The Story of Mother Teresa, and the Letters She Asked to Have Destroyed
She asked that the evidence be destroyed. The process that made her a saint preserved it and printed it.
There is a photograph of Mother Teresa that everyone has seen: small, stooped, in the white sari with three blue stripes, holding somebody’s hand. She was probably the most photographed Christian of the twentieth century and certainly the most universally admired.
For roughly the last fifty years of her life, by her own private account, she could not feel God at all.
She wrote that down only in letters to her spiritual directors, and she asked more than once that those letters be destroyed. They were not. They were gathered up by the man running her cause for sainthood and published in 2007 as Come Be My Light, which is why we know.
The first thirty-eight years
She was born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, into an Albanian Catholic family in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Her father, a businessman involved in Albanian politics, died suddenly when she was eight, and the household went from comfortable to precarious.
At eighteen she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, taking the name Teresa after Therese of Lisieux. She never saw her mother again. A year later she was in India.
Then came the part nobody remembers: she taught school for seventeen years. She was a geography teacher and eventually headmistress at a convent school in Calcutta, on the respectable side of the wall, and by every account she was good at it and content. If nothing had changed she would have finished her life as a well-regarded nun who ran a girls’ school.
The call within a call
On September 10, 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, something happened that she afterward described as Christ speaking to her directly and asking her to leave the convent and serve the poorest of the poor. Her order still keeps the date and calls it Inspiration Day.
It took two years to get permission. In 1948 she walked out of the Loreto convent in a cheap white sari bought in a local market, with a few rupees, and started working in the slums.
The Missionaries of Charity were approved in 1950. In 1952 she opened a home in an abandoned temple building at Kalighat where destitute people who were going to die could do it indoors, washed, and with someone present. By the time she died the order had thousands of sisters working in something like 120 countries. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, declined the ceremonial banquet, and asked that the money for it be given to the poor instead.
The darkness
Here is what the letters say.
From around 1948, almost exactly when the work began, she stopped being able to sense God’s presence, and it did not come back. Not for a season. For nearly fifty years, with one brief interruption in the late 1950s, until she died in 1997.
She described it without self-pity and with the precision of somebody who had thought about it a great deal. She wrote of dryness, darkness, loneliness, and of praying into a silence that gave nothing back. In one letter she wrote that the silence and emptiness were so great that she looked and did not see, listened and did not hear.
She kept going anyway, for five decades, smiling in photographs, while telling her directors privately that she felt nothing at all.
She wanted this destroyed. She asked. The letters survived because the Church’s own process for making saints requires gathering everything a candidate wrote, and because Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the priest running her cause, judged that they showed something worth showing.
What to make of it
There are two readings and both deserve stating.
The first, and the one the Church takes, is that this is what the Carmelite tradition calls the dark night: a purgative state, described at length by John of the Cross centuries earlier, in which consolation is withdrawn and faith has to operate without emotional support. On that reading the letters are not evidence against her sanctity but the strongest evidence for it, because someone who serves the dying for fifty years while feeling nothing is doing it for reasons other than how it makes her feel.
The second reading, argued by plenty of people since 2007, is simpler: she lost her faith, or never had the kind she projected, and the public certainty was a performance.
What can be said fairly is that the letters do not read like someone who had stopped believing. They read like someone in agony precisely because she still believed and could not feel it, which is a different condition, and which she herself distinguished carefully. She once wrote that if she ever became a saint she would surely be one of darkness.
She would be absent from heaven, she said, to light the light of those in darkness on earth.
She was not universally admired
She had critics in her lifetime and still has them, and the sharpest of them faulted the homes for offering comfort rather than medicine.
It is worth knowing what the homes were for. They were hospices, not hospitals, and never presented themselves as anything else. Calcutta had, and has, more need than any organization could meet. What she set out to provide was a place where somebody dying on the pavement could die indoors, washed, and with a person beside them, and that is what she provided, at enormous scale, on donated money. Measuring it as failed medicine is measuring it against a purpose it never claimed.
How fast it went
John Paul II waived the customary five-year waiting period and let her cause open in 1999, two years after she died. She was beatified in 2003 and canonized by Francis in 2016, nineteen years from death to sainthood, which by the standards of how long these things usually take is extraordinarily quick.
Two healings were examined and accepted along the way, the first the recovery of an Indian woman named Monica Besra from an abdominal mass in 1998.
The saint who asked to be hidden
There is a symmetry here worth noticing.
Augustine wrote three hundred pages exposing his own interior on purpose, and is known through a document he controlled completely. Mother Teresa wrote her interior only in private, to two or three priests, and asked for it to be burned. She is known through a document she explicitly did not want anyone to read.
Both are now saints, and in both cases the thing that makes them worth reading is the part they were least comfortable about. Augustine’s is his appetite. Hers is the silence.
Her feast is September 5, the day she died. The order she founded is still running the homes, and the sisters still wear the market sari.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.