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Lietuvi
AT ST. CASIMIR PARISH?|
Nun
September 4th
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Mother Teresa’s birth name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Born in an ethnic Albanian family in Skopje, in what is now part of Macedonia, she went to India in 1929 as a Sister of Loreto and became an Indian citizen in 1947. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. She was widely described as a living saint as she ministered to the sick and the dying in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the world. Some people have criticized her for not also challenging the injustices that kept so many people poor and abandoned. Others have criticized the comments of her doubts about faith and God’s love, which Teresa wrote in some of her letters. In spite of her discouragement at times, Mother Teresa demonstrated her faith through compassionate action. She believed that God first called her to be a nun and some years later called her to be a nun who helped and lived among the poor. She wanted her congregation, Missionaries of Charity, to be messengers of God’s love. She took seriously the Scripture passage: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” Mother Teresa accepted her doubts as part of God’s Divine will for her. What the world saw was her devotion to the poor with little hint of her mental sorrow. Mother Teresa worked so closely in a world of extreme poverty that she at times wondered that a kind and loving God allowed such suffering. In the face of her doubts, she adopted a “blind faith” that allowed her to persevere in her service to God and the poor. Sources:
1)
MOTHER TERESA IN MY OWN WORDS, compiled by Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado, G.K. hall
& Co., Thorndike, Maine USA. |
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THOUGHTS FROM THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH |
Faith and Hope
#2087 Our moral life has its source in faith in God who reveals his love to us. St. Paul speaks of the “obedience of faith” as our first obligation. He shows that “ignorance of God” is the principle and explanation of all moral deviations. Our duty toward God is to believe in him and to bear witness to him.
#2090 When God reveals Himself and calls him, man cannot fully respond to the divine love by his own powers. He must hope that God will give him the capacity to love him in return and to act in conformity with the commandments of charity. Hope is the confident expectation of divine blessing and the beatific vision of God; it is also the fear of offending God’s love and of incurring punishment.
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REFLECTION |
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SPIRITUAL DARKNESS
Spiritual Darkness is the feeling that God is absent, heaven empty, and
that one’s suffering is for nothing. Mother Teresa was not alone in her
darkness. In the history of Christian mysticism there have been many accounts of
divine darkness. It is an ancient doctrine that God dwells in inaccessible
light, a light so blinding that it veils the divine glory in a “dark cloud of
unknowing.”
Listen to Job’s lamentation, as he cries out in sorrow:
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Perish the day on which I was
born,
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Hear Jesus on the cross crying out words from Psalm 22:
“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46)
Some of the greatest saints have endured what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul”. The dark night of St. Paul of the Cross, an 18th century monk, lasted 45 years. St. John of the Cross saw his dark night of the soul, not as Divine abandonment but as a purgative expression of God’s love. Like Mother Teresa, St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa of Avila realized that the “agony of doubt and desolation is a way of sharing in Christ’s Passion.”
Saint Theresa of Lisieux, Mother Teresa’s patron saint, entered a Carmelite cloister at the age of 15 and died only nine years later of tuberculosis. Her autobiography, The Life of a Soul, is cheerful. However, it was later discovered that her sister Pauline, the head of the convent, had taken out all the sickbed entries in which Therese had described her “spiritual dryness” and how she feared the loss of her faith. Mother Teresa asked a friend to “destroy any letters or anything I have written.” Was she afraid that her troubled thoughts would be misunderstood because of idealized definitions of saints?
In (#2090) the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that a believer must hope that God will give the capacity to love God and in return to act in conformity to the commandments of charity. Mother Teresa certainly acted in conformity to the commandments of charity.
Source: “The Interior Cross: Mother Teresa and Her Dark Night of the Soul” by William A. Borst, Ph.D., Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, St. Louis, MO, December 2007