"The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment… is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating… But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God." — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Mother Teresa's "dark night," revealed in her private letters over 50 years, raises the question: What is sanctity? What is holiness? Was Mother Teresa, in the end, not close to God because she felt so strongly that he was not close to her?
Part of the problem is that the equipment we have for perceiving, for understanding, is so limited. Our minds are finite and quite often fail to comprehend even unimportant realities.
But God and holiness are not unimportant realities. They are the most important realities. Given our limited minds, should we ever be confident that we understand God and his purposes? St. John Chrysostom once said, "It is an impertinence to say that He who is beyond the apprehension of even the higher Powers can be comprehended by us earthworms, or compassed and comprised by the weak forces of our understanding!" An "impertinence," he says. He means we should not imagine we can understand much more about God than… an earthworm! — because the distance between the finite mind and the infinite God is so vast that it would be the height of foolishness, of irrationality, to think that the distance could be overcome by our human reasoning efforts.
And so one can begin to assess the letters of Mother Teresa from this perspective: that she was trying to understand God's purposes with her own mind, and could not.
St. Augustine once had this experience. He was walking along the seashore near Rome one day. There he saw a young boy running back and forth, filling a bucket of water in the ocean and then running and dumping it into a small hole he had dug in the sand. "What are you doing?" Augustine asked the boy. "I am emptying the ocean into that hole that I've dug," the boy replied.
We laugh. Of course the boy will never empty the ocean! But what Augustine understood at that moment was that theologians (and, in our own way, each of us) are really trying to do the same thing — that he himself was trying to do the same thing — by speculating about God. He was trying to fathom the nature of the divine, and the equipment he was deploying in that endeavor — his human mind, as great as it was — was inadequate.
The Arian heretics, in Chrysostom's time (the late 300s), held that they could say with assurance, "I know God as he is known to himself." One does not need to be a theological genius to see what one of the sources of the Arians' errors was: they put too much trust in human reason!
I am not saying human reason should be entirely distrusted. On the contrary, it is precisely a mark of the high dignity of human reason that it can say, "I cannot understand, and realize I cannot understand." This is, in fact, a very high level of reasoning power, infinitely beyond anything a computer has yet been able to achieve, and so admirable from the perspective of intellectual achievement.
But I am suggesting that, just as the Arians ignored the limits of the human reasoning faculty and fell into many errors and into apostasy, so too, we can fall into the same trap.
What does this have to do with Mother Teresa and her sense that God had abandoned her?
From a distance, we can see that, as she lamented her "dark night," she was relying too much on her mind, and not enough on her faith — a faculty of knowing which does not contradict human reason, but transcends it. She was misjudging her own life and the grace God was giving to her. She was being too rational, analyzing her feelings, her intellectual discomfort, and falling, repeatedly, into a cunningly set trap: the trap of relying too much on her own mind.
Mother Teresa felt abandoned. And, feeling so, she leaped to the wrong conclusion: that she was abandoned — even as she inspired dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions and in the end, tens of millions, with her example of life.
This is a strange paradox: even though the distinguishing character of Christianity consists precisely in the assertion — and the fact — that God is near us, that we can possess and apprehend Him, men like Chrysostom battled passionately, as if for the very essence of Christianity, for the view that God is "the Inconceivable," "the Inexpressible," beyond all the possibilities of the human mind to grasp.
Why? Because a God who could be comprehended by a human mind is not the true, inexhaustibly glorious and holy God who is the only God worthy of our worship. Misery has the virtue of stripping the individual of the comforts and security which insulate him from God's grace. Atheists, through their unhappiness, may paradoxically be nearer spiritual reality than smugly contented believers. "Between two men who have no experience of God," Simone Weil (1909-1943), a French Jewish philosopher who longed to enter the Catholic Church but never did, once wrote, "he who denies Him is perhaps closer to Him."
And this, I think, was the truth of the life of Mother Teresa, and it was most of all true in the time of her "dark night," when her human love for others was purified and tempered into a bright and holy flame.
