But Mother Teresa's heart-wrenching self-examination is entirely familiar to
thoughtful Christians. For instance, her insistent theme that she is being
forsaken by God recalls Christ's plaintive cry on the cross, "Why have You
forsaken me?" From Augustine to Luther to John of the Cross, there is a
whole body of Christian literature that sounds exactly like Mother Teresa.
In John's Dark Night of the Soul, for instance, the initial exhilaration of
conversion is followed by a "dark night of the senses" that is "bitter and
terrible to taste." Even so, this suffering is nothing compared to what
follows, the "dark night of the soul" in which "the soul feels itself to be
perishing and melting away, in the presence and sight of its miseries, in a
cruel spiritual death, even as if it had been swallowed by a beast and felt
itself being devoured." John interprets these travails as the purification
of the sinful part of man, so that he is ready for the holy eternal embrace of
God.
Bl. Teresa Of Calcutta pray for us.
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