If you've been reading the press or listening to talk radio, then you've heard some commentators suggest that because Mother Teresa had a life-long struggle with God in her spiritual life, the process leading to her canonization should cease. This is some of the fallout from a TIME magazine article on a new book in which Mother Teresa's long dark night of the soul is revealed.
For some 34 years I have been offering spiritual counsel to others, and receiving it myself from spiritual directors. I can assure you that rare is the individual who does not experience moments, days, weeks and even long years when they question the presence, even the existence of God. The questions I am most often asked are these: Where is God in my life? Has God forgotten about me? Does God hear my prayer? Why doesn't God answer my prayer? Where is the God I used to believe in? Have I lost him or has he lost me? These are the struggles of believers who long and thirst for an experience of God in their lives but who pass through the spiritual equivalent of a desert where the parched soul longs for just a taste of the waters of the Spirit of God.
Such "deserts" are sometimes connected to personal suffering (physical and/or emotional) or sometimes to the suffering or loss of loved ones. Sometimes the desert seems to rise up out of nowhere and takes the soul by sudden and sad surprise.
If many of us are surprised that someone like Mother Teresa should have suffered through such arid times in her prayer life, then let us not be surprised that many around us are experiencing the same. And if that is the case and I am the one in the desert, then perhaps I might take some comfort in knowing that I am not alone - even if it seems that God has forgotten about me.
Wondering if God has forgotten... feeling abandoned by the Lord... desperately wondering if any prayer is heard, let alone answered... these are experiences shared by many who want to know and love God, and to be known and loved by God.
Sometimes the scriptures and our prayers at Mass and the songs and psalms we sing can taste bitter in the mouths of those whose thirst is parched for the touch of God's presence. A homilist must always take care not to speak so blithely about the spiritual life that those "in the desert" feel themselves even more remote from the Divine.
The psalms are sometimes called The Prayerbook of the Bible and rightfully so. Over the 150 psalms one finds the whole range of human experience with God from the pits of desolation and abandonment (Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to my voice in supplication) to the heights or praise and glory (Give praise with crashing cymbals, praise him with sounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath give praise to the LORD! Hallelujah!). Most of us live somewhere in between those two ends, but not without experiencing both many times in our lives.
With others, I believe that Mother Teresa may become even more of a saintly model for our own times than she was in her lifetime. While many of us may have found it impossible to follow her example in giving her life to the poor, we may find her easy to follow in the spiritual life, knowing that even her soul's great struggles did not keep her from seeking God and doing the Lord's work.
Do others here recognize Mother Teresa's desert of faith? Do others here find in Mother Teresa a beacon of hope for their own spiritual difficulties?
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