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“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.” — Letter from Mother Teresa to Rev. Joseph Neuner, Circa 1961

“Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” a book by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, who is overseeing her cause for sainthood, looks to be an intriguing read into the spiritual journey of Mother Teresa. The book is already No. 3 on Amazon’s bestseller list with its release set for Sept. 4.

Her doubts in her faith and the darkness and emptiness she said she felt for many years are revealed in her letters printed in Kolodiejchuk’s book. “I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul,” Teresa wrote. “I want God with all the power of my soul — and yet between us there is terrible separation.” In another letter she wrote: “I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.”

The book has naturally sparked much debate from both the religious and non-religious. Time magazine dedicated a lengthy article to the book this past week. Here are a couple of excerpts from Come Be My Light:

“Tell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my soul?”
— to the Rev. Lawrence Picachy, August 1959

Why did Teresa’s communication with Jesus, so vivid and nourishing in the months before the founding of the Missionaries, evaporate so suddenly? Interestingly, secular and religious explanations travel for a while on parallel tracks. Both understand (although only one celebrates) that identification with Christ’s extended suffering on the Cross, undertaken to redeem humanity, is a key aspect of Catholic spirituality. Teresa told her nuns that physical poverty ensured empathy in “giving themselves” to the suffering poor and established a stronger bond with Christ’s redemptive agony. She wrote in 1951 that the Passion was the only aspect of Jesus’ life that she was interested in sharing: “I want to … drink ONLY [her emphasis] from His chalice of pain.” And so she did, although by all indications not in a way she had expected.

Kolodiejchuk finds divine purpose in the fact that Teresa’s spiritual spigot went dry just as she prevailed over her church’s perceived hesitations and saw a successful way to realize Jesus’ call for her. “She was a very strong personality,” he suggests. “And a strong personality needs stronger purification” as an antidote to pride. As proof that it worked, he cites her written comment after receiving an important prize in the Philippines in the 1960s: “This means nothing to me, because I don’t have Him.”…

“Please destroy any letters or anything I have written.”
— to Picachy, April 1959

Consistent with her ongoing fight against pride, Teresa’s rationale for suppressing her personal correspondence was “I want the work to remain only His.” If the letters became public, she explained to Picachy, “people will think more of me — less of Jesus.”

The particularly holy are no less prone than the rest of us to misjudge the workings of history — or, if you will, of God’s providence. Teresa considered the perceived absence of God in her life as her most shameful secret but eventually learned that it could be seen as a gift abetting her calling. If her worries about publicizing it also turn out to be misplaced — if a book of hasty, troubled notes turns out to ease the spiritual road of thousands of fellow believers, there would be no shame in having been wrong — but happily, even wonderfully wrong — twice.

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The Associated Press writes that in the book, Teresa had doubts until her death.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who has been put on the “fast track” to sainthood, was so tormented by doubts about her faith that she felt “a hypocrite,” it has emerged from a book of her letters to friends and confessors…

…Her smile to the world from her familiar weather-beaten face was a “mask” or a “cloak,” she said. “What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 and was beatified in record time only six years later, felt abandoned by God from the very start of the work that made her a global figure, in her sandals and blue and white sari. The doubts persisted until her death.

The nun’s crisis of faith was revealed four years ago by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postutalor or advocate of her cause for sainthood, at the time of her beatification in October 2003. Now he has compiled a new edition of her letters, entitled, “Mother Teresa: Come be My Light,” which reveals the full extent of her long “dark night of the soul.”…

…Rev. Kolodiejchuk maintains that Mother Teresa did not suffer “a real doubt of faith,” but that, on the contrary, her agonizing demonstrates her faith in God’s reality.

“We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us … Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic,” he said.

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The Religion News Service also writes about the impact the book may have:

…The book will likely challenge the characterization many people had of Teresa as a simple, pious woman, said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who wrote the best-selling My Life With the Saints.

“I think that this is a real treasure for not only believers, but even doubters and skeptics,” Martin said. “I think it also makes her much more accessible to the everyday believer. It shows that even the saints struggle in their spiritual lives and that they don’t have it easier than we do. They sometimes have it harder than we do.”…

…Before 1946, Kolodiejchuk said, little was known about Teresa’s spiritual life. “She says in a letter, ‘I came to India with the desire to love Jesus as he has never been loved before,’” he said. “She was a woman passionately in love with Jesus.”

Yet no sooner did Teresa start her work in the slums of Calcutta than she began to feel the intense absence of Jesus - a state that lasted until her death, according to her letters.

“The paradox is that for her to be a light, she was to be in darkness,” Kolodiejchuk said…

…Catholic saints typically experience a “dark night of the soul” in the words of 16th-century priest St. John of the Cross, Martin said, but never as long as the “whole working life” Teresa experienced.

“She moves into the ranks of the greatest saints,” Martin said. “There are very few who have suffered such an extended dark night.”

But Martin stressed that Teresa’s belief in God never wavered - just her feeling of connection to Jesus, especially after her intense mystical experiences.

“It’s one thing to feel that God is not with you. It’s another thing to believe that God doesn’t exist,” he said.

How all this may affect her bid for sainthood remains unclear. Some say that it makes her even more impressive. Although her spiritual loneliness became known during the canonization process, Kolodiejchuk said that this is the first time the arc of her inner spiritual life is compiled in one place in her own words…

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