Mother Teresa's Painful Struggle

Her anguished letters to spiritual confidants over 66 years, which she had wanted destroyed, are being released as a book Come Be My Light.

The letters disclose that just 11 weeks before her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo in 1979, in which she proclaimed God was everywhere, “Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive,” she herself was painfully distanced from him. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she wrote to her spiritual confidant Rev Michael va der Peet in September 1979.

“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 but does not speak ….”

Over two decades earlier, in 1955, she wrote: “The more I want him – the less I am wanted.” Then again, a year later: “Such deep longing for God – and … repulsed – empty – no faith – no love – no zeal. – [Saving] Souls holds no attraction – Heaven means nothing – pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.” Three years later she wrote: “What do I labour for? If there be no God – there can be no soul – if there is no Soul then Jesus – You also are not true.”

Astonishingly, Mother Teresa’s self doubts started soon after she established the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, to which she was inspired by a vision from Christ. In 1953, she wrote,

“Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself – for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.'”

She expresses acute consciousness of the divide between her public personae and her private anguish.

“The smile is a mask, a cloak that covers everything.”

After being feted at a public event at which she evoked her love for Christ, she confessed, “I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God – tender, personal love. If you were [there], you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.'”

Another time she wrote: “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love – and now become as the most hated one – the one – You have thrown away as unwanted – unloved. I call, I cling, I want – and there is no One to answer – no One on Whom I can cling – no, No One. – Alone … Where is my Faith – even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness – My God – how painful is this unknown pain – I have no Faith – I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart – & make me suffer untold agony.”

She wrote: “So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them – because of the blasphemy – 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 & hurt my very soul. – I am told God loves me – and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?”

The compilation of her private letters has been published by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, director of the Mother Teresa Center, who is leading the drive to canonize Mother Teresa. The church has said her private doubts are not uncommon and will not affect her beatification to sainthood.