Book Summary: Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light
By M. Fontaine

	Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light is based on nearly 70 years of correspondence from this dedicated and hard-working Catholic nun, as well as observations and anecdotes from those who knew her best and loved her.
	It’s a story of her faith, her love for the Lord, her relationship with Him, and her constant battles to feel His presence. These accounts are interesting, and often moving, convicting, and touching. They reveal the heart of a dear woman who was a bright and shining light for the Lord, even though she often felt far from Him. I think you’ll find them inspiring.

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Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light
The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”
Edited and with Commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C.
(New York: Doubleday. 2007)

Preface
	For decades, Mother Teresa and her work received extensive public interest. In view of all the attention she garnered during her lifetime, and particularly at the time of her death at the age of eighty-seven, the question arises: What was the source of the force drawing so many people to her? She would have certainly preferred to remain unnoticed. She considered herself just “a pencil in God’s hand” and was convinced that God was using her “nothingness” to show His greatness. She never took credit for her accomplishments and always tried to divert the attention she received to God and “His work” among the poorest of the poor. Yet it was not in God’s providential plan for her to remain unknown. People of all creeds and walks of life recognized her selfless love and compassion for the poor; they admired her simplicity and genuineness and were attracted by the joy and peace that radiated from her. At the same time, all those who met her, even just once, were left with the sense that there was something more behind her penetrating gaze.
	Mother Teresa could not hide her work among the poor, but what she did manage to keep hidden—and with astonishing success—were the most profound aspects of her relationship with God. She was determined to keep these secrets of love far from mortal eyes. The late archbishop Ferdinand Perier of Calcutta and a few priests were the only ones who had some insight into the spiritual wealth of her interior life, and even with them she constantly begged that they destroy all her letters regarding it. The reason for such insistence can be found in her deep reverence for God and His work in her and through her.
	Providentially, Mother Teresa’s spiritual directors preserved some of her correspondence. These pages unveil her interior life, with all its depth and drama, and add unsuspected riches to the spiritual heritage Mother Teresa offers to the world.
	Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, M. C.

Introduction
	“If I ever become a Saint, I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” Taken as a kind of “mission statement,” these words of Mother Teresa provide a key to the understanding of her spiritual life, and indeed of her whole life. “Come be My light,” Jesus had requested, and Mother Teresa strove to be that light of God’s love in the lives of those who were experiencing darkness. For her, however, the paradoxical and totally unsuspected cost of her mission was that she herself would live in “terrible darkness.”
	This book plumbs the depth of Mother Teresa’s interior life seen from the perspective of this “mission statement.” Rather than a theological study, this work is a presentation of the previously unknown aspects of her interior life, through which we gain greater insight into her resolute faith and intense love for God and neighbor.
	Initially, the experience of darkness took Mother Teresa off guard. Since she had experienced a high degree of union with God, the change was not only surprising but also agonizing: unable to feel His presence as she had earlier, she was bewildered and afraid. Was she going the “wrong way”? Seeking possible reasons for God’s apparent absence, when His presence to her had seemed so real, she at first attributed this absence to her sinfulness and weakness, concluding that the darkness was purification of her imperfections.
	With the help of her spiritual directors, she progressively came to grasp that her painful inner experience was an essential part of living out her mission. It was a sharing in the Passion of Christ on the Cross—with a particular emphasis on the thirst of Jesus as the mystery of His longing for the love and salvation of every human person. Eventually she recognized her mysterious suffering as an imprint of Christ’s Passion on her soul. She was living the mystery of Calvary—the Calvary of Jesus and the Calvary of the poor.
	Her living of this inner experience was the most challenging demand of her mission, and the supreme expression of her love for God and for His poor. Beyond providing care for the downtrodden and outcasts of human society, she was willing to embrace their material and spiritual suffering, their state of being “unwanted, unloved, uncared for,” of having no one.
	Although this intense and ongoing spiritual agony could have made her despondent, she instead radiated remarkable joy and love. She was truly a witness to hope, an apostle of love and joy, because she had built the edifice of her life on pure faith. She glowed with a kind of “luminosity,” as Malcolm Muggeridge described it, which flowed from her relationship with God. In this book I hope to explore and illuminate the hidden dynamics of this relationship.
	Mother Teresa herself was well aware of the uncommon circumstances of her calling and the extraordinary way in which she was challenged to live it out. She always insisted that all documents revealing the inspiration behind the founding of the Missionaries of Charity be destroyed, for fear that she would be given a prominence that she believed was due to God alone.
	However, it was the conviction of Archbishop Perier and his successors in office that the documents should survive, although Mother Teresa did manage to destroy a good number.
	Mother Teresa’s writings reproduced here have been edited as little as possible. Although almost all of them were written in English, it must be kept in mind that English was not Mother Teresa’s first language. Her mother tongue was Albanian. Her education and much of her everyday communication while growing up in Skopje was in Serbo-Croatian. The early letters from India to her friends and confessor back in Skopje were written in Serbo-Croatian. The most literal translation has been provided here. For the texts written in English, even if at times the grammar is incorrect or an improvement could have been made, they have been left as she wrote them. Her spelling mistakes have been corrected and the words that she obviously omitted in error have been added in square brackets.
	A word about punctuation: Mother Teresa’s writings presented here are personal communications to her close associates, not intended for publication. In this “informal writing” the dash is a punctuation mark that characterizes her style. At times, even in her letters, but especially in her journals and notes, the dash replaces every other punctuation mark: it stands for a period, comma, colon, and semicolon, for an exclamation or question mark, and finally for a dash as well. In short, every break of thought was marked with a dash. This particularity of her style is expressive of the dynamism and vivacity of her personality, a certain “haste” to do the next thing and not be busy with the “nonessential.” Though the dashes could be a distraction to reading, for the sake of authenticity these have almost always been left in the text as she placed them. In a few instances, however, when a dash would have interfered with the meaning or flow of the text, it was either removed or replaced with the conventional punctuation marks.
	It is my hope that many will be inspired by Mother Teresa’s heroic living of her mission of “[lighting] the light of those in darkness” and will carry it on according to their own call and possibilities. In those parts of our hearts where darkness still abides, may a bright light shine through her example, her love, and now also her intercession from heaven.

“Put Your Hand in His Hand,
and Walk Alone with Him”
	“Put your hand in His [Jesus’] hand, and walk alone with Him. Walk ahead, because if you look back you will go back.” These parting words from her mother were engraved on the heart of eighteen-year-old Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu, the future Mother Teresa, as she left her home in Skopje to commence her life as a missionary. On September 26, 1928, she journeyed to Ireland to join the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (the Loreto Sisters), a noncloistered congregation of women religious primarily dedicated to education. She had applied to go to the missions in Bengal. Such a venture demanded abundant faith and courage, for she and her family knew well that “at that time, when missionaries went to the missions, they never returned.”
	Young though she was, Gonxha had taken six years to decide on her vocation. She had been raised in a family that fostered piety and devotion, and in a fervent parish community that also contributed to her religious upbringing. In this setting, Mother Teresa would later reveal, she first felt called to consecrate her life to God:

I was only twelve years old then. It was then that I first knew I had a vocation to the poor ... in 1922. I wanted to be a missionary, I wanted to go out and give the life of Christ to the people in the missionary countries.... At the beginning, between twelve and eighteen I didn’t want to become a nun. We were a very happy family. But when I was eighteen, I decided to leave my home and become a nun, and since then, this forty years, I’ve never doubted even for a second that I’ve done the right thing; it was the will of God. It was His choice.

	Her decision was not a whim of her youthful years but rather a considered choice, the fruit of her profound relationship with Jesus.
	On January 6, 1929, after a five-week journey, Sister Teresa arrived in Calcutta. In a letter she sent back home, she shared with her readers her arrival to the city that would become inseparably linked with her name:

On January 6th, in the morning, we sailed from the sea to the river Ganges, also called the “Holy River.” Travelling by this route we could take a good look at our new homeland Bengal. The nature is marvelous. In some places there are beautiful small houses but for the rest, only huts lined up under the trees. … Pray much for us that we may be good and courageous missionaries.

	Shortly after her arrival in Calcutta, Sister Teresa was sent to Darjeeling to continue her formation. In May she began the novitiate, a two-year period of initiation into the religious life that precedes the first profession of vows. The first year concentrated on spiritual formation of the candidate, emphasizing prayer and the spirituality of the order, while the second year emphasized the mission of the institute and offered some training in its apostolic works. Having completed her formation, she made her first profession of vows on May 25, 1931, promising to live a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and to devote herself with particular care to the instruction of youth. This was an occasion of immense joy, as her longing to consecrate herself to God became a reality. She confided to a friend:

If you could know how happy I am, as Jesus’ little spouse. No one, not even those who are enjoying some happiness which in the world seems perfect, could I envy, because I am enjoying my complete happiness, even when I suffer something for my beloved Spouse.

	Following her profession of vows, Sister Teresa was assigned to the Loreto community in Calcutta and appointed to teach at St. Mary’s Bengali Medium School for girls. The young nun embarked eagerly on her new mission, one that she would retain (with only one six-month interruption) until 1948, the year she left Loreto to establish the Missionaries of Charity.
	After nine years in Loreto, Sister Teresa was approaching a very important moment in her life—she was about to make her profession of perpetual vows. Her superiors and her companions had by now become acquainted with her prayerfulness, compassion, charity, and zeal; they also appreciated her great sense of humor and natural talent for organization and leadership. In all her endeavors she consistently showed unusual presence of mind, common sense, and courage, such as when she chased away a bull on the road in order to protect her girls and when she scared off thieves who broke into the convent one night.
	Yet neither her sisters nor her pupils fully realized the remarkable spiritual depths that this hard-working and cheerful nun had reached in the midst of her daily activities. Her profound union with Jesus was only shared with her confessors. She likewise rarely alluded to her sufferings, while the joy she radiated around her effectively hid her trials. In a letter to Jesuit Father Franjo Jambrekovic, her former confessor in Skopje, she revealed the secret of God’s powerful action in her soul:

	I just received … permission to make my final vows. … I really cannot thank God enough for all that He has done for me. His for all eternity! Now I rejoice with my whole heart that I have joyfully carried my cross with Jesus! There were sufferings—there were moments when my eyes were filled with tears—but thanks be to God for everything.
	Do not think that my spiritual life is strewn with roses—that is the flower which I hardly ever find on my way. Quite the contrary, I have more often as my companion “darkness.” And when the night becomes very thick—and it seems to me as if I will end up in hell—then I simply offer myself to Jesus. If He wants me to go there—I am ready—but only under the condition that it really makes Him happy. I need much grace, much of Christ’s strength to persevere in trust, in that blind love which leads only to Jesus Crucified. But I am happy—yes happier than ever. And I would not wish at any price to give up my sufferings. But do not, however, think that I am only suffering. Ah no—I am laughing more than I am suffering—so that some have concluded that I am Jesus’ spoiled bride, who lives with Jesus in Nazareth—far away from Calvary....

	This letter to her confessor back in Skopje is the first instance in her correspondence where Sister Teresa refers to “darkness.” It is difficult to grasp precisely what “darkness” meant for her at this time, but in the future the term would come to signify profound interior suffering, spiritual dryness, an apparent absence of God from her life, and, at the same time, a painful longing for Him.
	Interior darkness is nothing new in the tradition of Catholic mysticism. In fact, it has been a common phenomenon among the numerous saints throughout Church history who have experienced what the Spanish Carmelite mystic St. John of the Cross termed the “dark night.” The spiritual master aptly employed this term to designate the painful purifications one undergoes before reaching union with God.
	Choosing to face this deep pain with trust, surrender, and unwavering desire to please God, while demonstrating an outstanding fidelity to her religious duties, Sister Teresa was already setting the pattern for her response to the even more demanding interior trial that was to come.
	After three months of fervent prayer and reflection, the long awaited date she had mentioned to Father Jambrekovic arrived. On May 24, 1937, with a happy and grateful heart, Sister Teresa approached the altar of God to pronounce her final “Yes,” committing herself to Jesus in spousal love for the rest of her life. The ceremony took place in the convent chapel in Darjeeling, with Archbishop Ferdinand Perier, S.J., as celebrant. Following Loreto custom she was now called “Mother Teresa.”
	The daily challenge of striving to overcome her faults was a part of Mother Teresa’s cross. She confided to her former confessor her struggle to conquer pride; yet, though unaware of it, she had already emerged victorious from many battles. While she lamented “the same proud Gonxha,” others were impressed by her humility. Sister Gabriela, one of her childhood friends from Skopje, and now her companion in Loreto, wrote to Father Jambrekovic:

I think that Jesus loves Sister Teresa very much. We are in the same house. I notice that every day she tries to please Jesus in everything. She is very busy, but she does not spare herself. She is very humble. It cost her dearly to achieve that, but I think that God has chosen her for great things. Admittedly, her deeds are entirely simple, but the perfection with which she does them is just what Jesus asks of us.

