The Land of Unlikeness

5 Responses to “The Problem with Theresa”

1. 1 Janet Leslie Blumberg
   September 28, 2007 at 3:21 am

   Thanks for these thoughts about Mother Theresa, A.D.

   This is such a tough subject! I feel conflicted about her. Some of the theological commentaries on her experience have brought up profound spiritual insights, and yet I still feel a lot of resistance to almost romanticizing, in a way, her “spiritual dryness” and her intense psychological agony that went on for so many decades. (I feel the same uneasiness when I read Simone Weil’s Waiting for God, with her sense that she was simply too unworthy and inadequate to take communion or become a member of the Church, even though she wanted to.)

   These ecstasies of self-abnegation are accompanied by such intense psychical self-loathing and self-punishment that it worries me for these stories to be held up as spiritual models, without at least some qualification being made. Perhaps I am wrong. This is why I hoped we all could talk about her some.

   The mysteries of each human soul are far too complex for any of us to pass judgment on, and only God can truly look on the heart. I’m very aware of that. But at the same time, I can’t believe that God is ever in the business of tormenting and torturing us.

   When I finished reading one article about Theresa especially — I’ll find the link — I was reminded of Charles Williams on Dante, that in The Divine Comedy, God (in God’s love) finally gives to each soul the thing it desires the most. Williams says that this is a very scary thought. What do we really want the most? And what if God finally gives in to us and lets us have what we insist on having? (Even if we want to be punished? Even if we want to be punished more than anyone else ever?) It’s those doors, again, the ones we are always closing against God, to hide ourselves from the terror of being loved and the terror of being fully accepted.

   Theresa said early on that she “wanted to love Jesus as he had never been loved before.” Eventually, after decades, apparently, she came to accept her sense of abandonment by God, her sense of God’s absence, because a spiritual adviser explained to her that this was a great gift, and that she could actually enact her love better by doing God’s will without the emotional consolation of God’s presence. But what if that was in a way what she was doing all along, getting her wish, with a vengeance?

   Going back to Dante, there is the great Mountain of Christian Growth that lies in between the states of hell and heaven, and the first cornice pilgrims up that mountain must pass is the cornice of pride. After souls have been cleansed of their pride, they are much less weighed down, and the journey up the rest of the mountain is far easier. The engraving of Mary acquiescing with peace and joy to the angel is the “counter-example” to Pride on the first cornice. Mary knew very early that “a sword would pierce her heart,” but she seems to have had a spiritual joy nonetheless.

   Okay, so while I see and respect the admiring things people are saying about Theresa’s life, and while it COULD have been a deep spiritual sacrifice that she made, I just cannot believe that God is in the business of tormenting us. Instead, what about those deep patterns of pre-Vatican II harshness and self-abuse and guilt? And also what about those familiar patterns whereby so many women starve themselves and cut themselves and so on because they have internalized all that guilt and shame and the compusive need to punish themselves for wanting or acheiving anything good for themselves?

   This is such a complicated case, and I am admitting to having some misgivings, hoping to hear what others think. I have read medieval writings by martyrs before their martyrdom, and they were very concerned that they would take pride in their “special” degrees of suffering. They prayed for joy and humility when they faced death, and not to be special. They prayed to be spared from falling into pride. And of course medieval Christians said over and over again that despair is the archetypal form of pride, because it makes the self greater than God’s love and God’s ability to change us.

   Please, I’m not accusing her of the sin of pride, which would simply be to continue with the same harshness and punitiveness I’m worried about. The martyrs knew how insidious and ambiguous even our best efforts can be. But it seems that she did find it hard to allow herself to succeed, and that she needed a special authority (when she prayed for intercession from the pope) to allow her to FEEL that God was pleased with her ministry. These are very familiar patterns, unfortunately.

   I know personally the utter wretchedness of suffering deep depression and also that it is quite possible to be self-destructive in all innocence, without being aware of the fact in any way.

   As the Church, don’t we need to seek and to hold up psychological health, as well as accepting the beauty of extreme sacrifices for Christ? (There’s a difference between being able and willing to throw yourself between a truck and a child, so as to rescue the child even if you yourself are crushed — as Jesus did for each person) — and on the other hand, going around looking for trucks to throw yourself under….)

   On the other hand, if she hadn’t started her extraordinary ministry, so many would have gone without care and tenderness and food and so on. It’s easy for me to be critical, when I haven’t done anything compared to what she has done. The only reason I am raising these misgivings is that I worry that this new image of Mother Theresa might encourage already masochistic believers to suppose that God wants them to choose utterly joyless “duty” no matter how miserable it makes them, or even because it makes them miserable.

   I’m always especially sensitive to issues bearing on battered women, and on the way Christian women have so often been encouraged to endure battering and to accept what that does to their children, based on passages such as I Peter 2. It seems at times in her writings as though Theresa is being spiritually battered by God. Yet Isaiah says that God loves the woman who has been abused and abandoned by her husband, and will not abandon her and will enrich her life and give her “sons.”

   Perhaps Theresa is like so many Christian women down through the ages, without the knowledge or the medical help or the cultural wisdom or the support system to escape from their condition, and who endured it all, trusting and loving God and suffering unspeakably. If that were the case, then she is a saint and deserves to be declared one. But I hope that as the Church, we are also making it clear that God wants us to get medical help for depression and that God wants us to experience a capacity to enjoy life and to feel God’s presence. Sixty years is just too long for a “dark night of the soul.”

