I begin the day with prayer. Something odd happened two days ago.
I bring up, on the computer screen, a photo suitable for prayer, often a photo found on google of a chapel interior or the blessed sacrament. I pray the Lord's Prayer, I pray for people I know, I mention any special intentions, often in response to prayer requests posted on facebook, and then sit quietly.
Saturday morning was especially dark. I got up early and it was still black outside.
For the first time in a while I confronted God with all I face: health challenges, rock bottom poverty, total isolation, no reason to hope. Trying and trying and trying and trying and nothing working out. No resources. No allies. No leads. No one even to say, at the end of the day, "There there." No nothing. One disaster after another, from broken limbs to hurricane evacuations.
I normally don't say all this, not even in prayer, because I start crying and can't stop, and … what's the point? This day was different, though. I very consciously hit God with all he'd hit me with, and the inevitable consequences: I told God the simple truth: I can't handle this. I give up.
And then I was ready to end this session of prayer, and begin the workday.
I felt a presence at my right side. Mother Teresa.
What's odd about this is not that I felt a presence. I grew up with a psychic mother and psychic experiences were allowed in our household.
What's odd about this is that I pray to a few saints consistently. St. Anthony, St. Christopher, St. Joseph, Mary, Wiktoria Ulma.
I've never prayed to Mother Teresa. I have nothing against Mother Teresa. She just isn't a focus of my devotion or even curiosity. I haven't read anything by or about her.
Saturday morning, after my bleak and blasted prayer, I felt Mother Teresa at my right side.
Her face was vivid and alive, her famous wrinkles warm and palpable. In her photos she often looks dour. She was smiling.
I stiffened a bit, thinking, heck, Mother Teresa, I better be reverent. But she was smiling gently. Her presence was fluid, flexible. I thought, okay, what to pray? But no words came. Just a sense that I needed to sit with her for a moment. I did so, and then I started to wrap up my prayer and begin working, but I was stopped – again, gently – by a sense that I should google her. I immediately turned to the computer. I questioned this inner prodding. There must be a million webpages devoted to Mother Teresa. What am I looking for? And the inner prodding said, read the fifth web page you find after you google my name.
I googled "Mother Teresa." I counted down the first five pages.
This was number five:
"Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith."
From that text:
"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979
"On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the 'Saint of the Gutters,' went to Oslo. She delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. 'It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'' she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had 'made himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one.' Jesus' hunger, she said, is what 'you and I must find' and alleviate. She suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world 'that radiating joy is real' because Christ is everywhere — 'Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive.'
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. 'Jesus has a very special love for you,' she assured Van der Peet. 'But as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves in prayer but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have a free hand.'
The two statements, eleven weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared."
I was a bit stunned.
I had just prayed a very bleak, uncompromising prayer to God, a prayer I normally do not even bother to pray. I felt the palpable presence of a saint to whom I had never prayed, and felt an articulate prodding to read of this saint's dark night of the soul.
I thought about this event for the next twenty-four hours before it occurred to me to ask, "Mother Teresa, if that was you, if you could come to me to share with me your crisis of faith, why couldn't you come to me to give me a lead on a fulltime job? Why couldn't you direct me to someone who would become my ally as I struggle with all this Sisyphean crap God keeps raining down on me? Would that be so much harder?
Mother Teresa, send me a winning lottery ticket."
Full text of the TIME magazine article about Mother Teresa's crisis of faith is here.
I bring up, on the computer screen, a photo suitable for prayer, often a photo found on google of a chapel interior or the blessed sacrament. I pray the Lord's Prayer, I pray for people I know, I mention any special intentions, often in response to prayer requests posted on facebook, and then sit quietly.
Saturday morning was especially dark. I got up early and it was still black outside.
For the first time in a while I confronted God with all I face: health challenges, rock bottom poverty, total isolation, no reason to hope. Trying and trying and trying and trying and nothing working out. No resources. No allies. No leads. No one even to say, at the end of the day, "There there." No nothing. One disaster after another, from broken limbs to hurricane evacuations.
I normally don't say all this, not even in prayer, because I start crying and can't stop, and … what's the point? This day was different, though. I very consciously hit God with all he'd hit me with, and the inevitable consequences: I told God the simple truth: I can't handle this. I give up.
And then I was ready to end this session of prayer, and begin the workday.
I felt a presence at my right side. Mother Teresa.
What's odd about this is not that I felt a presence. I grew up with a psychic mother and psychic experiences were allowed in our household.
What's odd about this is that I pray to a few saints consistently. St. Anthony, St. Christopher, St. Joseph, Mary, Wiktoria Ulma.
I've never prayed to Mother Teresa. I have nothing against Mother Teresa. She just isn't a focus of my devotion or even curiosity. I haven't read anything by or about her.
Saturday morning, after my bleak and blasted prayer, I felt Mother Teresa at my right side.
Her face was vivid and alive, her famous wrinkles warm and palpable. In her photos she often looks dour. She was smiling.
I stiffened a bit, thinking, heck, Mother Teresa, I better be reverent. But she was smiling gently. Her presence was fluid, flexible. I thought, okay, what to pray? But no words came. Just a sense that I needed to sit with her for a moment. I did so, and then I started to wrap up my prayer and begin working, but I was stopped – again, gently – by a sense that I should google her. I immediately turned to the computer. I questioned this inner prodding. There must be a million webpages devoted to Mother Teresa. What am I looking for? And the inner prodding said, read the fifth web page you find after you google my name.
I googled "Mother Teresa." I counted down the first five pages.
This was number five:
"Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith."
From that text:
"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979
"On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the 'Saint of the Gutters,' went to Oslo. She delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. 'It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'' she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had 'made himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one.' Jesus' hunger, she said, is what 'you and I must find' and alleviate. She suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world 'that radiating joy is real' because Christ is everywhere — 'Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive.'
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. 'Jesus has a very special love for you,' she assured Van der Peet. 'But as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves in prayer but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have a free hand.'
The two statements, eleven weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared."
I was a bit stunned.
I had just prayed a very bleak, uncompromising prayer to God, a prayer I normally do not even bother to pray. I felt the palpable presence of a saint to whom I had never prayed, and felt an articulate prodding to read of this saint's dark night of the soul.
I thought about this event for the next twenty-four hours before it occurred to me to ask, "Mother Teresa, if that was you, if you could come to me to share with me your crisis of faith, why couldn't you come to me to give me a lead on a fulltime job? Why couldn't you direct me to someone who would become my ally as I struggle with all this Sisyphean crap God keeps raining down on me? Would that be so much harder?
Mother Teresa, send me a winning lottery ticket."
Full text of the TIME magazine article about Mother Teresa's crisis of faith is here.
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