For the "Saint of the Gutters," Suffering and Love Intertwined
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Friday, October 5, 2007


ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch  
Publication Date: October 4, 2007

After years of following Mother Teresa's work, I thought I knew her. Unlike her closest friends, whom I have been interviewing in preparation for a televised conference I will anchor this weekend, I never had shadowed her as she nursed lepers in Calcutta, or traveled with her to meet world leaders from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro, or nursed her as she struggled through the last months of her life.

But I knew her works and her words, her infectious smile and the joy that emanated from the countless photos and profiles she had inspired. I even knew about her "dark night of the soul" -- the interior abandonment she had felt in the midst of her busy, cheerful service to the world's poor. News of that spiritual trial made headlines five years ago when the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a priest of the Missionaries of Charity order who is promoting Mother Teresa's canonization in the Catholic Church, published a study of her interior life based on her private letters.

Feelings of spiritual desolation are not uncommon in the writings of the saints. Catholic theology holds that God often allows such suffering to purify souls or to draw them -- and, through them, others -- into deeper intimacy with himself.

Yet even in this context, I found the suffering described in Kolodiejchuk's new collection of Mother Teresa's private writings, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, to be startling. More startling still was her intense longing to give everything to God, an element of her story that has received too little attention from pundits who dismiss her as a hypocrite or a dutiful do-gooder who plugged away despite losing her faith.

Mother Teresa's longing emerged from the outset of her ministry. In a series of plaintive letters written to explain her desire to live among the poor, she spoke of a smoldering, almost reckless, passion to suffer anything for God, to refuse him nothing, to lose herself in him and spend herself completely in service to the most destitute and despised of Calcutta: lepers with gaping sores, pauper children of prostitutes, crippled old men dying alone in the streets.

Mother Teresa believed that God loved these "poorest of the poor" with the same burning ardor with which she loved God. And she believed that her sharing in the hunger, fatigue and abandonment of the poor she served -- the suffering that Jesus experienced on the cross -- would be crucial to her ministry's fruitfulness.

The "saint of the gutters" considered no poverty greater than the spiritual poverty "of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for." Such loneliness is "the leprosy of the West," she said, and we only need look in our own homes and families to find it.

Mother Teresa did not need to look even that far. She experienced this loneliness in her own heart for nearly half a century. Yet she came to understand her feelings of abandonment as a sharing in the spiritual poverty of a world that had forgotten God, and she began to see her hunger for God as a gift she could offer God on behalf of those who did not know or love him.

The theme of radical generosity that runs through Mother Teresa's private writings also runs through the stories I have heard from her close friends, who knew her, simply, as "Mother." Their tales of families renewed and lives transformed suggest that Mother Teresa's suffering was not in vain, and her lifelong desire to bear God's love to a love-starved world was answered in the end.

-- Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com