Mother Teresa's "Dark Night"
What did it mean for her? What does it mean for us?

by Ralph Martin

Even though Mother Teresa’s experience of spiritual “darkness” has been known for several years, the full publication of her private letters in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light—The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” drew worldwide media coverage this summer.

TIME Magazine did a cover story on it, prominent articles appeared in The New York Times and other major publications, and numerous TV and radio interviews were conducted.

Some secularists chose to interpret her talk of darkness as a sign of hypocrisy and even accused her of not really believing in God. Only a very superficial and partial reading of these letters could have occasioned this interpretation. Some believers were disturbed and confused to hear of her prolonged experience of aridity or emptiness in her relationship with God. Some thought the letters were so disturbing it was a mistake to publish them.

This last concern is understandable, but unfounded. The letters in question are part of the official record compiled in the process of canonization and are generally made public. And by now we should realize that efforts to “edit” the life or writings of a saint (as the sisters of Therese of Lisieux tried to do in the case of their sister’s writings) only detract from the awesome witness to holiness to be found therein, albeit sometimes in unexpected and disturbing ways. I think we will see in the long run that the publication of these letters and the widespread media attention, even with its imperfections, will bear great fruit.

An Unimaginable Depth of Holiness

Having read the entire book—which includes all of Mother Teresa’s available letters and the sensitive and expert commentary of Missionaries of Charity priest Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk—I am left awestruck at the depth of Mother Teresa’s holiness. Her faith and her heroic service were more profound than I ever imagined.

It is certainly true that while she received remarkable communications from the Lord and deep spiritual and sensible consolation at the beginning of her mission, for almost 50 years Mother Teresa was left almost totally bereft of such consolation. She carried out her mission with almost no affective experience of God’s love and presence.

She could see the fruit that her work was producing. She could see that when she spoke to her sisters and others that they came alive and grew in the experience of God’s love. But she herself, for the most part, felt only emptiness.

During the first 10 years of this “darkness,” Mother Teresa was deeply troubled by it and sought to understand what was happening by consulting a few trusted priests. She wondered if this prolonged darkness was a sign of her great sinfulness and imperfection. Some of the advice she received was helpful, but it wasn’t until she met Fr. Joseph Neuner, a Jesuit working in India, that she came to grasp some of the special meaning of her suffering.

A Different Kind of Dark Night

Fr. Neuner explained to her that this wasn’t the typical “dark night” as described by St. John of the Cross—that it wasn’t just for her own purification, but rather it was a special gift that God was giving her to participate in the sufferings of Christ, particularly in Jesus’ own sense of abandonment during His agony in the garden of Gethsemane before His Crucifixion. Mother Teresa was forever grateful to Fr. Neuner:

I can’t express in words the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me. For the first time in these 11 years I have come to love the darkness. For I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness and 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. More than ever I surrender myself to Him. Yes, more than ever I will be at His disposal. (p. 241)

In fact, Mother Teresa had prayed for just such a participation in the agony of Christ years earlier. As a young woman, she had resolved “to drink the chalice to the last drop.” After the founding of the Missionaries of Charity, she again resolved “to drink only from His chalice of pain and to give Mother Church real saints” (p. 141).

The understanding Mother Teresa received from Fr. Neuner gave her a measure of peace and even joy. However, it didn’t take away the pain of not being able to experience the sensible and spiritual consolation of God’s love and favor. For Mother Teresa, this often seemed to be on the verge of unbearable.

In his 2003 Advent Meditations to the Holy Father and the papal household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa summed up well the reasons God led Mother Teresa by this unusual path. The publication of the full text of the letters and the commentary of Fr. Kolodiejchuk confirms this interpretation.

I discuss the unique experience of Mother Teresa in terms of her “dark night,” as interpreted by Fr. Cantalamessa, and its relationship to the “ordinary dark nights” as taught by John of the Cross in chapter 17 of my book on the spiritual tradition, The Fulfillment of All Desire: A Guidebook for the Journey to God Based on the Wisdom of the Saints.

