Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta

Edited with commentary by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, MC

Doubleday, 2007

416 pages, $22.95

Doubleday.com

When someone mentions Blessed Mother Teresa, the picture of her in my mind is of a compassionate woman wearing the familiar Missionaries of Charity’s blue-and-white headdress.

Her arms are outstretched, her gaze heavenward. She has a beautifully tender smile on her face, one that radiates Christ.

However, as I learned recently from Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, there was a lot more behind that smile than I ever imagined.

Set to be released this week to coincide with the 10th anniversary of her death, Sept. 5, the book — edited with commentary by Missionaries of Charity Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator of her cause for sainthood — is a collection of Mother Teresa’s letters to her spiritual directors and close associates.

The letters, presented chronologically, start out optimistic as she excitedly begs the archbishop of Calcutta to let her follow her “call within a call” to leave the Loreto order for the streets to serve the “poorest of the poor.” She describes interior locutions, her personal conversations with Jesus — whom she called “the Voice” — regarding the call.

After the archbishop gives his blessing and she begins her work, however, her letters begin to reveal one of the costs of her pledge to refuse Jesus nothing. No longer does she sense the complete unity with Jesus she had since she was a little girl receiving her first Communion. She reveals an all-consuming darkness in her soul, a sense that God has completely abandoned her.

“Lord, my God,” Mother Teresa wrote to one spiritual director, “who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. … Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness.”

What she was going through was “pure [St.] John of the Cross,” according to another priest with whom she corresponded. It was her “dark night of the soul” common among mystics — a period of spiritual dryness allowed by God to work in the depths of one’s soul.

Yet through it all Mother Teresa remained completely devoted to Jesus. For almost 50 years Mother Teresa continued to work feverishly to serve the poor around the world. She gave countless talks and retreats and said she only wished she could experience what she was preaching.

Eventually she came to “love the darkness,” realizing Jesus was allowing her to partake in his passion as a way to identify more closely with the poor she was serving.

To respect her writing style, Mother Teresa’s letters were edited as little as possible, the dash often being the only punctuation mark. It can make reading her letters a bit jarring until the reader gets used to it. But this collection of letters paints a picture of a wonderfully dedicated, intense, devoted servant of God.

If you thought you knew all there was to know about Mother Teresa, this book will prove you wrong.

She told one priest her “smile is a big cloak” hiding what she felt on the inside. Would that we could all smile despite our everyday struggles — much less intense than Mother Teresa’s were. In her life and in her death, this “saint of Calcutta” continues to be an inspiration to all trying to live in service to God.

Former Register copy editor

Tina Dennelly writes

from Oakdale, New York.