MOTHER TERESA’S FAITH
What Mother Teresa underwent is called "a dark night of the soul." This is what Jesus suffered on the cross when he cried out: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When he uttered those words, he meant them. At that moment, he felt exactly what Mother Teresa felt so acutely for more than fifty years, namely, the sense that God is absent, that God is dead, that there isn’t any God. But this isn’t the absence of faith or the absence of God, it is rather a deeper presence of God, a presence which, precisely because it goes beyond feeling and imagination, can only be felt as an emptiness, nothingness, absence, non-existence.
But how can this make sense? How can faith feel like doubt? How can God’s deeper presence feel like God’s non-existence? Why would faith work like this?
The literature around the "dark night of the soul" makes this point: Sometimes when we are unable to induce any kind of feeling that God exists, when we are unable to imagine God’s existence, the reason is because God is now coming into our lives in such a way that we cannot manipulate the experience through ego, narcissism, self-advantage, self-glorification, and self-mirroring.
This purifies our experience of God because only when all of our own lights are off can we grasp divine light in its purity. Only when we are completely empty of ourselves inside an experience, when our heads and hearts are pumping dry, can God touch us in a way that makes it impossible for us to inject ourselves into the experience, so that we are worshiping God, not ourselves.
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