Jewett Scholar Michael Novak

The past week, Christians and non-Christians alike have been e-mailing me about the meaning of Mother Teresa's nearly half a century of inner emptiness, as revealed by her own words in confidential writings to her spiritual directors, now gathered together as evidence in the process of canonization. Many of my correspondents had not known of Mother Teresa's long inability to sense the presence of God, and the inner agony in which this left her. All they had seen was her huge, broken smile, as if God's love filled her heart, when in fact her heart felt empty. Still she forged on, to bring tenderness to abandoned persons dying in the streets of Calcutta. If she couldn't find God, why did she go on believing in him? Why did she go on bringing love to the abandoned, when she herself felt so abandoned?

Some atheists, such as my friend Christopher Hitchens, now gloat that Mother Teresa was just an unbeliever like the rest of "us." But few atheists--and, alas, not many believers--understand the depths of the interior life of Jewish and Christian faith. They don't understand that one must fight an inner battle. Biblical faith demands putting childhood behind, and adolescence, and the busy-ness of young adulthood. It demands an appetite for bravery--for going into unknown territories alone, to wrestle inner demons, and a willingness to experience darkness, if darkness comes. Faith is not for those who seek only man-made pleasures.

I had one tiny reason for feeling especially close to Mother Teresa from the first time I heard of her. My younger brother Richard was a missionary to Bengali-speakers, as Mother Teresa was. But Richard did his work across the Bay of Bengal from Calcutta, in Dhaka, then part of East Pakistan. Two years after he arrived there, as he was setting out by bicycle on a mission of mercy during the cruel Hindu-Muslim riots of January 1964, Dick was knifed to death by a group of young men who seized his bicycle and his wristwatch. He was 27 years old. They threw his body into a river already thick with corpses.

The Little Thérèse

Dick's favorite saint was St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), a frail Carmelite nun, second only to St. Francis of Assisi as the most beloved of all Catholic saints. (I have only once in years of traveling around the world found a Catholic church without some depiction of her.) Thérèse lived for most of her adult life in utter darkness and dryness and abandonment by her divine Lover. She wrote an autobiography about her experience, and how it led her to interpret the heart of Christianity. So powerfully and clearly did she write that Pope John Paul II inscribed her name among the historic handful of "Doctors of the Church"--teachers so profound and so sweeping in their wisdom that they instruct the whole Catholic people.

The canonization of Thérèse in 1925 was at the time one of the swiftest on record. Miracles attributed to her care and her attention to the needy--which she promised during her lifetime to "shower down"--were too many to count. As early as the war of 1914, Thérèse was the favorite saint of French soldiers in the trenches, held by them co-equal with Joan of Arc. And so she remains today--this 24-year-old victim of consumption, who after the age of 16 never set foot outside her cloistered contemplative convent--with Joan of Arc Co-Patroness of France.

The kernel of Thérèse's teaching is often called "the little way," meaning that no Christian is too humble or too insignificant to follow it. No matter what spiritual darkness you find yourself in, choose as your North Star a tender love for the persons that life's contingencies have put next to you. Do not go looking around for more fascinating neighbors to love. Love those who are nearest. You cannot see God, even if you try. But you can see your neighbor, the tedious one, who grinds on you: Love him, love her. As Jesus loves them. Give them the tender smile of Jesus, even though your own feelings be like the bottom of a bird cage. Do not ask to see Jesus, or to feel him: That is for children. Love him in the dark. Love for the invisible divine, not for the warm and comforting human consolation. Love for the sake of love, not in order to feel loved in return.

The Dark Path

It happens that Agnes Bojaxhiu of Albania eventually became a missionary nun in Ireland, and chose for her religious name Thérèse, in the footsteps of the patron saint of darkness from Lisieux. In Spanish, the same name is Teresa, and St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), builder of scores of convents of Carmelite nuns all over Europe, was also an experienced traveler in inner darkness. Thérèse of Lisieux took the name in her honor, and followed in her way, as described in Teresa's books and in the traditions of the Carmelites.

For those who love God, that way is excruciating. They would like to feel close to God, but they find--nothing! Like her contemporary, St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila gradually came to see that if God were a human invention, and a human contrivance, then warm human feelings would be quite enough. But God is far greater than that. He is beyond any human frequency. He is outside our range. One must follow him without any human prop whatever, even warm and comfortable inner feelings. That may be why Jesus loved the desert as a place for prayer.

That is to say, our senses cannot touch God. Nor can our imagination encompass him. Our minds can form no adequate conception of him; anything the mind imagines is easily ridiculed. The God who made us and out of his infinite love redeemed us and called us to his bosom is divine, not human. As such, he cannot be found using human perceptual equipment.

This is not a new idea. Serious and devout believers from the time of Elijah and Job have known about the darkness in which the true God necessarily dwells. In order for one's soul to be ready to go far beyond any human contrivance, one must be willing to go out into the desert and the night. Thus we read of the prophet Elijah:

And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold, the word of Jehovah came to him, and he said unto him . . .

