![[INDIA MOTHER TERESA^]FILE--Mother Teresa, shown in an August1993 file photo, has been hospitalized with heart problems and is breathing with the help of a respirator, her doctor said Thursday, Aug. 22, 1996. Mother Teresa, who will be 86 next week, was admitted Tuesday night to the Woodlands Nursing Home in Calcutta with a fever. She then developed cardiac problems and was placed on the respirator, said physician Asim Bardhan.](/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/20070825__20070826_A2_ND26LETTERSp1.jpg?w=226 "20070825__20070826_A2_ND26LETTERS~p1.JPG")
Mother Teresa, a globally beloved symbol of saintly devotion to the poor, spent her last 50 years secretly struggling with doubts about her faith, her newly published letters show.
“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 and hurt my very soul,” she wrote. “How painful is this unknown pain – I have no Faith.”
The letters paint an astonishing alternate portrait of the nun revered for her selflessness and serenity. In reality, she was tortured by her inability to feel even a glimmer of the Lord’s presence.
She felt abandoned by Christ, referred to Jesus as “the Absent One,” and called her own smile “a mask.” In the 1960s, after receiving an important prize, she wrote, “This means nothing to me, because I don’t have Him.”
Sixty-six years’ worth of her deeply personal letters to superiors and confessors – preserved by the Catholic Church despite her dying wish that they be destroyed – are published in a new book, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” excerpted in Time magazine.
The book is by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, director of the Mother Teresa Center and the driving force behind efforts to canonize her.
She has already been beatified, the step before formally being declared a saint.
“I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented,” Kolodiejchuk said. “It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her.”
He argues that the depth of her spiritual suffering increases her saintliness.
Most believers suffer from crises of faith, but the duration of Teresa’s alienation from Christ may seem extreme, given her life’s work.
It began, she said, soon after she set up her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in the late 1940s to succor India’s poor. And it lasted, with only a joyous five-week respite in 1959 when she refound God, until her death at age 87, a decade ago.
The nun, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, coped with what she termed her “spiritual dryness” by likening it to Christ’s doubt on the cross.
“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,” she wrote in 1961.