   Please take my comments as being offered in a spirit of genuine searching and not as derogatory toward her ministry or toward her sufferings, which clearly were enormous.

2. 2 Janet Leslie Blumberg
   September 28, 2007 at 3:26 am

   I don’t have that link, so here’s the piece itself, a very good one I think. - Janet

   The Torment of Teresa

   By Michael Gerson
   The Washington Post

   Wednesday, September 5, 2007

   What are we to make of Mother Teresa’s letters, collected in a new volume called ” Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” which reveal decades of spiritual depression, loneliness and doubt? Should this console us or disturb us?

   The pious answer is that these sentiments humanize the distant saint, showing that even the great have their struggles. But this underestimates the rawness and intensity of the letters themselves, which are in fact disturbing.

   In the 1950s she wrote: “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love — and now become as the most hated one — the one You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. Alone . . . I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

   This is clearly not an intellectual skepticism, a normal crisis of faith. It is a profound sense of abandonment. In September of 1946, then-Sister Teresa had heard a voice calling her to serve the poorest of the poor — what she interpreted as the voice of Jesus, asking her: “Wilt thou refuse?” But not long after this mystical encounter . . . nothing. In the long obedience that followed, there were no more spiritual consolations, no rewards of divine closeness, just interior darkness and silence. “I long for God,” she wrote, but find “longing and no love.” Having tasted the divine — like a single day with a vanished lover — God’s absence seems to her beyond the tortures of nihilism. Only a believer would feel this divine departure so deeply. Martin Buber called this kind of experience the “eclipse of God” — and it was made more terrible by Mother Teresa’s vivid memory of the sun.

   All of this was shocking to many who knew her, because she was constantly cheerful and smiling — a manner she called “the cloak by which I cover the emptiness & misery.” Rather than being hypocritical, this seems to have been peasant toughness. She often told others: “Pull yourself up,” “Just be cheerful” and “Keep smiling” — advice she followed herself. Such cheerfulness was not false but willed. And there is a kind of courage in losing hope without losing heart.

   Eventually, on the evidence of the letters, Mother Teresa made peace with her darkness, identifying her own anguish with the suffering of her Savior and the suffering of the poor. “Now it does not really seem so hard,” she eventually concluded. But she never regained the subjective religious experiences of her youth. “If ever I become a saint,” she said, “I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ ”

   There are lessons in this complicated spiritual life — that holiness has more to do with obedience than spiritual feelings; that faith can coexist with suffering and doubt; that sainthood can be harsher and more difficult than we imagine.

   But Mother Teresa’s sense of abandonment raises a deeper issue. Assuming, for a moment, that she was not self-deluded in her calling, what kind of God would set such a difficult path — ministering to lepers and outcasts for a lifetime — and then withdraw his presence? Mother Teresa herself seemed to struggle with this unfairness: “What are you doing My God to one so small?”

   There is no easy answer here, but the question is central to the Christian faith. Other noble religious traditions promise serenity, detachment from striving and release from the suffering of the world. Christianity, in contrast, teaches that grace is found in the worst of that suffering, and through a figure who despairs of God’s presence in his parting words. This anguish is not convenient — “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” is hardly the best religious marketing slogan. But for millennia this abandonment has offered hope that God might somehow be present even in shame, loneliness and betrayal, even on the descending path of depression, even in the soul’s hardness and doubt, even in the silence of God himself — and that all these things may be the preface to glory.

   Through her pain-filled letters, Mother Teresa offers this assurance: Even when all we have to offer is ashes, and all we feel is emptiness, something beautiful may come of it in the end. But her decades of lonely sorrow are not an easy source of comfort. And Graham Greene might have been speaking of this abandoned mystic when he wrote: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.”

3. 3 Scott
   September 28, 2007 at 8:36 am

   I’d like to hear what John ‘Christian Hedonist’ Piper would say about all this? [I say this a bit tongue and cheek.]

4. 4 A.D.
   September 28, 2007 at 10:54 am

   I have to admit I don’t think this is an issue of women, or anyone else, being battered by God. God loves us, its we who batter ourselves, and thus it was necessary for us to invent psychoanalysis. God has never been more present than in his absence (something which psychoanalysis is not unaware)–don’t Theresa’s letters read as a paraphrasing of the psalms, the one read this morning concluding with, “the darkness if my only friend.”? And its no great sin to surmise that such a great saint as Theresa (or perhaps King David) suffered from terrible pride rather than a terrible God. . .

5. 5 Janet Leslie Blumberg
   September 28, 2007 at 4:02 pm

   But that is exactly what I was trying to say, A.D. And I was asking, are we holding up a model of such self-punishment as an example of spirituality to be emulated?
   God is most present in God’s absence, precisely because that absence is so terrible. We need God’s presence. Do you think that most of those who want her sainted are thinking of her the way you are? Perhaps they are?
   But if your last lines are the case, then why isn’t this about a woman punishing herself just like other women have done? I wasn’t saying God was battering her. I am was saying that she needed to feel punished by God for reasons that are much different from the inward griefs that dirve other owmen into battering situations. I guess I wasn’t ver clear at all….