. . . Go forth, and stand upon the mount before Jehovah. And, behold, Jehovah passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before Jehovah; but Jehovah was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but Jehovah was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but Jehovah was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entrance of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:9-13)

Thus, also, Job, after he had been stricken with painful boils all over his body, and sat outside where others might mock him, scraping off the scabs, and unable, now, to find the Lord in whom he had placed such utter trust:

But if I go to the east, he is not there; or to the west, I cannot perceive him; where the north enfolds him, I behold him not; by the south he is veiled, and I see him not. Yet he knows my way; if he proved me, I should come forth as gold. My foot has always walked in his steps; his way I have kept and have not turned aside. From the commands of his lips I have not departed; the words of his mouth I have treasured in my heart. . . . Therefore am I dismayed before him; when I take thought, I fear him. Indeed God has made my courage fail; the Almighty has put me in dismay. Yes, would that I had vanished in darkness, and that thick gloom were before me to conceal me. (Job 23:8-12, 15-17)

The teachings of Elijah and Job were not so different from those of St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), the other great Spaniard who founded the male order of Carmelites, the practitioners of the Dark Way of Mt. Carmel.

In more than one book, but especially in The Dark Night of the Soul, St. John proceeded lesson by patient lesson to mark out for the novice at prayer the terrors yet to be faced in the desert, where human expectations were shed for those seeking to receive the divine. He vividly described the aridity and emptiness that the lover of God ought to expect, as he traded a child's faith for that of an adult, as he was weaned away from the sweet milk of infancy and obliged to live on hard, dry bread, for long stretches of time. Gradually, St. John of the Cross described what the North Stars are. And the dangers to watch for. And the characteristic temptations of every stage of the journey.

This is not an easy book to read. For one thing, it relies heavily upon the experience of the reader. It is intended to show the voyager of the spirit the ways through the night and the desert. How can anyone who has not known the night and desert recognize the symptoms and the signs? This is not a book for reading, but for experiencing.

Perhaps its main point may be expressed thus: Go, seek with love your Beloved, follow wherever he leads. Yet even when you come up to him you must anticipate that there will be no one to be seen. Your faculties are simply inadequate. Did you actually see, you would be destroyed. It is too much. Your bulbs will short out. Be prepared, therefore, to walk in darkness. Not at all in doubt; on the contrary, for the first time ever, aware that you are not now following illusions, but only the true darkling light of the true God. Anything else is human contrivance and illusion.

St. John imagines his soul as the bride, the spouse, eagerly seeking her Beloved for just one sight of him. This is his great classic song on the Dark Night, in eight brief stanzas, of which the following four are the most telling:

1. On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings--oh, happy chance!--
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

2. In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised--oh, happy chance!--
In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.

3. In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

4. This light guided me More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me--A place where none appeared.

The Teresian Darkness

It would be easy here to multiply texts from Teresa of Avila, the distant mother and guide of her young follower of three centuries later, Thérèse of Lisieux, meditating on this dryness, and surprised at how acute its pain. Let us take up only a few samples.

The memoirs of Teresa of Avila recount years of spiritual aridity and torment:

I may say that it was the most painful life that can be imagined, because I had no sweetness in God, and no pleasure in the world. . . .

I believe that it is our Lord's good pleasure frequently in the beginning, and at times in the end, to send these torments, and many other incidental temptations, to try those who love Him, and to ascertain if they will drink the chalice, and help Him to carry the Cross, before He entrusts them with His great treasures. I believe it to be for our good that His Majesty should lead us by this way, so that we may perfectly understand how worthless we are. . . .

It is certain that the love of God does not consist in tears, nor in this sweetness and tenderness which we for the most part desire, and with which we console ourselves; but rather in serving Him in justice, fortitude, and humility. That seems to me to be a receiving rather than a giving of anything on our part.

Of her own spiritual aridity, Thérèse of Lisieux wrote:

But during the Paschal days, so full of light, our Lord . . . allowed my soul to be overwhelmed with darkness, and the thought of Heaven, which had consoled me from my earliest childhood, now became a subject of conflict and torture. This trial did not last merely for days or weeks--I have been suffering for months, and I still await deliverance. . . . I wish could express what I feel, but it is beyond me. One must have passed through this dark tunnel to understand its blackness. . . .

Sometimes, I confess, a little ray of sunshine illumines my dark night, and I enjoy peace for an instant, but later, the remembrance of this ray of light, instead of consoling me, makes the blackness thicker still. And yet never have I felt so deeply how sweet and merciful is the Lord.

This is the context in which the new book by Mother Teresa of Calcutta must be grasped. These are her two "mothers" in spiritual growth and authentic Christian faith, in the light of the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. The decades of emptiness, darkness, and inner pain experienced by Mother Teresa, and honestly set forth in her private letters to her spiritual directors, follow in a long tradition. They are not really signs of doubt, although at times they feel like that. They are in fact signs of Christian adulthood, following in the only way in which illusions of human contrivance can be scraped away, as Job tried to scrape away the dry boils on his skin. And in which the truly faithful, like Job and Elijah, can find him whom they love in the darkness, while denying him not.

Then his wife said to him, "Are you still holding to your innocence? Curse God and die." But he said to her, ". . . We accept good things from God; and should we not accept evil?" Through all this, Job said nothing sinful. (Job 2:9-10)

It is from "human fabrication" that the darkness and the desert free a person. When God subtracts his gifts, as he subtracted Job's, it is not taken as punishment; Job knows his innocence, he knows his fidelity, even in the darkness and in utter suffering. He utters not one denial of his Lord. His soul stands firm beneath the pain.

So also Mother Teresa stood darkly in the presence of her Beloved, confident that, even unseen, he is best found where love for her nearest dying, suffering neighbor presents him.

In the place where he (well she knew Who!) was awaiting her--
a place where None appeared.

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.