	Mother Teresa was striving to “drink the chalice to the last drop” in living her commitment “to be only all for Jesus.” As another sister from her community affirmed: “She was very, very much in love with Almighty God.”
	After her final vows, Mother Teresa returned to her duties at St. Mary’s with her characteristic enthusiasm. One of her companions remarked of her: “She was a very hard worker. Very. She never wanted to shirk anything, she was always ready.”
	On Sundays, she used to visit the poor in the slums. This apostolate, which she herself chose, left a deep impression on her:

Every Sunday I visit the poor in Calcutta’s slums. I cannot help them, because I do not have anything, but I go to give them joy. Last time about twenty little ones were eagerly expecting their “Ma.” When they saw me, they ran to meet me, even skipping on one foot. I entered. In that group of houses twelve families were living. Every family has only one room, two meters long and a meter and a half wide. The door is so narrow that I hardly could enter, and the ceiling is so low that I could not stand upright. . . . Now I do not wonder that my poor little ones love their school so much, and that so many of them suffer from tuberculosis. The poor mother [of the family she visited] did not utter even a word of complaint about her poverty. It was very painful for me, but at the same time I was very happy when I saw that they are happy because I visit them. Finally, the mother said to me: “Oh, Ma, come again! Your smile brought sun into this house!”

	To her friends back home in Skopje, she disclosed the prayer she whispered in her heart while returning to the convent: “O God, how easily I make them happy! Give me strength to be always the light of their lives and so lead them to You!” She could not imagine that less than a decade later her prayer would be answered: she would dedicate not just her free time, but her entire life to the poor, becoming a beacon for them through her love and compassion.

Something Very Beautiful for Jesus
	In the years following her final profession, Mother Teresa’s passionate love for Jesus continued to prompt her to seek new and hidden ways of expressing her love. The most striking of these was an exceptional private vow she made in April 1942: “I made a vow to God, binding under [pain of] mortal sin, to give to God anything that He may ask, ‘Not to refuse Him anything.’” Only later did she explain the reason for it: “I wanted to give God something very beautiful” and “without reserve.” This vow expressed Mother Teresa’s desire to “drink the chalice to the last drop” as she resolved to say “Yes” to God in all circumstances.
	This private vow was one of Mother Teresa’s greatest secrets. No one except her confessor, whose guidance and permission she sought in this matter, knew about it.
	When Mother Teresa finally referred to her special vow seventeen years later, she revealed its significance: “This is what hides everything in me.” The vow was indeed hiding the depth of her love for God, which motivated all her actions, especially her unconditional surrender to His will. She would later explain:

Why must we give ourselves fully to God? Because God has given Himself to us. If God who owes nothing to us is ready to impart to us no less than Himself, shall we answer with just a fraction of ourselves? To give ourselves fully to God is a means of receiving God Himself. I for God and God for me. I live for God and give up my own self, and in this way induce God to live for me. Therefore to possess God we must allow Him to possess our soul.

	In embracing this new obligation, Mother Teresa was yearning to return love for love in a more radical way. One of the paradoxes of genuine love is that the lover freely wishes to bind him or herself irrevocably to the beloved. 
	With her vow, Mother Teresa aimed at perfect interior compliance to what was most pleasing to God even in the smallest detail. Hence the vow implied a commitment to discern carefully and obey the slightest manifestations of God’s will. This habitual and loving attentiveness to the present moment called for inner silence and recollection. “In the silence of the heart God speaks,” Mother Teresa would often say, with a conviction that sprang from being constantly attuned to His voice.
	The gravity of her commitment did not make her gloomy or despondent. On the contrary, she was “full of fun” and “enjoyed everything that went on.”

Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified person, who forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please her God in all she does for souls. Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity. A person who has this gift of cheerfulness very often reaches a great height of perfection. For God loves a cheerful giver and He takes close to His heart the religious He loves.

	Mother Teresa’s secret vow touched all aspects of her daily life. Ordinary as well as exceptional moments became opportunities to welcome His will and respond by doing “something beautiful for God.”
	Mother Teresa aimed at “profiting by all the smallest things, and doing them through love.” She would later insist to her sisters: “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love. . . . The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.” She lived this principle in whatever she was doing throughout each day. Whether it was big or small mattered not to her; everything she did was an opportunity to love.
	Prompted by her vow, Mother Teresa also developed the habit of responding immediately to the demands of the present moment. A strong impulse to act without delay—once she was certain that it was God’s will for her—was a notable characteristic of all her undertakings.

“Come, Be My Light”
	In September 1946 Mother Teresa, then thirty-six years old, was sent for her annual retreat and a needed rest to the Loreto Convent in Darjeeling, a town nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas some four hundred miles north of Calcutta. During the journey by train, on Tuesday, September 10, 1946, she had a decisive mystical encounter with Christ. Though she would persist in letting the details remain veiled in silence, she later revealed:

[It] was a call within my vocation. It was a second calling. It was a vocation to give up even Loreto where I was very happy and to go out in the streets to serve the poorest of the poor. It was in that train, I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums—to serve Him in the poorest of the poor. 

	She later explained: It was on this day in 1946 in the train to Darjeeling that God gave me the “call within a call” to satiate the thirst of Jesus by serving Him in the poorest of the poor.
	To the end of her life, Mother Teresa insisted that the single most important reason for the existence of the congregation she founded was to satiate the thirst of Jesus. In the first draft of the Rules of her order (written several months after her encounter on the train), which remain essentially unchanged to this day, she expressed the aim of the new congregation: “The General End of the Missionaries of Charity is to satiate the thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for Love and Souls.”
	That the aim of the congregation is “to satiate the thirst of Jesus on the Cross” indicates that her mystical experience took place in the context of Calvary, at the time when Jesus, dying on the Cross, cried out “I thirst.”
	Thirst—a physical need that craves to be satisfied, a painful longing for what is missing—became synonymous for her with particular aspects of God’s love for each person. A few years before her death, she would remind her followers:

Jesus wants me to tell you again . . . how much is the love He has for each one of you—beyond all what you can imagine. . . . Not only He loves you, even more—He longs for you. He misses you when you don’t come close. He thirsts for you. He loves you always, even when you don’t feel worthy....

	That same September 10, Mother Teresa began to receive a series of interior locutions* that continued until the middle of the following year. Mother Teresa was actually hearing Jesus’ voice and intimately conversing with Him. She is among those saints to whom Jesus spoke directly, asking them to undertake a special mission among His people. From the beginning of this extraordinary experience Mother Teresa had no doubt that it was Jesus who was speaking to her. Yet she would mostly refer to these communications as the “Voice.” *[Locutions, or supernatural words, are “manifestations of God’s thought.”]
	A moving exchange of great beauty went on between Christ and Mother Teresa. With utmost tenderness, He addressed her as “My own spouse” or “My own little one.” “My Jesus” or “My own Jesus,” replied Mother Teresa, longing to return love for love.
	The “Voice” kept pleading, “Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor. Come, be My light.” Jesus’ invitation was imbued with trust; He counted on her response.
	During her retreat in Darjeeling, Mother Teresa began a record of “what went on between Him and me during the days of much prayer.” She later referred to these notes as “the copy of the Voice since September 1946” and used them in her correspondence with the archbishop of Calcutta, quoting the “Voice” she had been hearing. But some months were to pass until that correspondence began.
	In early October, Mother Teresa returned from Darjeeling to Calcutta to resume her duties at St. Mary’s school. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, she related what had happened on the train and during the retreat to her spiritual director, Jesuit Father Celeste Van Exem.
	Mother Teresa wanted to act immediately upon her inspiration. Yet because she had consecrated her life to God through a vow of obedience, she could proceed only with the approval of her superiors. To her, their blessing was not a mere formality but a protection and assurance that God’s hand was in her undertaking. Only their permission would give her the certainty that this call was indeed God’s will and not some delusion.
	It was the task of her spiritual director, of the superiors of her religious order, and, especially, of the Jesuit archbishop of Calcutta, Ferdinand Perier, to test and discern this call. If they found it inauthentic, they would be obliged to discourage it; if they found it genuine, they would be conscience-bound to help bring it to realization.
	By January of 1947, after long conversations and prayer, Father Van Exem had no doubt that Mother Teresa’s inspiration was from God and that the time had come for her to pursue the realization of the call. Thus he gave her permission to write to the archbishop. In a simple and straightforward letter she told Archbishop Perier what she believed God was asking of her: to start a new religious order to minister to the poor.
	As self-sacrificing and courageous, as generous and compassionate to the poor as she was, on her own initiative she would never have considered leaving Loreto to found a new religious community. But the inspiration was so compelling that she could fail to heed the “Voice” only at the steep price of being unfaithful to her deepest love.
	After an initial struggle, Mother Teresa remained resolute in her conviction that God was calling her to this new life. By the time she wrote to Archbishop Perier in January, she was clear about what she intended to do. She was innovative in her proposals, ready to “burn myself completely for Him and souls,” giving her whole being in response to His call.

“To Bring Joy to the Suffering Heart of Jesus”
	Shortly before writing her first letter to Archbishop Perier, Mother Teresa’s provincial had notified her of her imminent transfer from Calcutta to the Loreto community in Asansol, a town about 140 miles to the northwest. Some sisters of her community had noticed Mother Teresa’s frequent and long conversations in confession with Father Van Exem in the months following her retreat in Darjeeling. From this simple fact, suspicion arose concerning the nature of their relationship. Obviously, the sisters had no clue about the reason for these prolonged meetings. Nonetheless, they deemed them inappropriate and brought them to the notice of her religious superiors. On the basis of these “uncharitable suggestions and remarks,” the decision was made to transfer Mother Teresa to the Asansol community.
	For St. Mary’s school, her leaving was “obviously a blow,” and her absence was keenly felt. As for herself, though she admitted missing St. Mary’s and the girls she had under her charge, she accepted the change serenely. Despite the sacrifice of leaving so much she loved, she saw God’s hand in these happenings and believed the move ultimately came from Him. This faith-filled response to difficulties was typical of Mother Teresa.
	Before leaving Calcutta, Mother Teresa learned about Archbishop Perier’s initial reaction to her proposal. The archbishop was cautious and told her he needed time to pray, reflect, and consult.
	This unexpected reply became a fresh source of suffering for Mother Teresa. Convinced of the genuineness of the call, and accustomed to act at once as soon as God’s will became clear, she felt she must begin immediately. Yet, as convinced as she was, she would not begin without the permission of her religious superiors, for she believed that through her obedience to God’s representatives His will would ultimately and securely be made known. Therefore, in spite of her longing to start her new mission and her distress at not being able to do so, she could do nothing but wait.
	Upon her arrival at Asansol in mid-January 1947, Mother Teresa, with her characteristic wholeheartedness, took up her new role of teaching. One benefit of the transfer was that she had fewer responsibilities than in Calcutta, and thus more time to spend in prayer. This was a providential opportunity to prepare herself for her new mission.

Longing to Bring the Light of Christ
	In July 1947, Mother Teresa returned to the Entally community in Calcutta. This change took place at the intervention of her superior general, who believed that “Mother Provincial was mistaken . . . in her estimate of Mother M. Teresa.” For her part, Mother Teresa simply obeyed, trusting that through all these happenings God was working out His plan. Upon arriving back at St. Mary’s, though no longer principal of the school, she resumed most of her previous activities; she began teaching and looking after the boarders. Those around her, while continuing to admire her generosity and the influence she had on the girls, still had no idea of her new call.
	And there followed several more months of waiting for Mother Teresa, of prayer and communications with the archbishop, while he considered her request. It was far from certain that she would be allowed to follow her call.
	After much prayer and deliberation, the archbishop finally felt free to give Mother Teresa permission to pursue her goal. “I am deeply convinced,” he later wrote to Loreto Superior General Mother Gertrude, “that by withholding my consent, I would hamper the realization, through her, of the will of God.” “You may go ahead,” were his long awaited words to Mother Teresa when he met her on January 6, 1948, the nineteenth anniversary of her arrival in India.

