Flora Cantábrica

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Father Brian Kolodiejchuk brings to light the most personal and intimate letters of the Mother
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Teresa of Calcutta
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First part
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«She lived a test of faith, not a crisis of faith»
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-What is the dark night? -It is a moment of spiritual life in which the person is purified before the intimate and transforming union with Christ. The book frames this test in the horizon of the Mother’s entire life. In reality, what we understand by dark night was experienced by the blessed when she was still in Loreto (known in Spain as Irish Mothers), the religious congregation where she began her dedication to God. The years 1946-1947 were ones of intimate, joyful and sweet union with Jesus. «Jesus gave himself to me,» says the Mother in one of her letters. The union of the Mother with Jesus was «violent», deeply felt and lived. Then, as she began the work with the poor and the founding of the congregation, there came that new and prolonged darkness (it lasted 50 years, the rest of her life) that was no longer preparatory to another spiritual stage. She speaks of this darkness in her letters to her confessors and spiritual directors.
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. -So, what is new in the darkness of Mother Teresa? -We know that other saints (Saint Paul of the Cross, Saint Jeanne Françoise Frémyot de Chantal, Saint Teresa of Lisieux) lived a very long spiritual night.
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……. The Mother lived her religious consecration as a union of love, as a wife’s dedication to Jesus, a union through which she shares everything with her beloved, with Jesus, a wifely love and a redeeming love: a love which is especially identified with the pain of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and the abandonment of his Father that Christ experiences on the cross.
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In 1942 the Mother made a vow to never deny anything to Jesus. Shortly afterward she was when she heard Jesus say to her: «Come, be my light.» At first the Mother brought the «light» to places even of absolute physical darkness: many poor people did not even have windows. She accepted the darkness within herself to bring others to the light. The Jesuit Neuner (one of her confessors) in 1962 explained to her that that dark night was the «spiritual side of her apostolic work.»
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-So, the Mother of «the poorest of the poor», wasn’t she referring only to material poverty? -Mother Teresa always said that the greatest poverty was not feeling loved, not feeling wanted, feeling alone, rejected… She felt this in her soul. That is why her dark night could be called «dark night of love.» This is specific to you. Her proof is very «modern.» The saints of other centuries lived the dark night as a doubt about their own salvation, as a test of faith. The Mother experienced interior poverty, «spiritual dispossession.» Jesus lived that poverty and the Mother was a pure instrument in his hands so that by living that darkness she would be a light for others. «If I ever become a saint, I will surely be one of the “darkness”. «I will be continually absent from heaven to shine the light of those who, on earth, are in darkness.»
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She didn’t feel. She thus teaches us that we should not seek our faith and love for God and others by what we feel. Today it is fashionable to say: I no longer love because I don’t feel. No. Love is in the will, not in the feeling.
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Teresa of Calculta: light from darkness (I)
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The postulator of the cause of canonization, Father Kolodiejchuk, speaks
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hat was Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s «dark night» like? Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, missionary of Charity, answers this question. Father Kolodiejchuk has just published the book «Come Be My Light», in which he collects writings of the blessed, partly unpublished, which reveal how during many years of his life he experienced terrible suffering. of not experiencing the love of God.
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–The extraordinary inner life of Mother Teresa has been discovered after her death. According to her spiritual directors, what was her life like, especially her suffering from spiritual darkness, hidden from everyone who knew her?
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–Father Kolodiejchuk: Nobody had the slightest idea of ​​what he was experiencing internally, since his spiritual directors kept these letters. The Jesuits keep some, others are in the archbishopric, and Father Joseph Neuner, another of her spiritual directors, has some. These letters were discovered when we were looking for documents for the case. When she was alive, Mother Teresa requested that her biographical information not be released. She asked Archbishop Ferdinand Périer of Calcutta not to tell any other bishop how it all began. She told him, «Please don’t give them anything about the beginnings because once people know the beginnings, when they hear about the inner locutions, then the focus will be on me and not on Jesus.» She always said: “God’s work. This is the work of God. Even the sisters closest to her had no idea about her inner life. Many might have thought that she had a great intimacy with God and that He illuminated her path in the midst of the difficulties of the Order or the material poverty that she suffered.
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The book tells of the secret vow she made at the beginning of her vocation by which she promised not to deny God anything that had to do with the pain caused by mortal sin. What role did this vow play in her life?
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