Mother Teresa’s letters to her sole confidante are published and subsequently interpreted as a “Crisis of Faith” that some “scholars” claim give doubt to her role as a Saint. Not so, her faith is unquestioned, here is my interpretation of those letters:
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about Mother Teresa. I wrote 10 years ago about the demise of the American mother, and Mother Teresa was essential to that piece.
At the time I was lamenting the politics of mothering and how anything associated with nurturing in our society was politically and economically negative.
Now I find myself 10 years later essentially doing the same thing, defending what a woman creates, against a society who views only male truth as the truth. You’re asking how could Mother Teresa’s “crisis of faith” be a gender issue? Mother Teresa is completely misunderstood. A male interpretation will exist in a reality that is separate from the reality that women function in. Generalization hardly does justice to a lifetime like Mother Teresa’s. Certainly the writers who espouse this “crisis of faith” generalize, how else can they take a life’s work and diminish it down to letters of pain and anguish and sorrow?
I make two points in this discussion: one begins with myself and the second has to do with coping.
I have always been a writer, first in copious letters to my mother and various boyfriends and then in limitless diaries. The truth is, my pain is recorded necessarily, but my joy never made it to paper. My joy I inhaled like a greedy infant grasping my first bottle. I did not share my joy with pen and paper. When life went well, my pages were blank. My pain and abject misery are perfectly recorded in exquisite agony over many pages in every form of prose.
To know me is to know that I am mother first and foremost, there is no other activity, love, purpose or idea more important to me. When it comes down to it, when I have been forced, when I must make a life changing decision, it is always and without fail, to and for my children. If you had read my crazed writing over the years, you would first read the ravings of a beleaguered step mother whose first child refused to learn how to tie her shoes, who, while sweet, also had a stubborn streak a mile wide. You might then read about a lost young woman separated from her young sons for weeks at a time trying hard to find a future, a place, a reason. I do not believe that you would find within those pages a portrait of a dedicated mother.
You might then read a story written when my first daughter was born. This is a time I remember as the most joyous of my life. Nothing could compare to the gift of the beautiful female infant who was mine. But in my writing you will only find the abject fear, pain and anxiety of almost having lost that beautiful baby at birth. At delivery, her heart wouldn’t beat right and then there might be brain damage? That is the writing that you will find. You will not find even one word written about how thankful I was to God, that God had saved my daughter by placing nursing students on that floor on the morning I went into labor. You will not find one word written about how God had given me those nursing students to precisely save my child’s life, to ensure her intelligence, to secure her safety. You will not know about how my mother stayed outside of the operating room guarding myself and my child. How she waited hours for me to awaken, so that she could reassure me. You will not know these things from the stories that I have written about my life: you will only know the pain, the fear, the hurt.
And now, it’s been 27 years since that child was born. My new dilemma is my aloneness. In the cradle of my then-husband and his mother, in the cradle of my mother, I was re-assured and safe and I had all of these children. First a step-daughter, then two sons, then two daughters, somewhere in the middle I received a foster son and then finally, my youngest, my heart, my twenty one year old adopted son.
This I did in the safety of those loving arms who nurtured me, who assisted me and who did so many of the parenting tasks by my side.
All of those people are dead now. I am alone and I still have all of these children and indeed, they multiply, they marry, they have children, I fall in love more and more and increase my vulnerability exponentially. Being in love with 15 people is infinitely more risky than being in love with one.
And I am alone.
If you read my diaries, you would imagine a tortured soul full of anguish and anger. Anger because so many that I love have abandoned me to take up space in heaven. How dare they!
You would not know how happy and relieved I am to have so many to love and to have so many love me. You would not know that I am able to perceive God’s wisdom in taking mama to heaven. You would not know that I believe in the lessons my children learn as a result of their forced independence. I believe that my mother and my children’s father look over my children every single day of their lives. If you read my diaries, you would only read loneliness and despair. How can a heart so full of anguish and loneliness have such crystal clear faith? I do not see these things as oppositional; I only see these things as what is. This is what is in my heart, this is what exists in my soul.
What I have written, in all of those letters and all of those diaries does not reflect even a fraction of who I am.
What exists in my heart would make no sense to the mind of a man. I have faith and yet I am scared and full of pain.
What I have had to face is so little compared to that which Mother Teresa faced.
So it is that we find Mother Teresa’s anguished prayers and letters after her death. And so it is… This does not mean that Mother Teresa suffered a “crisis of faith”, it only means that Mother Teresa was a writer. She is a woman who needed to write and who filled her journals and letters with the hurt in her heart. Do we imagine that those who do great deeds do not have fear and despair? Where does this fear and despair go? How is it relinquished from the mind? For some people a confidante is all that is needed, for others, it is journaling and for others it is art. We cannot question Mother Teresa’s great deeds because she wrote about her fear and despair. We must honor the way that she coped, we must honor any means that she used to be the saint that she was in life. For Mother Teresa there were all of those human feelings and there was also the means for releasing them, letters to a confidante. That is all.