To the “Dark Holes”
	With the archbishop’s consent, Mother Teresa was now free to take the next step toward fulfilling the call. Following the norms of the Church, she needed permission from her Loreto Superior General, Mother Gertrude Kennedy, to seek authorization from the pope to leave Loreto and begin her new mission. In her petition to Mother Gertrude, written just four days after receiving the archbishop’s blessing, she made no mention of the locutions and visions, but presented a synopsis of her new call, emphasizing the spiritual aim of the future congregation.

My dearest Mother General,
	The matter of this letter is very sacred to me, therefore, I beg you to keep the content of it a secret. I shall send Mother Provincial a copy of this letter, in case you desire to communicate with her on this matter, otherwise I do not desire that any other nun should know of this.
	In Sept. 1946 I went to Darjeeling for a holiday and there also I made my eight days retreat. On my return to Calcutta I informed my spiritual Father of the following:
	That God wants me to give myself completely to Him in absolute poverty, to identify myself with the Indian girls in their lives of self-sacrifice and immolation by tending the poor in the slums, the sick, the dying, the beggars in their dirty holes and the little street children. In a word, to give myself without any reserve to God in the poor of the slums and the streets.
	The spiritual father put me off. Though he saw that it was from God, still he forbade me to even think about it. Often, very often during the four months I asked him to let me speak to His Grace, [but] each time he refused, until the 8th Jan. ‘47 when he gave me permission to put the whole matter before His Grace. I did so in detail. His Grace kept it for a whole year. He prayed much to see the will of God. On the 6th Jan. ‘48 he came to say Mass here and after which he told me “You may go ahead.” He allowed me to write to you and tell you of the call.
	Now dear Mother General, I desire to work out the plan in the best way, for the glory of His name. I turn to you, to help me to fulfill His holy Will.
	Dear Mother General, I am sure that it is God’s holy Will for me to go and do the work. Why did He call me, me the most unworthy and sinful, one so full of weakness, of misery and sin, I do not know. There is nothing I can answer—but that His way is a mystery to me. I have prayed and prayed much over this, looked at it from every corner and the answer remains the same—to leave all and follow Him deeper still, in that life of complete surrender and immolation for Him and His poor.
	I have foreseen many of the hardships and the difficulties which that life will bring me—but I trust the good God blindly and I know He will not let me down, even though I may make a mistake.
	Pray for me, dear Mother General, please pray for me, and ask the dear old nuns at the Abbey to do the same for me.
	Your affectionate child in J. C. [Jesus Christ]

	Mother Teresa eagerly anticipated a reply from Mother Gertrude, and when it had not come in less than three weeks, she became concerned. That her request would arrive, be considered and responded to so quickly was not a realistic expectation, but she was on fire to move ahead.
	But what seemed to Mother Teresa a long time was unusually quick under the circumstances. Mother Gertrude had made the decision the day after receiving her request, and wrote the archbishop:

Realizing as I do, the long consideration and the earnest prayer Your Grace has given to the matter, as well as the views of others well qualified to judge in Mother M. Teresa’s case, I feel I cannot do otherwise than acquiesce in the matter, lest I should fail in compliance with the Will of God.

	With this approval, one more door opened for Mother Teresa. The final step she needed to take before she could set out for the streets of Calcutta was to petition the Holy See. In a sober letter to the head of the Sacred Congregation for Religious, Mother Teresa explained her plans.
	Although she understood a quick reply from Rome was not to be expected, the waiting was nonetheless difficult for Mother Teresa.
	On August 8, 1948, Mother Teresa finally received the news from Rome: Pope Pius XII, through the Sacred Congregation for Religious, had granted her permission to leave Loreto and begin her new mission.
	At last she would have “the joy of giving up all, and bringing joy into the Heart of Jesus.” Before she received permission from Rome, she had foreseen that the transition would not be without pain: “The thought of leaving it breaks my heart,” she had told the Cardinal Prefect in February. Now the moment had arrived to make that heroic sacrifice, to abandon the security of the convent and plunge into an unpredictable future in the slums. Only to the archbishop did she reveal the cost of the step she was about to take.

Your Grace,
	First of all I want to thank you for all you have done for me—to help me to follow this new call. I have been a cause of much extra work and anxiety. I do hope the good God will repay you in His own way.
	On Tuesday evening I am leaving by the Punjab mail [train]. All is very dark—plenty of tears—but I go of my free choice with the blessing of obedience. Please pray for me that I may have the courage to complete my sacrifice as He has given me the inspiration and grace to begin....
	Please pray. I have very little courage—but I trust Him blindly, in spite of all feelings.
	Your devoted child in J. C. [Jesus Christ], Mary Teresa.

	On August 17, 1948, clad in a white sari with a blue border, Mother Teresa—a European nun alone in newly independent India—set out to begin life as a Missionary of Charity. Her lifestyle would be as innovative as the dress she wore. Considering “absolute poverty” essential to her new mission, she chose to leave with just five rupees. That was the entire capital of this “lone woman … wearing only a sari ... “ Yet her wealth lay in her heart: unshakable faith in God and absolute confidence in the promise He had made to her two years earlier: “Do not fear—I shall be with you always.... Trust Me lovingly—trust Me blindly.”

“The Dark Night of the Birth of the Society”
	Only God knew the heavy price of Mother Teresa’s sacrifice as she walked with steady step out the gate of her beloved Loreto. Her destination was the Holy Family Hospital of the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, where she was to learn the basics of nursing needed to serve the poor. Determined as she was in the pursuit of her new calling, she still found it “much harder to leave Loreto than to leave my family.” After arriving in Patna, Mother Teresa wrote to Archbishop Perier:

The first step towards the slums is over. It cost a very good deal, but I am grateful to God for giving the grace to do it and also for showing me how very weak I am.

	Her letter ends with a request that highlights her heart’s aspiration: “Please pray for me that I may keep up looking at Him cheerfully.”
	The prayer she copied on the first page of her medical notebook also reflects her pain at leaving Loreto and adjusting to a new way of life:

O Jesus, only love of my heart, I wish to suffer what I suffer and all Thou wilt have me suffer, for Thy pure love not because of the merits I may acquire, nor for the rewards Thou hast promised me but only to please Thee, to praise Thee, to bless Thee as well in sorrow as in joy.

	By December, thanks to the Medical Mission Sisters’ competent training, Mother Teresa was prepared to begin her work in the slums. She returned to Calcutta on the ninth and took up lodging with the Little Sisters of the Poor at the convent of St. Joseph’s. Before starting her mission, she made an eight-day retreat under the direction of Father Van Exem.
	At last, on December 21, Mother Teresa went into the slums for the first time as a Missionary of Charity. Through the challenges of the past two years, she had remained faithful to the call and had finally reached her goal: “the dark holes of the poor.” One of her first followers later remarked, “Seeing her poorly dressed in a simple, humble sari, with a Rosary in her hand, was like seeing the Gospel come alive, making Jesus present among the poorest. One could say a Light has dawned in the darkness of the slums.”
	The Calcutta Mother Teresa now faced had been very much affected by the consequences of World War II, the aftermath of the 1943 famine, and the frequent riots in the city. Immediately after India’s independence, the influx of people was enormous. The poor who could afford to rent tiny shacks (only several square feet of often windowless space jammed with their scant belongings) survived often on a bare minimum of food and with practically no medical help available. Schooling for their children was beyond their means. The number of street dwellers, who lacked even this bare minimum, was growing and they were at the mercy of illness, hunger, and starvation.
	Every new day in the slums brought new challenges. Besides the poverty, hardships, and insecurity, Mother Teresa had to face criticism. Not all understood her efforts nor saw the benefit of her work among the poor. This did not alarm her. Her confident answer—the harbinger of future ones—shows her determination:

I believe some are saying what use of working among these lowest of the low—that the great—the learned and the rich are ready to come [so] it is better to give full force to them. Yes, let them all do it.—The Kingdom must be preached to all. If the Hindu and Muslim rich people can have the full service and devotion of so many nuns and priests, surely the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low can have the love and the devotion of us few. “The slum Sister” they call me, and I am glad to be just that for His love and glory.

	Despite sufferings and the nagging temptation to go back to the security of Loreto, Mother Teresa continued to follow the difficult path God had set for her. That the path was indeed formidable is evident from the journal entry of February 16:

Today I learned a good lesson—the poverty of the poor must be often so hard for them. When I went looking for a home—I walked and walked till my legs and my arms ached. I thought how they must also ache in body and soul looking for home, food, help. Then the temptation grew strong—the palace buildings of Loreto came rushing into my mind—all the beautiful things and comforts—the people they mix with—in a word everything. “You have only to say a word and all that will be yours again,” the tempter kept on saying. Of [my] free choice my God and out of love for You—I desire to remain and do whatever be Your Holy Will in my regard. I did not let a single tear come. Even if I suffer more than now—I still want to do Your Holy Will. This is the dark night of the birth of the Society. My God give me courage now—this moment—to persevere in following Your call.

	As Mother Teresa had foreseen, this new life was bringing her “for the most part only suffering.” Yet she accepted that it had to be so, for this was “the dark night of the birth of the Society.” “The poverty of the poor” was becoming her own. At the same time, God was supplying the courage to persevere, for which she had prayed.
	After two long months of searching, God answered her plea for a new home. The Gomes brothers, two of whom lived in Bangladesh, made available to her the third floor of their home at 14 Creek Lane; this was to become “the first home for the Missionaries of Charity.”
	With only volunteer help, Mother Teresa was ministering to a large number of poor in various parts of Calcutta. Seeing the enormity of the need and wanting to do more, she implored the Virgin Mary to send her followers to further her work.
	Her prayer was soon answered. Some of her former students from St. Mary’s were interested in her new mission. She had already made an impact on them as their teacher, and now, in the example she was providing in this new life of Gospel service to the neediest they saw an ideal worth leaving everything to follow. By June 1950, the community numbered twelve.
	Mother Teresa’s accomplishments in little more than a year were remarkable. When in March 1950 she wrote to Pope Pius XII asking for the approval of the new congregation as a diocesan institute, she submitted an impressive report on the activities carried out by her community:

On my return from Patna I made an 8 days retreat and then on the 2Ist Dec. ‘48 I started the work. I went visiting and nursing the people in their dark homes and holes. So many neglected poor children surrounded me everywhere. Slowly with some lay helpers I gathered the children in two slums. Then in March the first Bengali girl joined: Now we are seven. We work in five different centers. We have the dispensaries where the poor get free treatment and medicine from generous Catholic and Hindu doctors—who have generously offered their services free. We visit the families from street to street. On Sundays we take the poor children from the slums to Sunday Mass. We started the Sunday School with 26 children last May. Now we have over 350.... The abandoned whom we often find in the streets we take to the different hospitals.

	In the Loreto convent, meanwhile, unrest and tension had arisen because of the students from St. Mary’s school who had decided to join Mother Teresa. The support she initially enjoyed from her Loreto companions was curtailed by a warning from the superior general. Mother Teresa confided to the archbishop:

Mother General is afraid that I am a great danger to the Loreto Nuns—so she has forbidden everyone to have anything to do with me.

	These misunderstandings added to the heaviness of her sacrifice, yet she remained upright and charitable toward the Loreto nuns.
	With the permission of the Holy See, Archbishop Perier officially established the Society of the Missionaries of Charity in the archdiocese of Calcutta on October 7, 1950. Jesus’ call that Mother Teresa heard on September 10, 1946, was now recognized and confirmed by the Church. She felt humbled, seeing all that God had done, as she told the archbishop in a letter:

The thought of my unworthiness for all His gifts to me and to my children gets deeper and clearer. In my meditations and prayers, which are so full of distractions nowadays—there stands one thing very clear—my weakness and His Greatness. I fear all things from my weakness—but I trust blindly His Greatness.

