Madrid, Spain, Sep 13, 2007 / 07:55 am
In an interview with the Spanish daily “La Razon,” Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, author of the book “Come Be My Light” and postulator of Mother Teresa’s cause of canonization, said the revered nun “lived a trial of faith, not a crisis of faith,” and that she overcame it showing that the love “is in the will and not in feelings.”
“Come Be My Light” is a collection of letters Mother Teresa written about various aspects of her life, some revealing that she suffered spiritual darkness for decades. Father Kolodiejchuk expressed regret that Time Magazine twisted the meaning of the book, whose title comes from “the words Jesus spoke to Mother Teresa in 1947. Time Magazine, even with the cover photo (of a Mother Teresa who appears depressed), has greatly manipulated world opinion. The book is about a trial of faith that Mother endured for 50 years, which is very different from a crisis of faith. This is not something new in the saints. This phenomenon of the dark night is well know in spiritual theology,” he said.
A Modern Trial
Father Kolodiejchuk recalled that Mother Teresa “always said the greatest poverty was to feel unloved, unwanted, alone, rejected…She felt that in her soul. Therefore her dark night could be called a ‘dark night of love.’ That was specifically hers.”
Her trial “is very ‘modern’,” he continued. “The saints of previous centuries loved the dark night as a questioning of their own salvation, as a trial of faith. Mother lived interior poverty, the ‘spiritual bareness.’ Jesus lived that [same] poverty and Mother was a pure instrument in his hands so that by living that darkness she might be a light for others.”