William Collier, in a comment on a post below, refers to an extraordinary article in Time Magazine by David Van Biema on Mother Teresa's prolonged "dark night of the soul."

The article is based upon a new book of Mother Teresa's Letters:

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light(Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa andher confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides thespiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. Theletters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requestedthat they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal thatfor the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence ofGod whatsoever or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. BrianKolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

Van Biema continues:

The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigativereporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk,a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsiblefor petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supportingmaterials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step iscanonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of thatprocess.

The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanishmystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the"dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in thegrowth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensivesuch case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St.Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) YetKolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith.Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it andabandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced thebook as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her mostspiritually heroic act.

Teresa's spiritual agony and its partial resolution are suggested:

There are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividnessand remain its captive, or without necessarily "conquering" it, togradually integrate it into the day-by-day. After more than a decade ofopen-wound agony, Teresa seems to have begun regaining her spiritualequilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. TheRev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided insomewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when sheturned to him with her "darkness," he seems to have told her the threethings she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (thatis, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feelingJesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very cravingfor God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; andthat the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her workfor Jesus.

This counsel clearly granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release.For all that she had expected and even craved to share in Christ'sPassion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate theparticular moment on the Cross when he asks, "My God, My God, why haveyou forsaken me?" The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum, hisfelt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that herperseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross,that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling,made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, "It was the redeemingexperience of her life when she realized that the night of her heartwas the special share she had in Jesus' passion." And she thankedNeuner profusely: "I can't express in words the gratitude I owe youfor your kindness to me for the first time in ... years I have cometo love the darkness. "

The whole article deserves careful attention. Clearly the book (which I have not yet read) is an important one, perhaps a new classic of spirituality. When Matthew Lamb and James Martin reach common ground on a book's significance, it's time to take notice.