	The outstanding work they accomplished was not without cost for Mother Teresa and her young companions. The work in the slums was demanding: They had to walk long distances; their food was poor, and at times they had to beg for it. At the same time, many of them had to continue with their studies. “We have to pay the price for souls,” the foundress kept repeating to her young sisters.
	In her Explanation of the Original Constitutions she wrote:

Jesus says, “I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.” The missionary must die daily, if she wants to bring souls to God. She must be ready to pay the price He paid for souls, to walk in the way He walked in search for souls.

	Challenges did not dishearten Mother Teresa. On the contrary, she impressed those around her by her cheerful disposition. It was a conscious choice; she wanted “to keep on smiling in spite of everything” and to “give Our Lord always all with a cheerful smile.” Overlooking her pain, she chose to spread joy, confirming the resolve of her youth to “drink the chalice to the last drop.”

	Accusations and rumors continued to spread among the Loreto nuns and the Daughters of St. Ann because of her. Mother Teresa confided to the archbishop this new wave of suffering:

There has been a storm in Entally.—The Daughters [of St. Ann] have been very upset with M. M. [Mother Mary] Bernard’s coming here. I have become something terrible for Loreto. I am well compared to the devil and the work as his work and so on. Someday all will be clear. I am grateful to God for all.—I love Loreto just as much if not more, now as I did for so many years.—I pray for them often, and their “persecution” makes me love my new vocation more.

	The remarks from a few of the nuns were upsetting to Mother Teresa not only because they were coming from former companions, but even more so because attributing the work of her fledgling congregation to the devil was a direct attack on the divine origin of her call. It undermined her whole endeavor and God’s tender love for His poor. The conviction that she was doing “God’s work” was the anchor that enabled her to weather this storm.
	To respond to these falsehoods, Mother Teresa decided to write to the Loreto provincial, Mother Francis Xavier Stapleton, “purely out of duty to our own Society.” Realizing the seriousness of the situation and the hurt caused by some of her nuns, the provincial responded immediately, assuring Mother Teresa that she would take action: “You already know my opinion of your work which God is visibly blessing. . . . I am sorry if you have been shown any ill-feeling and shall do my utmost to correct it.” A mutual understanding and collaboration eventually developed between the two congregations.
	While going about the city to meet the needs of the poor, Mother Teresa often encountered people dying in the streets. Because these people were considered “hopeless cases,” the hospitals would not accept them; they were destined to face the end of their life alone, unwanted and abandoned by all. Mother Teresa sought a home where they would be received with love and treated with dignity at least in the last moments of their lives. The city government of Calcutta provided her one of the shelters for pilgrims at the Kali Temple, which she named Nirmal Hriday, Bengali for “pure heart.” There she and her sisters would bring the dying off the streets and offer them accommodation, basic medical care and above all, tender love.
	Mother Teresa regarded Nirmal Hriday as the “treasure house” of her congregation. The neglected, the rejected, the unwanted that she sheltered there closely resembled the suffering Christ—“Christ in distressing disguise”—and gave her the opportunity to “put her love into living action.”
	By the end of 1952, the third floor of the Gomes’ family house had become too small for the community of twenty-six members. Mother Teresa was obliged to look for a larger home to accommodate the increasing number of sisters. After storming heaven with prayer, she found a house on Lower Circular Road that is still today the motherhouse of the Missionaries of Charity. The community moved there in February 1953.
	The inspiration of 1946 was now a “living reality”—a flourishing community serving the poorest of the poor of Calcutta. The challenges and sufferings involved had been worth it. But they were not over. There was one particular trial for which Mother Teresa repeatedly sought spiritual support. After some time she finally revealed this painful interior ordeal, by now deeply settled in her soul.

A Terrible Darkness Within
Your Grace,
	... 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.” Ask Our Lord to give me courage.
	Please give us Your blessing,
	Your devoted child in J. C. [Jesus Christ]. M. Teresa, M.C.

	After several years of suffering in silence and with only occasional and vague references to her interior state, Mother Teresa at last revealed to Archbishop Perier the great pain that had been tormenting her soul from the beginning of her mission with the poor.
	The accomplishments of her community began to attract admiration and praise as articles describing her work began to appear locally and internationally. Mother Teresa also shared her concern with the archbishop:

I am afraid we are getting too much publicity.—A few things I heard this evening have made me feel cold with fear. God preserve us. Please pray for me—that I be nothing to the world and let the world be nothing to me.

	Her well-established humility, the persistent darkness and the numerous demands of the expanding work helped to prevent pride and a worldly spirit from entering her heart. The fact that she and her sisters were at times in real physical danger served to keep their “feet on the ground”:

We had again trouble in Kalighat [Nirmal Hriday]—they very coolly told me I must thank God that up to now I have not received a shot or a beating from them, since all those who worked for them death has been their reward. Very peacefully I told them, that I was ready to die for God. Hard times are coming, let us pray that our Society will stand the test….

	Though not without struggles, Mother Teresa’s work among the poor continued with remarkable results. She was aware that it was “God’s work”; she was but an instrument in bringing “souls to God—and God to souls.” For such a mission, prayer and sacrifice were essential: united to Jesus’ redemptive suffering, prayer and sacrifice leavened the work for the poor. This vision of faith guided her in the establishment of her “sick and suffering co-workers,” as she explained to Archbishop Perier:

I don’t know if I have told Your Grace, but I have started with the sick a spiritual relationship. Every Sister has a second self—to pray and suffer for her—and the Sisters will share her good works and prayers with her. … It is their prayers and sufferings that [are] blessing our apostolate. It makes them so happy to have to suffer for somebody—to be a Missionary of Charity—though they be blind, lame, TB [tuberculosis patients], crippled, having cancer. Often when I find the work very difficult, I offer the suffering of these my children and I find help comes at once.

	Almost a year after her first disclosure to the archbishop, Mother Teresa again reported to him that “my own soul remains in deep darkness and desolation. No I don’t complain—let Him do with me whatever He wants.” Surrendering anew, she sacrificed willingly the consolation of felt union with Jesus for the challenge of living by pure faith. This experience made her even more understanding and compassionate toward others.
	Interior darkness was Mother Teresa’s way of entering into the mystery of the Cross of Christ. Knowing that suffering should be expected as a part of the calling of a Missionary of Charity, she instructed one of her sisters:

My dearest Child,
	Thanks for the lovely consoling letter of the 14th. Keep looking at the Sacred Heart.—Why worry if it be TB or not?—You are His and it is His gift to you, His spouse. … So smile—smile at the Hand that strikes you—kiss the Hand that is nailing you to the Cross.—I don’t believe just as you that you have TB—but let them do all that they want with you.—Be like a little lamb—smile at everyone. Don’t worry, I shall beg the money and will come to see you as soon as I hear more definite news.
	“Let them look up and see only Jesus.” Love Jesus and keep a smiling heart for Him. All these disturbing thoughts come from the devil—ignore them all. God bless you my child.

	In January 1955, a little less than a year since she had last mentioned the darkness to Archbishop Perier, Mother Teresa noted a new element in her experience: deep loneliness. This loneliness, her “traveling companion” from this point forward, resulted from her apparent separation from God and those she trusted most. This sense of alienation made her cross harder to bear.
	Mother Teresa continued to be cheerful and enthusiastic. Hers was no mere superficial joy but a deeply spiritual one.
	Because Archbishop Perier was her superior, Mother Teresa was expected to write a report to him at least once a month about her spiritual life, the concerns of her community, and their apostolate. She also sought his counsel or permission on certain points. In this correspondence with him, she shared, for the most part, the ordinary details of daily life, but occasionally she remarked on her darkness. These seemingly casual references give a glimpse of the depth of her interior trial and the magnanimity of her response.

Your Grace,
	In 1956 will be the 1st ten years since Jesus spoke of the “work.” … God has been very wonderful to use the poor instruments for His work. With the whole of my heart I can say—I claim absolutely nothing in all this, only that the Sisters and I have let God use us to the full.
	The Sisters are all doing very well.—Even Sister M. . . . has changed completely. I have really much to thank God.
	We are having our Christmas treat at St. Laurence. We shall have plenty to do to prepare for 2400 and to find conveyance for all of them. God has provided, He will provide again. The Marian Society ladies have bought new clothes for 1212 slum Catholic children. To the Hindus we shall give in Sept. during the Pujas and the Muslim children for Idd.
	Pray for me—for within me everything is icy cold. It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness. As long as Our Lord has all the pleasure—I really do not count.

	Only in February 1956 did Mother Teresa offer Archbishop Perier a more detailed description of her spiritual experience.

Your Grace,
	I want to say to you something—but I do not know how to express it. I am longing—with a painful longing to be all for God—to be holy in such a way that Jesus can live His life to the full in me. The more I want Him—the less I am wanted. I want to love Him as He has not been loved—and yet there is that separation—that terrible emptiness, that feeling of absence of God. For more than four years I find no help in the direction of [my confessor] Rev. Fr. C. Van Exem. Yet I obey him blindly. Often I have gone to the confessional with the hope of speaking and yet nothing comes.—Sometime last year I told Father about this—and he told me that this should be put before you.—I am not complaining—I only want to go all the way with Christ. I am not writing to you as to His Grace—but to the father of my soul—for to you and from you I have not kept hidden anything. Tell me what your child should do—I want to obey at any cost—and if you tell me to continue like this till the end of my life I am ready to obey cheerfully... .
	Please Your Grace pray for me—that I may draw very close to God.

	To this baring of her soul, the archbishop answered with a short summary of the teaching of St. John of the Cross on the “dark night,” without directly referring to it:

In what you reveal there is nothing which is not known in the mystical life. It is a grace God grants you, the longing to be His entirely without return on self or creatures, to live by Him and in Him, but that longing which comes from God can never be satisfied in this world, simply because He is infinite and we finite.

	He pointed to the great success of the mission as a sign of God’s presence. “God’s blessing is on your work, thank Him for it,” he wrote, recommending her to pray, “'Do with me what Thou wilt’ ... and refuse Him nothing.”
	Without knowing it, the archbishop was echoing the private vow she had made fourteen years earlier not to refuse God anything under the pain of mortal sin. He was touching that secret bond that was hiding everything within her. Did she perceive in this exhortation God’s hand encouraging her to continue in the way He had chosen for her?
	In her response to the archbishop she showed her determination to give Jesus a free hand and accept anything He would permit in order to satiate His thirst for souls:

Please pray for me, that it may please God to lift this darkness from my soul for only a few days. For sometimes the agony of desolation is so great and at the same time the longing for the Absent One so deep, that the only prayer which I can still say is—Sacred Heart of Jesus I trust in Thee—I will satiate Thy thirst for souls.

	Rather than hardening her, her correspondence shows that suffering rendered her more kindhearted. She encouraged others to smile in suffering as she herself did.
	Archbishop Perier continued to counsel Mother Teresa concerning the darkness. At this time, he interpreted it as purification and protection against pride in the face of the remarkable fruitfulness of her work.

	With regard to the feeling of loneliness, of abandonment, of not being wanted, of darkness of the soul, it is a state well known by spiritual writers and directors of conscience. This is willed by God in order to attach us to Him alone, an antidote to our external activities, and also, like any temptation, a way of keeping us humble in the midst of applauses, publicity, praises, appreciation, etc. and success. To feel that we are nothing, that we can do nothing is the realization of a fact. We know it, we say it, some feel it. That is why stick to God and like the little Bernadette at the end of her last retreat wrote: God alone, God everywhere, God in everybody and in everything, God always.
	With St. Ignatius you may add: My only wish and desire, the one thing I humbly crave to have is the grace to love God, to love Him alone. Beyond that I ask for nothing more.

	From the time the darkness had set in and thwarted the feeling of Jesus’ presence, Mother Teresa had nonetheless been recognizing Him in the distressing disguise of the poor: “[W]hen I walk through the slums or enter the dark holes—there Our Lord is always really present.” The “dark holes” had become the privileged meeting place with Him. There she wanted to love Him to the end:

As for myself—there is but one desire—to love God as He has never been loved—with deep personal love. In my heart there seems to be no other thing but He—no other love but His: the streets, Kalighat, slums and Sisters have become places where He lives His own life of love to the full. Pray for me, Your Grace, that there be really “only Jesus” in me.

