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Teresa of Calcutta

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Father Kolodiejchuk: Mother Teresa made a vow, in 1942, not to deny God anything. Her letters inspired by Jesus came right away. In several letters, Jesus asks her, commenting on her vow: «Will you stop doing this for me?» Therefore, her vow is the substratum of her vocation. Later, in her inspired letters, Jesus is seen explaining her calling to her. She then goes ahead because she knows that Jesus loves her. She is motivated by the thought of Jesus’ pain because the poor do not know him and therefore do not love him. This was one of the pillars of hers that kept her on her path through the ordeal of darkness. Thanks to the certainty of her call and to this vow of hers, in one of her letters she writes: «I was about to quit and then I remembered the vow, and this made me get up».

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– Much has been said about the dark night of Mother Teresa. Her book describes her as a «martyrdom of desire.» Her thirst for her God has been unknown for a long time. Can she describe it?

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–Father Kolodiejchuk: A good book to read and understand some of these things is «Fire Within» («Inner Fire»), by Father Thomas DuBay’s, he talks about the suffering of loss and the suffering of thirst to explain that the suffering of thirst is harder. – As Father Dubay clarifies, on the path to authentic union with God, there is the purgative stage, called “dark night”, and then the soul enters a state of ecstasy and true union with God.– In the case of Mother Teresa, it seems that the purgative stage took place during her training in the convent of Loreto. At the time of her profession, she told a companion of hers that she often experienced darkness. The letters of that time are the typical letters of a person who is in the «dark night».

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Father Celeste Van Exem, her spiritual director at the time, said that probably in 1946 or 1945 she was already close to ecstasy. a reference is given to the moment in which the inspirations and interior locutions appeared, the moment in which the difficulties of faith ceased. Later, Mother Teresa wrote to Father Neuner, explaining: “And you know how He acted. And it was as if our Lord gave Himself completely to me. But the sweetness, the comfort and the togetherness of those past six months was soon gone. So Mother Teresa experienced six months of intense union, after the inner locutions and the ecstasy. She was already in the spiritual stage of the transforming union. At that moment, she returned the darkness. But. From then on, the darkness she experienced was in the midst of union with God. This does not mean that she lived through the union and then lost it.

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She lost the consolation of union that alternated with the pain of loss and with a deep longing for God, a true thirst. As Father Dubay said, «sometimes contemplation is delightful and other times it is replaced by a strong thirst for God.» But in the case of Mother Teresa, except for one month in 1958, she did not have this consolation of union. There is a letter in which she says: «No father, I am not alone, I have his darkness, I have his pain, I have a terrible longing for God. To love and not to be loved, I know that I have Jesus in the union that has not been broken, my mind is fixed on Him and only on Him».

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Her experience of darkness in union is exceedingly rare, even among saints, for for most the end is union without darkness. Her suffering, then –using the term of the Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange– is due more to the sins of others than to the purifying character of her own sins.

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She is united to Jesus with a faith and a love capable of leading her to share her experience of the Garden of Gethsemane and the cross. Mother Teresa commented that her suffering in Gethsemane was worse than that on the cross. And now we understand where this was coming from, because she had understood Jesus’ thirst for souls. The important thing is that it is a union. As Carol Zaleski pointed out in an article published in «First Things» magazine, this kind of test is new. It is a modern experience of saints of the last hundred years: to suffer the feeling that one has no faith and that religion is not true. This interview was made and first published by ZENIT,. 4.9. 2007 (Zenit.org).

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Teresa of Calcutta: light from darkness (II)

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Without her suffering, the work of Mother Teresa of Calcutta would have been simply social work and not the work of Jesus Christ, explains the postulator of her cause for canonization, citing the Blessed herself.

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In the second part of this interview, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, Missionary of Charity, explains the main points of the book that he has just published with the title «Come Be My Light» (
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