The Formation of a Saint

The Lord knew that the remarkable mission Mother Teresa was undertaking would be greatly blessed, and that the whole world would come to admire it. Mother Teresa received the gift of acute “spiritual poverty,” therefore, as a protection against pride. The experience of her “nothingness” and “emptiness” was a gift that God gave to protect her from the adulation she would receive, including the reception of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

In addition, because of the specific nature of the mission God called her to, He gave Mother Teresa the gift of knowing in the depth of her being what it was like for those she was serving—those who had been abandoned by their families, rejected, unwanted, and left alone to die in the streets of Calcutta. She was able to feel deep compassion for these abandoned ones, in part because of her own experience of “darkness” and abandonment.

Finally, Mother Teresa was given to a remarkable degree the gift of being one with Jesus in His Passion, out of which flows so much redemptive power. A gift she had asked for on more than one occasion.

Yes, she experienced temptations to give up, to despair, even temptations to blasphemy and unbelief, but to be tempted is not to sin. Her heroic perseverance in the face of such interior suffering is truly awe-inspiring. What an example to us in our need to persevere no matter what the difficulties, no matter what we experience or don’t experience.

Identifying the Roots of Spiritual Aridity

On the other hand, there are dangers in misunderstanding Mother Teresa’s unusually sustained experience of darkness. It was because of her special vocation that this darkness accompanied her for so long. Hers was not one of the normal purifying “dark nights” that St. John of the Cross spoke of, either for beginners or for those more advanced in the spiritual life. Nor is every experience of aridity, emptiness, or darkness a purifying or redemptive “dark night.”

It is helpful to avail ourselves of the wisdom of our spiritual tradition to better understand this.

In brief, St. John of the Cross taught that there are three reasons why someone may experience deep aridity, emptiness, or darkness in their prayer or relationship with God. (See Chapter 14 of The Fulfillment of All Desire for a much more complete explanation.)

One reason such aridity may be experienced is because of “lukewarmness” or infidelity in “doing our part” in sustaining our relationship with God. We may become careless about regular prayer and spiritual reading, we may not frequent the Eucharist and Sacrament of Reconciliation, we may fill our minds and hearts with worldly entertainment, we may not be diligent in rejecting temptation, or we may not develop relationships with others who desire to follow the Lord.

This carelessness and infidelity lessens our hunger for God and our desire to be with Him, producing lukewarmness and repugnance for things of the spirit. This is not a purifying darkness, but rather the result of laxity for which the only solution is to repent and to take up the spiritual practices that dispose us toward union with God.

A second reason why such aridity may be experienced is because of physical or emotional illness. The advice of the saints is to try to get better, pray for healing, go to the doctor, but keep on as best one can in living a fervent Christian life. And if one is not healed, this aridity is an invitation to join our suffering with the suffering of Jesus and to offer it as reparation for our own sins and as intercessory prayer for others.

A third reason why such darkness may be present is that we are ready to move to a deeper level of faith, hope, and love, and that God purposely removes the experience of his love, presence, or favor—but not their reality—in order to give us a chance to believe, hope, and love more deeply and purely. This is the true “dark night.” It may be quite intense and last for a long period of time, or it may happen intermittently, interspersed with times of sensible consolation. A true dark night is accompanied by deep and painful longing for God—a longing that was acutely present in Mother Teresa.

One sign of an authentic dark night is that, in our aridity, we don’t try to fill the emptiness with worldly or fleshly consolations. Instead, we remain faithful in seeking God even in the pain of His apparent absence. The authentic dark night isn’t an end in itself, but is intended to prepare us for an even greater union with and experience of God.

Bl. Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us!

Ralph Martin is the author of The Fulfillment of All Desire: A Guidebook for the Journey to God Based on the Wisdom of the Saints (Emmaus Road Publishing, 2006). He is the president of Renewal Ministries and the director of graduate theology programs in the New Evangelization at Sacred Heart Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Visit www.renewalministries.net for more information.

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