	Mother Teresa professed to be “perfectly happy to be nobody even to God.” In 1947 she had written to Archbishop Perier, “By nature I am sensitive, love beautiful and nice things, comfort and all the comfort can give—to be loved and love.” She normally remained silent about any lack of love, though she felt it keenly. How much more sensitive must she have been to signs of God’s love—or their apparent absence? Her longing to sense His closeness made the darkness all the more excruciating. Yet she had attained a spiritual maturity that helped her humbly and ungrudgingly assume the last place and happily be “nobody even to God.”
	During her yearly retreats, Mother Teresa would review her life and renew her commitment to strive after holiness—and she was very demanding of herself. In April 1957 she made known to Archbishop Perier her determination to uproot the defects of her strong personality.

	I speak my faults—Sometimes I have been rather quick and harsh in voice when correcting the Sisters. Even with the people I have been impatient a few times—for these and all my other faults I humbly ask pardon and penance. … I beg you to admonish me for all my faults. I want to be a saint according to His Heart meek and humble, therefore at these two virtues of Jesus I will try my best.
	My second resolution is to become an apostle of joy—to console the Sacred Heart of Jesus through joy.

	To commit herself to becoming “an apostle of joy” when humanly speaking she might have felt at the brink of despair, was heroic indeed. She could do so because her joy was rooted in the certitude of the ultimate goodness of God’s loving plan for her.
	In her letters to Archbishop Perier, Mother Teresa had reached the point where she could describe her interior pain in greater depth. It was to the tortures of hell that she now compared the separation from God she was feeling:

Pray for me, pray that I may have the courage to keep on smiling at Jesus. I understand a little the tortures of hell—without God. I have no words to express what I want to say, and yet last First Friday—knowingly and willingly I offered to the Sacred Heart to pass even eternity in this terrible suffering, if this would give Him now a little more pleasure—or the love of a single soul. I want to speak—yet nothing comes—I find no words to express the depths of the darkness. In spite of it all, I am His little one—and I love Him—not for what He gives—but for what He takes.

	Mother Teresa did not enjoy suffering for the sake of suffering; in fact, she found it almost unbearable. But she treasured the opportunity of being united to Jesus on the Cross and showing Him her love. The “mad desire” she had had in the months following the inspiration in 1946 still burned within her heart: “Pray that I may love God with a love with which He has never been loved before.”

“My God, How Painful Is This Unknown Pain”
	Mother Teresa was aware that it was love that made her suffering so acute. The absence of her Beloved had turned into a torturing longing for Him. She was torn between the feeling of having lost God and the unquenchable desire to reach Him. It was a veritable martyrdom of desire.
	Only by possessing a firm and ardent love—the very love she felt she had lost—could she choose to suffer for those she loved, the poor. Her dedication to them spurred her on to greater generosity in offering up her own suffering.
	The depth of Mother Teresa’s love for Jesus is highlighted in the contrast between the pain she was feeling and the way she chose to act, guided by pure faith. She felt reluctant to speak about her darkness—which she compared to the pain of hell—because she was afraid that whatever she thought or wrote would hurt Jesus. Paradoxically, the more she felt stripped of faith, the more her reverence and love for God grew.
	Mother Teresa had always kept hidden the deepest working of God’s grace in her life—her private vow, the details of the inspiration, and now her interior darkness—because of her delicate respect for her relationship with God and His work in her soul, which she treated as something sacred and revealed only to her trusted guides.
	All she yearned for was His happiness; she wanted to satiate His thirst with every drop of her blood. And she would wait, if need be, even for all eternity for the One she loved but whose love she perceived not.
	In her first general letter to her sisters, Mother Teresa exhorted her sisters to grow in the virtues to which the darkness had made her more attentive.

Be kind to each other.—I prefer you make mistakes in kindness—than that you work miracles in unkindness. Be kind in words….

	Refusing to allow her inner suffering to be an excuse for failing in charity, Mother Teresa was striving to have a ready smile, a kind word, a welcoming gesture for each one. She expected the same from her sisters.
	Mother Teresa was now fifty years old and was about to begin a new phase in spreading her mission of love that would take her on numerous journeys around the world. “Love is proved by deeds; the more they cost us, the greater the proof of our love.” These trips would exact their price in time, fatigue and public speaking and serve as further proof of her love.
	In July 1960 the Catholic Relief Services of New York invited Mother Teresa on behalf of the National Council of Catholic Women to their national convention in Las Vegas. At first she declined the invitation:

I am sorry to have to say—“Thank you, I won’t be able to come.” I am not meant for meetings and conventions. Speaking in public and I don’t agree.—My friend Miss E. Egan will do the needful much better—in my place.

	Some days later, having received a second and then a third invitation, she consulted Archbishop Perier for direction. She was “praying that he would say no,” but she had to change her position, as she told her friend Eileen Egan:

I asked His Grace—and he told me that I should go—therefore . . . I will come for the Convention. Thank God I have plenty to do—otherwise I would be terrified of that big public.

	On October 25, 1960, “alone with Jesus and for Jesus,” Mother Teresa left India for the first time since disembarking in Calcutta in January 1929. In Las Vegas, over three thousand women were waiting expectantly to see the “simple little unknown missionary,” this “poor little Missionary, without anything natural to attract,” as Mother Teresa described herself. “Imagine me in U.S. in front of those thousands of great people. I would die of fear and shyness,” she had written before her trip. Yet once there, in a long address she spoke about “her people” and the work in the slums and ended by inviting all to share in the “works of love”:

For me, I have never spoken in public. This is my first time, and to be here with you and to be able to tell you of the love story of God’s mercy for the poorest of the poor, it is a grace of God. . . . I am glad to say that with my whole heart I offer you to share in these works of love.

	From the United States, Mother Teresa went to England, Germany, Switzerland, and finally to Italy. After her return to Calcutta on December 1, 1960, she confided to Archbishop Perier: “My going to the U.S.—was the hardest act of obedience I had ever had to give to God.”
	As soon as she was back in Calcutta, Mother Teresa resumed her regular visits to her mission houses. Numerous responsibilities, fatigue, and sickness added to her already heavy cross.

“I Have Come to Love the Darkness”
	In 1957 Jesuit Father Joseph Neuner wrote an article about Mother Teresa and her work in a German mission magazine, Die Katholischen Missionen. Shortly thereafter she sought out his help to respond to the letters directed to her from readers. Their personal contact took a new turn a few years later. Father Neuner, who taught theology in Pune, India, came on occasion to Calcutta to teach at Morning Star College and to direct retreats. In April 1961 he was invited to preach a retreat to the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. Mother Teresa attended the retreat and spoke to him privately. Father Neuner recalled the encounter:

	In our meetings, Mother Teresa began to speak about the trials of her inner life and her inability to disclose them to anyone.
	So I asked her to write down her experiences which she did more explicitly than I expected. She gave me the papers with the explicit request to burn them as soon as I had read them. I was deeply impressed by the honesty and simplicity of her account, and the deep anxiety she was going through in utter darkness: Was she on the right path? Why had God abandoned her totally? Why this darkness whereas in her earlier life she had been so close to God? She had to lead her Sisters, initiate them into the love of God and into a life of prayer, which had been wiped out in her own life as she lived in total emptiness: Had she become a shameful hypocrite who spoke to others about the divine mysteries which had totally vanished from her own heart? It is all contained in the document, I need not explain it.

	This document, most of which Father Neuner thought best to preserve, touches upon the highlights of her spiritual journey thus far:

	In Loreto, Father I was very happy.—I think the happiest nun.—Then the call came.—Our Lord asked directly—the voice was clear and full of conviction.—Again and again He asked in 1946.—I knew it was He. Fear and terrible feelings—fear lest I was deceived.—But as I have always lived in obedience—I put the whole thing before my spiritual father—hoping the whole time that he will say—it was all devil’s deception, but no—like the voice—he said—it is Jesus who is asking you—and then you know how it all worked out. My Superiors sent me to Asansol [in] 1947—and there as if Our Lord just gave Himself to me—to the full. The sweetness and consolation and union of those 6 months passed but too soon.
	And then the work started—in Dec. 1948.—By 1950 as the number of the Sisters grew—the work grew.—Now Father—since 49 or 50 this terrible sense of loss—this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual longing for God—which gives me that pain deep down in my heart.—Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me.—When the pain of longing is so great—I just long and long for God—and then it is that I feel—He does not want me—He is not there.—Heaven—souls—why these are just words—which mean nothing to me.—My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls—to go where? Why all this? Where is the soul in my very being? God does not want me.—Sometimes—I just hear my own heart cry out—“My God” and nothing else comes.—The torture and pain I can’t explain.—From my childhood I have had a most tender love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament—but this too has gone.—I feel nothing before Jesus—and yet I would not miss [Communion] for anything.
	You see, Father, the contradiction in my life. I long for God—I want to love Him—to love Him much—to live only for love of Him—to love only—and yet there is but pain—longing and no love.—Years back—about 17 years now—I wanted to give God something very beautiful.—I bound myself under pain of mortal sin not to refuse Him anything.—Since then I have kept this promise—and when sometimes the darkness is very dark—and I am on the verge of saying “No to God” the thought of that promise pulls me up.
	I want only God in my life.—“The work” is really and solely His.—He asked—He told me what to do—He guided every step—directs every movement I take—puts the words in my mouth makes me teach the Sisters the way.—All that and everything in me is He.—This is why when the world praises me—it really does not touch—not even the surface—of my soul. About the work I am convinced it is all He.
	Before I could spend hours before Our Lord—loving Him—talking to Him—and now—not even meditation goes properly—nothing but “My God”—even that sometimes does not come.—Yet deep down somewhere in my heart that longing for God keeps breaking through the darkness. When outside—in the work—or meeting people—there is a presence—of somebody living very close—in very me.—I don’t know what this is—but very often, even every day—that love in me for God grows more real.—I find myself telling Jesus unconsciously most strange tokens of love.—
	Father, I have opened my heart to you.—Teach me to love God—teach me to love Him much. I am not learned—I don’t know many things about the things of God—I want to love God as and what He is to me—“My Father.”
	All these things were so natural to me before—until Our Lord came fully in my life—I loved God with all the powers of a child’s heart. He was the centre of everything I did and said.—Now Father—it [is] so dark, so different and yet my everything is His—in spite of Him not wanting me, not caring as if for me.
	When the work started—I knew what it will all mean.—But with my whole heart I accepted then everything.—Only one prayer I made—to give me grace to give saints to the Church.
	My heart and soul and body belongs only to God—that He has thrown away as unwanted the child of His Love.—And to this, Father, I have made that resolution in this retreat—To be at His disposal.
	Let Him do with me whatever He wants, as He wants, for as long as He wants. If my darkness is light to some soul—even if it be nothing to nobody—I am perfectly happy—to be God’s flower of the field.

	Mother Teresa knew that her perception of her spiritual state with all its darkness was not the whole picture. She could catch a glimmer of her love for God: it was becoming more real, and “most strange tokens of love” arose spontaneously into her consciousness. And while she felt “as if” God was not caring for her, she knew she was a “child of his Love.”
	Years later, Father Neuner summed up his reaction to Mother Teresa’s self-revealing notes:

My answer to the confession of these pages was simple: there was no indication of any serious failure on her part which could explain the spiritual dryness. It was simply the dark night of which all masters of spiritual life know—though I never found it so deeply, and for so many years as in her. There is no human remedy against it. It can be borne only in the assurance of God’s hidden presence and of the union with Jesus who in His passion had to bear the burden and darkness of the sinful world for our salvation. The sure sign of God’s hidden presence in this darkness is the thirst for God, the craving for at least a ray of His light. No one can long for God unless God is present in his/her heart. Thus the only response to this trial is the total surrender to God and the acceptance of the darkness in union with Jesus.

	Father Neuner was able to impart to Mother Teresa invaluable insight into her trial, which she appreciated greatly.

Dear Father,
	I can’t express in words—the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me.—For the first time in this 11 years—I have come to love the darkness.—For I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a “spiritual side of ‘your work’” as you wrote.—Today really I felt a deep joy—that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony—but that He wants to go through it in me.—More than ever I surrender myself to Him. Yes—more than ever I will be at His disposal.

