,
> > to respect the life of her child."
> >
> > and that she calls calls abortion "violence" which I have never
> > thought of it in that term.
> >
> > Fantastic and makes me love that lady more and more.
> >
> > 'Mash
>
>
> I am no fan of the adoration of mere humans,
> but Mother Teresa did live a life worthy of
> respect ...
>


Those reading this thread might be interested to learn something not widely
known, something rather extraordinary, about the humble and holy little
woman we know as Mother Teresa.  After her death, when her personal writings
and correspondence began to be collected and examined in toto, it was
discovered that as she lived most of her adult life, loving God and serving
the poorest of the poor, she did so in the midst of a prolonged and
pronounced "dark night of the soul."  This revelation was a great surprise
to many, if not most, of the people who had worked so closely with her
across many decades.

There is an article in First Things magazine from back in 2003 that explores
this fascinating aspect of Mother Teresa's hidden spiritual life (though it
barely scratches the surface of the subject):


http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0305/articles/zaleski.html


Here is a short excerpt:


"Throughout 1946 and 1947, Mother Teresa experienced a profound union with
Christ. But soon after she left the convent and began her work among the
destitute and dying on the street, the visions and locutions ceased, and she
experienced a spiritual darkness that would remain with her until her death.
It is hard to know what is more to be marveled at: that this
twentieth-century commander of a worldwide apostolate and army of charity
should have been a visionary contemplative at heart; or that she should have
persisted in radiating invincible faith and love while suffering inwardly
from the loss of spiritual consolation. In letters written during the 1950s
and 1960s to Fr. Van Exem, Archbishop Périer, and to later spiritual
directors, Fr. L. T. Picachy, S.J., and Fr. J. Neuner, S.J., she disclosed
feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment. God seemed absent, heaven
empty, and bitterest of all, her own suffering seemed to count for nothing,
". . . just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not
being God, of God not really existing."

The dark night of Mother Teresa presents us with an even greater
interpretive challenge than her visions and locutions. It means that the
missionary foundress who called herself "God's pencil" was not the
God-intoxicated saint many of us had assumed her to be. We may prefer to
think that she spent her days in a state of ecstatic mystical union with
God, because that would get us ordinary worldlings off the hook. How else
could this unremarkable woman, no different from the rest of us, bear to
throw her lot in with the poorest of the poor, sharing their meager diet and
rough clothing, wiping leprous sores and enduring the agonies of the dying,
for so many years without respite, unless she were somehow lifted above it
all, shielded by spiritual endorphins? Yet we have her own testimony that
what made her self-negating work possible was not a subjective experience of
ecstasy but an objective relationship to God shorn of the sensible awareness
of God's presence."


What is surprising is not that she experienced a "dark night" of this kind
-- it seems that most (all?) maturing Christians do -- it's rather that it
lasted for so long and was of such intensity.  While carrying on and
spreading such a difficult and awe-inspiring apostolate (i.e. the work with
the suffering and dying) over so many decades, the Lord invited her as well
to carry this heavy cross.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us!  Pray for me that when I am full of
doubt and in fear in darkness, that I might always receive the grace to make
a firm act of faith, a firm act of hope, that I might pray still, and choose
to love God and neighbor as Jesus did and taught, and as you so faithfully
imitated Him.  I ask this through the same Christ, Our Lord.  Amen.

In the Hearts of Jesus and Mary,

Michael Bradley, Jr.

--
My home on the Net ::
   http://www.michaelsbradleyjr.net/

IC XC NIKA
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