A new book of Mother Teresa’s correspondence to her spiritual superiors reveals a deeper look into the heart of Nobel Prize winner and minister to India’s poorest of the poor.

Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday) is a collection of deeply personal letters that she had asked be destroyed at her death. In them she confides:

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

Jesus, my own Jesus—I am only Thine—I am so stupid—I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You wish—as You wish—as long as you wish (1947).

Mother Teresa is not the first Christian to struggle with what sixteenth century’s Saint John of the Cross called "The Dark Night of the Soul." The Spanish priest believed that all Christians must come to the point of loving Christ more than anything: His love, forgiveness, blessings, comfort, etc. Loving anything other than Christ Himself was "idolatry." Mother Teresa later writes of embracing that darkness:

I can't express in words—the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me—for the first time in ... years—I have come to love the darkness—for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus' darkness & 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 (1961).

The painfully honest questions should be an encouragement for believers going through times of doubt. And an important antidote for today's unhealthy emphasis "health and wealth" and "prosperity gospel." And a more recent entry warns that the dark "night" can go on for years.

Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me—The silence and the emptiness is so great—that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have [a] free hand” (1979).

I suspect that Mother Teresa and the apostle Paul will have much to discuss. He wrote:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort (1 Corinthians 1:3-7).

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