	Thanks to Father Neuner, Mother Teresa’s understanding of her interior condition deepened considerably: she came to realize that her darkness was the spiritual side of her work, a sharing in Christ’s redemptive suffering. Regardless of how she had understood it, this trial of faith, hope, and love was not a purification from the defects characteristic of beginners in the spiritual life or even from those defects common to those advanced on the path of union with God.
	Her darkness was an identification with those she served: she was drawn mystically into the deep pain they experienced as a result of feeling unwanted and rejected and, above all, by living without faith in God. Years before, she had been willing to offer herself as a victim for even one soul. She was now called to be united in the pain, not only with one soul, but with a multitude of souls that suffered in this terrible darkness.
	Father Neuner later shed light on the transformation that took place in her soul:

It was the redeeming experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus’ passion. . . . Thus we see that the darkness was actually the mysterious link that united her to Jesus. It is the contact of intimate longing for God. Nothing else can fill her mind. Such longing is possible only through God’s own hidden presence. We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us. Thirst is more than absence of water. It is not experienced by stones, but only by living beings that depend on water. Who knows more about living water, the person who opens the water tap daily without much thinking, or the thirst tortured traveler in the desert in search for a spring?

	Henceforth Mother Teresa began to love the darkness as an integral part of her call.
	The darkness did not lessen, the pain did not diminish, but a greater peace and a more serene acceptance were evident in Mother Teresa’s soul. Father Neuner had led her to a turning point in the understanding and living of the darkness.
	Still, Mother Teresa kept wondering at the paradox in her life: How could God be so close, as Father Neuner maintained, when her feelings indicated the opposite? Yet, while her feelings continued in this treacherous “game,” she could not deny that her whole being was fixed on Him. Others were drawn to her precisely because they perceived this closeness to God. And though she still feared being a hypocrite, she was witnessing to resolute faith and genuine charity—the fruits of her intimate union with God that she could not sense. Judging herself unable to “reach” God, she still rejoiced in helping others to get closer to Him.
	God’s blessing on her endeavors continued to be a reassurance of His presence and guidance through her interior desert. To her friend Eileen, Mother Teresa wrote, “God is so very wonderful to bless His own works in so many ways. Now more than ever I not only feel but know for certain—that really the work is His.” It was from this knowledge and conviction that she could confidently encourage her co-workers to live in union with Him:

The Loved Ones of Christ
	Eileen has asked me to write—that you have all voted to have a few words from me for your March meeting. There must have been something wrong with that voting.—All the same, it gives me pleasure to come again near you and I think I can see still that burning desire for holiness I saw on your faces when I was with you. God keep it burning. Daily we pray “let them look up and see only Jesus,” but how often we look in and see only Jesus in us? Do we see Him in using our eyes, mind, and heart, as His own? Are we so given to Him—that we find His eyes look through ours, His tongue speaking, His hands working, His feet walking, His Heart loving? Do we really see only Jesus in us?
	You have to be in the world and yet not of the world. The light you give must be so pure, the love you love with must be so burning—the faith you believe with must be so convincing—that in seeing you they really see only Jesus. Your apostolate is so beautiful to give Jesus. You can give Him—only if you have surrendered yourself totally to Him.

	Her interior darkness gave Mother Teresa the capacity to comprehend the feelings of the poor. “The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbor who lives at the roadside assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease,” she would later say.
	And she did her part, spending herself totally to help change the horrifying conditions of the poor. Not only did she meet their material needs; she offered more, for she knew that “people today are hungry for love, for understanding love which is much greater and which is the only answer to loneliness and great poverty.” Those she served knew that she loved them, understood them, suffered with them. They felt that for her, they were the only person in the world at that moment. It was not just the material help, but especially her love that made the difference.
	Without her interior darkness, without knowing such a longing for love and the pain of being unloved, and without this radical identification with the poor, Mother Teresa would not have won over their trust and their hearts to the extent she did.

“I Want With My Whole Heart What He Wants”
	Even in intense suffering, Mother Teresa’s sense of humor did not fail her, and she could be impish in expressing her manner of following Jesus through the darkness. “I can do only one thing, like a little dog follow closely the Master’s footsteps. Pray that I be a cheerful dog,” she wrote.
	Mother Teresa’s increasing zeal for souls was reflected in the rapid spread of her mission. To her friend Eileen she happily related the increasing number of foundations: “Counting Heaven where we have 4 Sisters—now we have 15 houses—and one of the Brothers with 9 Brothers.” This zeal helped her overlook her own needs and sufferings and unite them to the sufferings of the poor she served. “Don’t worry about me,” she added in the same letter to Eileen, “my throat is better—and it is good to have something [to suffer]—so that I can share a little the pain of my poor in Nirmal Hriday. . . . I long to light the light of love in the heart of every creature of God.”
	Mother Teresa recognized that her darkness was the price of lighting “the fire of love.” She willingly agreed to pay the price and exhorted the superiors of her communities to do the same, though she gave no indication that she was speaking from direct experience:

You are there for your Sisters—the Sisters are not there for you. You must be ready for any sacrifice—so to say, to be eaten up by your Sisters. You may sometimes feel great loneliness—but this is one of the sacrifices you can make for your Sisters. It often happens that those who spend their time giving light to others, remain in darkness themselves.

	On February 1, 1965, the Missionaries of Charity received pontifical recognition, whereby the congregation was placed directly under the authority of the pope instead of the diocesan bishop. This was a decisive step in the life of the “young Society.” This mark of God’s favor moved Mother Teresa to think of St. John the Baptist. His words “He must increase, but I must decrease” were both her inspiration and her aspiration, for she wanted all the attention to be on Jesus and not on His instrument.
	Mother Teresa’s awareness of God’s Providence in her ministry and in her own spiritual life helped her through the hard times. “Thank God we don’t serve God with our feelings, otherwise I don’t know where I would be.—Pray for me,” she wrote to Bishop Picachy. Yet she resisted falling into self-pity.
	Jesus was Mother Teresa’s first love and her only love, in a relationship that grew more intense at each stage of her life. One of the best descriptions of Mother Teresa is that she was a woman “totally, passionately, madly in love with Jesus.”
	A journalist persistently digging into the extraordinary experience of “someone to whom God had personally spoken” inquired: “Were you not for a second in doubt? After all, Christ himself had moments of doubt. In Gethsemane.” Mother Teresa responded with conviction:

	No. There was no doubt. It was only for a moment that He felt unsure. That was as a human being. That was natural. The moment you accept, the moment you surrender yourself, that’s the conviction. But it may mean death to you, eh? The conviction comes the moment you surrender yourself. Then there is no doubt. The moment Jesus said, “Father, I am at Your disposal, Thy will be done,” He had accepted. That was His agony. He felt all the things you and I would feel as human beings. That’s why He was like unto us in all things, except sin.
	[If uncertainty remains] that’s the time to go on your knees, eh? . . . In that prayer, God cannot deceive you because that prayer comes from within you. That is the time you want Him most. Once you have got God within you, that’s for life. There is no doubt. You can have other doubts, eh? But that particular one will never come again. No, I have never had doubt.... But I am convinced that it is He and not I. That it is His work, and not my work. I am only at His disposal. Without Him I can do nothing. But even God could do nothing for someone already full. You have to be completely empty to let Him in to do what He will. That’s the most beautiful part of God, eh? Being almighty, and yet not forcing Himself on anyone.

	More than twenty years had passed since Mother Teresa began her mission among the poor. At this stage, she spoke very little about her own interior darkness, but never missed the chance to connect the reality of the human suffering she was facing with the sufferings of Jesus. Her heart was “one” with His. His wounds were so imprinted on her soul that they had become hers. She suffered intensely at seeing the sufferings of those she loved, but she kept highlighting the value and the meaning of human suffering as a means of sharing in the Passion of Jesus.

“God Uses Nothingness to Show His Greatness”
	In 1975 the Missionaries of Charity, numbering over a thousand sisters in eighty-five foundations in fifteen countries, celebrated the silver jubilee of their foundation. The succeeding years would be marked by the rapid expansion of the congregation throughout the world and the increasing attention of the world’s media on Mother Teresa and the work she had started in the obscurity of Calcutta’s slums. Though she had made no mention of it for the past six years, the darkness still had its unrelenting grip on her soul.
	It was during this time that Mother Teresa met Father Michael van der Peet, a member of the Priests of the Sacred Heart. In October 1974, while walking down the street in Rome, he saw Mother Teresa waiting for a bus with another sister. “My first impulse was to go to her, but I said to myself, ‘Leave the woman alone. Everybody is always staring at her.’ I walked on, my heart pounding, but suddenly I thought, ‘She’s a saint and I’m a sinner. Let the sinner go to the saint and ask her to pray for me.’” So he returned. After a short greeting, Mother Teresa, in her usual fashion, asked him to give a conference on prayer to her novices two days later.
	Father van der Peet’s impressions from this and subsequent meetings with Mother Teresa leave no doubt as to the union with God that she radiated:

	Whenever I met Mother, all self-consciousness left me. I felt right away at ease: she radiated peace and joy, even when she shared with me the darkness in her spiritual life. I was often amazed that someone who lived so much face to face with suffering people and went through a dark night herself, still could smile and make you feel happy.... I believe that I can say that I felt in God’s presence, in the presence of truth and love.
	I could not help but think: Here is a person God dreamed of in Paradise, truly a touch of God. Yet I have to say at the same time that she was one of the most down-to-earth persons I have ever met.

	This practical spirit came to the fore especially in the way she directed her congregation and managed to stay on top of the myriad demands on her time by so many people within and outside her religious family. Yet despite the numerous activities, the frequent travels to visit the increasing number of houses, the growing needs of the poor she witnessed daily, and the persistent interior darkness that troubled her, her fidelity to prayer was categorical:

I make my holy hour with Jesus straight after Mass—so that I get the 2 hours with Jesus before people and Sisters start using me.—I let Him use me first….

	“People were fascinated just watching Mother pray. They would sit there and watching her be really drawn into this mystery,” one of her followers observed.
	The mystery of God’s greatness and her nothingness had become a recurrent theme in her speaking and writing. Her smallness, an essential element of the way she related to God and to others, had shaped her way of praying and acting, her very life. She even welcomed the growing publicity from His hand, since in her smallness she neither made any claims nor wished to place any obstacles in the way of His action.

Dear Father Michael,
	Thank you for your letter of 23/5 [May 23]. It was so good of you to write. I want to write—but I have nothing to say, but that I wonder at His great humility and my smallness—nothingness—I believe this is where Jesus and I meet. He is everything to me—and I—His own little one—so helpless—so empty—so small. I am so small that all these things that the people keep pouring at and round me cannot enter within me. Maybe because of the darkness I do not see. Maybe He just wants it to be so. I let Him have His way.—I smile at the cardboard box getting filled with all kinds of things—big things, most of which I do not understand. But I know that I am being used—only for and by them so that they proclaim the presence of the poor—and their concern for the poor, and so I accept everything with a smile in their name.

	Mother Teresa had reached the point in her life when she no longer ventured to penetrate or question the mystery of her unremitting darkness. She accepted it, as she did everything else that God willed or at least permitted, “with a big smile.” Though the pain was deepening as the years went by, she had made friends with it, and had even come to love it.
	Aspiring to be completely at God’s disposal, she marveled at His humility in using her “nothingness.” Her very poverty was her meeting place with God. She was convinced that He used it in order to reach others:

His ways are so beautiful.—To think that we have God almighty to stoop so low as to love you and me and make use of us and make us feel that He really needs us.—As I grow older my wonder at His humility grows more and more and I love Him not for what He gives but for what He is—[the] Bread of Life—the hungry One.

	To be absorbed with Jesus required being forgetful of self, as she explained to her sisters:

... It is only when we realize our nothingness, our emptiness, that God can fill us with Himself. When we become full of God then we can give God to others, for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.

	Her long experience of darkness, her sense of rejection, her loneliness, the terrible and unsatisfied longing for God, each sacrifice and pain had become for her as one more “drop of oil” that she readily offered to God, to keep the lamp—the life of Jesus within her—burning, radiating His love to others and so dispelling the darkness.
	As the correspondence continued, Father van der Peet rejoiced in the privilege of this exchange with Mother Teresa. “It was a gift from God for which I am most grateful,” he later admitted:

The impression that I got was that I was dealing with a woman who somehow saw God and felt God in the distress of the poor, and a woman who had an incredible faith in light and darkness. She saw the suffering of Christ, but it was not that she was taken up in ecstasy or things like that—that was not part of her life, although people might be tempted to think that.... I really believe that the reason Mother Teresa had to undergo so much darkness in her life is that it would bring about a greater identification with the poor.

	The darkness as being a means of “greater identification with the poor” was an insight that Mother Teresa had obtained earlier with Father Neuner’s guidance. Father van der Peet pointed in the same direction, thereby helping Mother Teresa to have confidence in him. Her contact with him was also God’s gift to her, offering her one more proof of His tender love, a confirmation of His care in the midst of her abiding interior trial.
	Being a public figure was a real suffering—a “Calvary”—for Mother Teresa and she struggled mightily to overcome her natural feelings. Yet her smile, a “cloak” that covered this pain, too, prevented others from sensing what living in the spotlight cost her. To smile required an effort, as she explained during a speech in I977 with her characteristic humor:

I remember some time ago a very big group of professors came from the United States and they asked, “Tell us something that will help us.” And I said, “Smile at each other.” I must have said it in a very serious way, I suppose, and so one of them asked me, “Are you married?” And I said, “Yes, and I sometimes find it very difficult to smile at Jesus because He can be very demanding.”

	People flocked to her, attracted by her kindness and simplicity; for everyone she had time, a word, a smile. She was able to provide solace, because it was Jesus she wanted to give to all:

Pray—I must be able to give only Jesus to the world. People are hungry for God. What [a] terrible meeting [it] would be with our neighbor if we give them only ourselves.

	“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” St. Paul wrote. These words describe well the reality of Mother Teresa’s union with God: Christ was indeed living and acting in her, spreading His love in the world. She often stated, “God still loves the world through you and through me today,” and she was letting Him do it.
	In every new “tabernacle,” as she called a new foundation, she saw “a great gift of God to the world which is dying for God and His love—and yet does not want God.” Each convent was another shrine where the sisters, nourished with the “Bread of Life,” were spurred on to go in search of the “hungry Christ” hidden in the poorest of the poor and offer Him humble service. Prayer and service flowed from the same contemplation of Jesus’ presence under these two “disguises.” For this reason, Mother Teresa never tired of repeating, “We are not social workers. We are contemplatives in the heart of the world. We are 24 hours a day with Jesus.”
	In November 1979, at the fourth general chapter of the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa was again elected superior general. Though she had been longing to be “a simple sister in the community,” she accepted this decision as the will of God.
	Shortly after, on December 11, 1979, Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize. By now, she had learned that “Calcutta is everywhere.” In her mission among the poor she was led progressively to identify and address not only material poverty but also the forms of poverty that exist among the rich in affluent countries.
	It was about her poor that she spoke to her attentive audience when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, challenging all present to look for those who lived the agonizing poverty of being unwanted, unloved, or uncared for by their own. Beginning at home, loving and caring for each one, everyone could be a “missionary of charity,” she said. Through humble love and service, they could discover the face of Jesus under the distressing disguise of the needy.

[Jesus] makes Himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the sick one, the one in prison, the lonely one, the unwanted one, and he says: “You did it to me.” He is hungry for our love, and this is the hunger of our poor people. This is the hunger that you and I must find, it may be in our own home....

	Mother Teresa had great sympathy for those who felt rejected and unwanted: the forgotten parents left in an old folks home, the lonely youth whose family did not care for him or her, and very especially, the unborn child. “I find the unborn child to be the poorest of the poor today—the most unloved—the most unwanted, the throwaway of the society.” She fought to defend the precious gift of life and it became one of the recurrent themes of her speeches.

But what does God say to us? He says, “Even if a mother could forget her child, I will not forget you. I have carved you in the palm of My hand.” We are carved in the palm of His hand; that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God from conception and is called by God to love and to be loved, not only now in this life, but forever. God can never forget us.

	Mother Teresa realized that the Nobel Peace Prize had “helped many people to find the way to the poor,” and it prompted her to ask for prayer for greater love and zeal in serving the poor. “Keep praying that we do not spoil God’s work—but that through us and in us—and with us and our poor, God’s love and compassion be proclaimed,” she wrote to Father Neuner. Speaking to her own sisters, she explained, “The work is God’s work and not our work, that is why we must do it well. How often we spoil God’s work and try to get the glory for ourselves.” This possibility frightened her, and she prayed constantly to be protected from this presumption.
	In October 1980, Mother Teresa was invited to attend the Synod of Bishops. Though she felt uneasy about addressing “big people” at the Synod, she was convinced that Jesus was using her to proclaim God’s great love for His poor. Her simple but eloquent message was a summary of what she had been living for thirty years. Through her interior darkness, she was well acquainted with the feelings of being unwanted, unloved, uncared for; and she knew that this deep pain was far worse than any physical disease. In her address, she pointed especially to loneliness as a new kind of poverty:

	Recently, a man met me on the street. He said: “Are you Mother Teresa?” I said, “yes.” He said: “Please send somebody to my house. My wife is half mental and I am half blind. But we are longing to hear the loving sound of a human voice.” They were well-to-do people. They had everything in their home. Yet they were dying of loneliness, dying to hear a loving voice.
	How do we know someone like that is not next to our house? Do we know who they are, where they are? Let us find them and, when we find them, love them. Then when we love them we will serve them.
	Today God loves the world so much that He gives you, He gives me, to love the world, to be His love, His compassion. It is such a beautiful thought for us—and a conviction—that you and I can be that love and compassion.
	Do we know who our own poor are? Do we know our neighbor, the poor of our own area? It is so easy for us to talk and talk about the poor of other places. Very often we have the suffering, we have the lonely, we have the people—old, unwanted, feeling miserable—and they are near us and we don’t even know them. We have no time even to smile at them.
	Tuberculosis and cancer [are] not the great diseases. I think a much greater disease is to be unwanted, unloved. The pain that these people suffer is very difficult to understand, to penetrate. I think this is what our people all over the world are going through, in every family, in every home.
	This suffering is being repeated in every man, woman and child. I think Christ is undergoing His Passion again. And it is for you and for me to help them….
	Our poor people are great people, a very lovable people. They don’t need our pity and sympathy. They need our understanding love and they need our respect. We need to tell the poor that they are somebody to us, that they, too, have been created, by the same loving hand of God, to love and be loved.

	In 1980, because of the large number of Missionaries of Charity communities spread throughout the world, the decision was made to divide the houses into twelve regions. A corresponding regional superior was appointed to assist Mother Teresa in the governance of the congregation. The work for the poor was flourishing and twelve more foundations were opened that year.
	However, Mother Teresa also had the painful realization that not all her followers were fully living up to their lofty vocation. Jesus was not being loved and served in the poor as ardently as she longed for Him to be. In addition, there were failures in the sisters’ love for each other. All these deficiencies hurt her deeply.
	Since her journeys were more frequent and demanding, Mother Teresa felt that she was not giving enough time to her sisters when they needed her most. For that reason, she asked the pope for permission to be released from public engagements. She conveyed his reply to her sisters:

	After Holy Father gave a big speech to the people, I said, “Holy Father, I want to see you five minutes.” He sat there; I sat there at his feet. He had his arms crossed with his head in his arms like this looking down at me. He said, “You got problems.”
	I said, “Holy Father, I am finding it very difficult. I have so many Sisters, 342 at the Mother House now in India, they need me and I need them, and now this continual calling. It is your will, I know, whatever you say I will do, but what do you want me to do?” He said, “Continue doing what you are doing. Do not refuse Jesus. You have never refused Him before, do not refuse Him now.”

Radiating Christ
	The last two decades of Mother Teresa’s life were a period of intense activity, even as her health deteriorated. Endowed with an extraordinary energy, she traversed the world proclaiming the good news of God’s love and of His presence in the poorest of the poor. Her love and zeal for God and souls was boundless and inspired her to make numerous foundations all over the world. Her presence and words had such influence that in 1985 she was called the most powerful woman in the world by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Javier Perez de Cuellar. Yet the terrible darkness remained.
	While on visitation in Rome in 1983 she fell out of bed and was hospitalized. A serious heart condition was providentially discovered. While in the hospital, Mother Teresa wrote her intimate response to Jesus’ query in Matthew 16:15: “Who do you say that I am?”

Jesus is my God.
Jesus is my Spouse.
Jesus is my Life.
Jesus is my only Love.
Jesus is my All in All.
Jesus is my Everything.

	Jesus, I love with my whole heart, with my whole being.
	I have given Him all, even my sins, and He has espoused me to Himself in tenderness and love.
	Now and for life I am the spouse of my Crucified Spouse. Amen.

	Although she recovered, her strength began to fail and she was never long without sickness and physical pain. Yet she was continually active and even more determined, no matter the cost, to give her “Yes” to God and “a big smile for all.” She maintained the same busy schedule almost to the end, living to the full her vow of wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor. Her body was getting weaker, but her spirit was indefatigable. She wanted to conquer the world with love, as a sister recalled:

Mother one day brought a map of Europe and spread it before me. At that time, the Soviet Union had not yet broken up and half of Europe was under Communist rule with no permission for missionaries to enter as missionaries. But Mother just went with her finger from country to country, like: “France, we are here. Germany, we are here. Austria, we are here. Hungary, not yet. Bulgaria, not yet.” And so she went on. Then she started to count the countries where we were “not yet” on her fingers. . . . she was in dead earnest that “a tabernacle” (meaning a house) should be opened in each country of the world. Mother had a big vision of what she wanted to give her Lord and God.

	By the end of 1989, a new phase began in Mother Teresa’s life. Her heart condition was worsening, and several times she was at death’s door. In December 1989, after she had a permanent pacemaker inserted, she wrote to Brother Roger of Taize, “One very good thing was the fruit of my sickness—that the whole world prayed to the same God to make me well.” It was important to Mother Teresa that people be drawn to God, and if her sickness helped bring this about, she was grateful. As soon as she regained a little strength, she was on her feet again spreading God’s love in every possible way.
	In the 1990s, with the collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe, she was on the move, in spite of her heart condition and contrary to the doctors’ advice. She had been longing to bring the light of God’s love to the Central and Eastern European countries that had suffered restrictions on religious freedom. She opened foundations in most of the countries of the former Soviet Union, including several in Russia, and in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and finally Albania. “People are so hungry for God,” she repeated after witnessing the deep desire for God that had been suppressed for too many years in these countries.
	Mother Teresa had been a fearless missionary all her life. She had heard the Voice of God calling her to serve the poor. She had, in turn, become a voice pleading on behalf of the poor. Armed with the weapon of faith, she was not afraid to face and challenge world leaders to protect the interests of the most vulnerable members of human society. An open letter she wrote to the heads of state of the United States and Iraq, in the hope that the looming war could be averted, was one eloquent example of her courage and single-mindedness.

Dear President George Bush and President Saddam Hussein
	I come to you with tears in my eyes and God’s love in my heart to plead to you for the poor and those who will become poor if the war that we all dread and fear happens. I beg you with my whole heart to work for, to labor for God’s peace and to be reconciled with one another.
	You both have your cases to make and your people to care for but first please listen to the One who came into the world to teach us peace. You have the power and the strength to destroy God’s presence and image, His men, His women, and His children. Please listen to the will of God. God has created us to be loved by His love and not to be destroyed by our hatred.
	In the short term there may be winners and losers in this war that we all dread, but that never can, nor never will justify the suffering, pain and loss of life which your weapons will cause.
	I come to you in the name of God, the God that we all love and share, to beg for the innocent ones, our poor of the world and those who will become poor because of war. They are the ones who will suffer most because they have no means of escape. I plead on bended knee for them. They will suffer and when they do, we will be the ones who are guilty for not having done all in our power to protect and love them. I plead to you for those who will be left orphaned, widowed, and left alone because their parents, husbands, brothers and children have been killed. I beg you please save them. I plead for those who will be left with disability and disfigurement. They are God’s children. I plead for those who will be left with no home, no food and no love. Please think of them as being your children. Finally, I plead for those who will have the most precious thing that God can give us, life, taken away from them. I beg you to save our brothers and sisters, yours and ours, because they are given to us by God to love and to cherish. It is not for us to destroy what God has given to us. Please, please let your mind and your will become the mind and will of God. You have the power to bring war into the world or to build peace. PLEASE CHOOSE THE WAY OF PEACE.
	I, my sisters and our poor are praying for you so much. The whole world is praying that you will open your hearts in love to God. You may win the war but what will the cost be on people who are broken, disabled and lost?
	I appeal to you—to your love, your love of God and your fellow men. In the name of God and in the name of those you will make poor, do not destroy life and peace. Let love and peace triumph and let your names be remembered for the good you have done, the joy you have spread and the love you have shared.
	Please pray for me and my sisters as we try to love and serve the poor because they belong to God and are loved in His eyes, as we and our poor are praying for you. We pray that you will love and nourish what God has so lovingly entrusted into your care.
	May God bless you now and always.

	Mother Teresa was preaching not only by her words but even more by her actions. Wherever a disaster struck or a tragedy occurred, she would be there with her sisters. She did not judge, nor did she criticize; she loved and helped in a simple but effective way.
	Mother Teresa had given her all to answer God’s call, without counting the cost. The fruitfulness of her apostolate came at the steep price of many years of sacrifice. The sisters living closest to her could not help but notice:

She must have undergone martyrdom. Her extensive travels in crowded trains, only third class compartments, her daily walks to the slums in the dust and dirt, being tired, hungry, thirsty, not having any privacy—the door of her room being always open—no fan even in the hottest summer, small rooms, small chapels, a narrow, hard iron bed: all these and more, without ever a complaint! . . . She would just say almost daily, “All for Jesus”—just like that, no comment, nothing. . . . And when she had special trials or something, she used to teach us: “You know, this is the chance for greater love.”

	These were only the sufferings others observed. The excruciating interior ones she had kept well hidden.
	In the midst of all her activities and in constant interior pain, Mother Teresa was fully involved in community life with her sisters. During her extensive travels, she would at times reach her destination after midnight but she would still be up at 4:40 in the morning, first in the chapel for morning prayers and ready to carry out the day’s demanding work schedule. This routine continued until shortly before her death:

During 1994 and 1995 Mother led a normal life, following the whole timetable, meeting visitors, answering the phone, etc. From time to time, she suffered from bouts of cough and colds, malaria, etc. She had broken her shoulder bone and fractured three ribs due to a fall in Rome, but this was not enough to keep Mother in bed. She was always in haste to give Jesus and gave no thought for herself. At the age of over 80 it surely was not easy to have a hectic day followed by handling the mail each night. However, Mother gave herself completely.

	When visiting the houses of her congregation, she would share in doing the simplest tasks with her sisters. Her example spoke to them more eloquently than her words, as a sister testifies:

I remember once when Mother came to Baton Rouge, I was watching Mother’s every step. After we had lunch, Mother helped us to wash the dishes and she was the first one to take the [dishcloth] to clean off the table. People were crowded outside because of Mother, and here Mother is doing the humblest act like a simple sister.

	Much of Mother Teresa’s correspondence in the last years of her life was reduced to short notes, but they convey succinctly her thoughts, her desires, and her prayer. They were often just encouraging exhortations, her simple expression veiling a profound wisdom:

	God is in love with us and keeps giving Himself to the world—through you—through me... .
	May you continue to be the sunshine of His love to your people and thus make your life something truly beautiful for God.

	Doing “something truly beautiful for God” was not just an attractive motto; it was how she had been attempting to show her love for Jesus all these years, doing everything as beautifully as she possibly could for Him.
	At the age of eighty-five, Mother Teresa was still eager to receive advice and spiritual guidance with humility and simplicity. Bishop Curlin was a witness to this characteristic of hers:

	I remember especially our last meeting together in Charlotte when she came here in 1995. That evening we spent an hour in private conversation discussing her spiritual life. When I suggested that she offer her spiritual dryness to God as a special gift, she reacted with enthusiasm. She repeated several times, “What a wonderful gift from God to be able to offer Him the emptiness I feel. I am so happy to give Him this gift.”…
	In the telephone conversations that followed our last meeting, she invariably mentioned her continuing to make that inner and hidden gift.

	In 1996 Mother Teresa's health took a notable turn for the worse. At times she required hospitalization. One of her priests recalled her suffering:

In her last illness [1996] she was often in the hospital. She was literally pinned to the bed, nailed to the cross. When she became conscious, she immediately tried to make the sign of the cross, even when she had so many needles from machines in her arms. She told me how I could become a holy priest. “First thing in the morning,” she said, “kiss the crucifix. Offer Him everything you will say, or do or think during the day. Love Him with a deep, personal, intimate love—and you will become a holy priest.”

	From this near-fatal illness Mother Teresa recovered. She remained at the head of her congregation until March 1997 (six months before her death), when, to Mother Teresa’s great joy, Sister M. Nirmala Joshi M.C. was elected as her successor. In May, against all medical advice, Mother Teresa set out on what was to be her last journey to Rome, New York, and Washington, D.C. Sister Nirmala was aware of the gravity of the situation but also of the motives behind Mother Teresa’s determination:

[The doctor] was absolutely against Mother’s traveling to the U.S.A., for it was too dangerous for Mother’s life. I understood how important the religious Professions of the Sisters were for Mother. For in each Profession she offered so many consecrated souls to Jesus to quench His thirst for them and for souls.... This perhaps was the last time Mother would have the chance of doing it. This was her mission of quenching the thirst of Jesus for love and for souls. And I knew I had to support Mother’s decision to go to the U.S.A. for this purpose, even at the risk of her life. If Mother had lost her life during the journey, it would be the consummation of her life in the fulfillment of her mission, for which Jesus had called her. That would be her joy and glory.

	When Mother Teresa returned to Calcutta in July, after a hectic and exhausting journey, she quietly told a friend, “My work is done.” She was overjoyed to be “back home” at Motherhouse, in her beloved Calcutta, where she had always desired to die. One of the sisters remarked, “After her return from Rome . . . Mother had been extremely happy, joyful, optimistic, and talkative. Her face was always radiant, full of fun. The Lord must have revealed to her the impending end of her life.”
	Mother Teresa had kept her word to God. She had succeeded in not refusing Jesus anything for fifty-five years, welcoming each situation as a new opportunity to be faithful to the love she had pledged.
	While her last days continued to be marked with physical and spiritual pain, those around her could see that she was consciously preparing for the moment of meeting God, and the thought of “going home to God” filled her with joy. One of the sisters remembered:

Towards the last, Mother spoke . . . so much of heaven and she showed so much concern for every Sister. . . . Mother was very loving and affectionate; she was very joyful and radiant.

	On September 5, 1997, after 8 P.M. Mother Teresa complained of severe back pain; soon her condition was aggravated by the inability to breathe. The sisters at the motherhouse were alarmed. All was done to help her; a doctor and a priest were called in. Unexpectedly the electricity failed and the whole house was in darkness. Foreseeing an emergency, the sisters had secured two independent electric supplies. But both lines went out at the same time; such a thing had never happened before. Prompt and expert medical aid could not help, as the breathing machine could not be started. It was 9.30 P.M. While Calcutta was in darkness, the earthly life of the one who had brought so much light to this city and to the whole world was extinguished. Even so, her mission continues: from heaven she still responds to Jesus’ call, “Come be My light.”

Conclusion
	“Mother, you were a source of light in this world of darkness,” proclaimed one of the countless banners put up by the citizens of Calcutta at the time of Mother Teresa’s funeral. The secret of the abundant light and love that Mother Teresa radiated has been the topic of this book.
	That secret lies in the depth, and intimacy of her relationship with God. She was a “woman madly in love with God,” and even more, she was a woman who understood that “God was madly in love with her.” Having experienced God’s love for her, she desired ardently to love Him in return—even as He had never been loved before.
	The darkness she experienced and described in her letters, in which the strength and beauty of her soul shines forth, was an unrelenting torment.
	Throughout this ordeal, Mother Teresa remained steadfast and faithful to her call, spending herself unremittingly and cheerfully in the mission entrusted to her. Rising above the pain of feeling “unloved and unwanted” by Jesus, she did her utmost to show her love for Him, the Beloved of her soul, and to give joy to Him through all that she did. She sought Him in each person she met, especially in the poorest of the poor, holding fast to His words, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
	Her painful darkness mysteriously united her so intimately with her crucified Spouse, that He became the sole “object of her thoughts and affections, the subject of her conversations, the end of her actions and the model of her life.” Her total surrender to His will and her determination not to refuse Him anything allowed Him to manifest through her His love for each individual. It was the light and love of Jesus Himself that radiated from her—in the midst of her own darkness—and that had such an impact on others.
	Mother Teresa was able to lift up those who had fallen, to encourage the faint, to rekindle hope in the disheartened.

She seemed to delight in you. It was not something of charity that was burdensome, which destroys the dignity of the poor, but it was something that she delighted in.... You had the sense that she considered it a privilege to do this. She comforted you when you were sad. She encouraged you when you were doubting whether you could do something.

	Another of her followers noted, “She always led us to Jesus, especially in very difficult moments.” All were astonished, however, to discover that she had been living in agonizing pain for almost fifty years, clinging to Jesus in pure faith. Her closest collaborators were totally unaware of it.
	It was not the suffering she endured that made her a saint, but the love with which she lived her life through all the suffering. She knew that everyone can, with God’s grace and one’s own resoluteness, reach holiness, not in spite of the suffering that accompanies every human life, but through it. She was able to convey this conviction to her followers, as one of them testified:

She would say to me in difficult times, “Don’t give in to your feelings. God is permitting this.” This really taught me that the best and the worst in life would pass and if I will learn myself to accept the cross, to be quiet, humble and hopeful, that all will pass. By renewing hope in me, I was able to come through that period without making a bad judgment, by acting on my feelings.

	Having taken to heart Christ’s words “Love one another as I have loved you,” and made them a reality in her life, she invites us to travel along the same path:

And today God keeps on loving the world. He keeps on sending you and me to prove that He loves the world, that He still has that compassion for the world. It is we who have to be His love, His compassion in the world of today. But to be able to love we must have faith, for faith in action is love, and love in action is service.

	In a book resonating with Mother Teresa’s voice it seems appropriate to grant her the last word. The following is a story she told that wonderfully expresses the heart of her life and mission. It also invites each one to “be His light” by partaking in these humble deeds of love and compassion that may seem insignificant but are, in fact, nothing less than the means of radiating God’s love to each person we meet, thus transforming, little by little, the darkness of the world into His light:

I will never forget the first time I came to Bourke and visited the sisters. We went to the outskirts of Bourke. There was a big reserve where all the Aborigines were living in those little small shacks made of tin and old cardboard. Then I entered one of those little rooms. I call it a house but it’s only one room, and inside the room everything. So I told the man living there, “Please allow me to make your bed, to wash your clothes, to clean your room.” And he kept on saying, “I’m alright, I’m alright.” And I said to him, “But you will be more alright if you allow me to do it.” Then at the end he allowed me. At the end, he pulled out from his pocket an old envelope, and one more envelope, and one more envelope. He started opening one after the other, and right inside there was a little photograph of his father and he gave me that to look at. I looked at the photo and I looked at him and I said, “You, you are so like your father.” He was so overjoyed that I could see the resemblance of his father on his face. I blessed the picture and I gave it back to him, and again one envelope, second envelope, third envelope, and the photo went back again in the pocket, near his heart. After I cleaned the room I found in the corner of the room a big lamp full of dirt and I said; “Don’t you light this lamp, such a beautiful lamp. Don’t you light it?” He replied “For whom? Months and months and months nobody has ever come to me. For whom will I light it?” So I said, “Won’t you light it if the Sisters come to you?” And he said “Yes.” So the sisters started going to him for only about 5 to 10 minutes a day, but they started lighting that lamp. After some time he got into the habit of lighting. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the Sisters stopped going to him. But they used to go in the morning and see him. Then I forgot completely about that, and then after two years he sent word—“Tell Mother, my friend, the light she lit in my life is still burning.”

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