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Mother Teresa — The Catholic Saint Who Couldn't Feel God for 50 Years · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

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  For nearly 50 years, one of the most famous women on earth wrote private letters to her
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  spiritual directors. In them, she said she couldn't feel God at all, not a little, not sometimes,
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  almost never. The whole world saw her as joy itself. She was living something very different.
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  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. This is episode 15, so 15 weeks, 15
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  saints. And if you're new here, welcome to the porch. Stick around and if this hits you, subscribe
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  so you don't miss next week, a new saint every Thursday. First off, I want to apologize. If
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  you tried to listen to last week's episode in the first seven to eight hours it was live,
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  you probably got St. Nicholas again instead of St. Genesius. I uploaded the wrong file
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  to the RSS feed. That's not an excuse, it's just me running this whole show and each episode
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  takes about 30 to 40 hours to put together. So sometimes I mess things up. Sorry about
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  that. And I'll do my best to make sure it doesn't happen again. We are back to a known saint
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  this week. You already know her face. You have probably seen it a hundred times. Small, in
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  a white and blue habit, surrounded by the poorest people in Calcutta. This is the story of Saint
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  Teresa of Calcutta. Most of the world calls her Mother Teresa, and almost nobody knew until
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  after she died what she was actually carrying the whole time. She was born in 1910 in a city
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  called Skopje, in what's now North Macedonia. Her family was Albanian and reasonably well
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  off. Her father ran a successful business and was active in local politics, but that changed
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  fast. He died suddenly when she was only eight years old, likely poisoned according to some
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  accounts over his political involvement. Her mother was left to raise three children alone
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  and money got tight very fast. But her mother kept the family deeply involved in their parish
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  and by all accounts that faith only got stronger under the pressure, not weaker. As a teenager,
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  she got involved with a youth group at her local church that focused on stories of missionaries
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  working overseas, the kind of far-off, difficult, sacrificial work that most people only read
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  about. Something about those stories stuck with her. By the time she was 17, she had decided
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  she wanted that kind of life for herself. At 18, she left home for good, and as far as anyone
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  knows, she never saw her mother or sister ever again. She joined a religious order called
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  the Sisters of Laredo, trained briefly in Ireland to learn English, and then was sent to India,
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  where she took the name Sister Mary Theresa, after Saint Therese of LeSue. For close to
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  20 years, she taught school in Calcutta at a convent school for girls from wealthier families.
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  She was good at it. She became the school's principal. By every outward measure, she had
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  a stable, respected life. A vocation, a role, a purpose. Most people would have called that
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  enough. Then in 1946, on a train ride to a retreat, something happened that she later described
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  as a call within a call. Not a call to become a nun, she already was one. A second, separate
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  call telling her to leave the convent school and go live among the poorest people in the
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  city. the ones dying in the streets with nobody to help them. She never described the exact
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  details of that train ride publicly. She kept most of it private, even from people close
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  to her. But she said later that the message itself was clear and unmistakable, impossible
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  to talk herself out of. Leave everything. Give up the school, the students, the stable, the
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  respected life she had spent almost 20 years building. Go into the slums. served the poorest
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  of the poor, not from a school building with walls and a schedule, but right where they
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  are, on the street, with nothing between her and the need in front of her. That's not a
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  small ask for anyone, let alone a woman in her mid-30s who had already built an entire life
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  around one calling and was now being told from somewhere she trusted completely to walk away
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  from it for a second one. It took her a couple years to get permission from the church to
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  actually do it. But in 1948, she finally left the convent, traded her habit for a simple
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  white siree with blue trim, the outfit almost everyone pictures now when they think of her,
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  and walked into the slums of Calcutta with no plan beyond finding people who needed help
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  and then helping them. She started with nothing. No building, no staff, no funding. Basic first
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  aid? She learned quickly and applied on the street, teaching children to read using sticks
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  in the dirt because she had no paper or chalkboard. She picked up dying people off the street,
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  people other institutions had turned away, people with diseases nobody wanted to touch, people
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  who had been left to die alone on the sidewalk and gave them a clean place to die with some
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  measure of dignity and care, even when there was no cure left to offer them. Sometimes that
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  just meant holding someone's hand while they died, so at least one person on earth was there
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  with them. In 1952, the city gave her a building to use, a former rest house next to a Hindu
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  temple, not exactly a natural fit on paper. She named it Nirmal Hrdi, which means home
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  of the pure heart, and turned it into a place where the dying could spend their final hours
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  or days being cared for, regardless of their religion. It wasn't universally welcomed at
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  first. Some in the neighborhood objected to a Catholic nun running a facility that close
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  to a temple. She didn't argue the point publicly. She just kept doing the work and over time,
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  most of the objections faded because people could see what was actually happening inside.
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  In 1950, she founded a religious order of her own, the Missionaries of Charity, built entirely
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  around this work. It grew. slowly at first, but then fast. By the time she died, the order
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  had thousands of sisters running homes for the dying, orphanages, and hospices in over a
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  hundred countries. The world, well, it noticed. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She
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  met popes and presidents. Her face became, for most of the 20th century, the single most recognizable
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  image of Christian charity on the planet. People who knew nothing else about the Catholic Church
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  knew who Mother Teresa was. When she accepted the Nobel Prize, she asked the committee to
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  cancel the traditional celebratory banquet that comes with it and give her the money instead,
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  roughly $192,000 at the time, so it could go directly to the poor in Calcutta. That single
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  request tells you most of what you need to know about how she operated for the rest of her
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  life. Fame came to her constantly. She kept redirecting nearly all of it toward the people
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  she had started this whole thing for. Her reach went places you would not expect for a nun
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  who started with nothing but a siree and a plan to help dying strangers. She ran missions inside
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  communist countries during the Cold War, at a time where religious work was heavily restricted
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  or outright banned in many of them. Her own home country, Albania, was one of the most
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  aggressively atheist communist states in the world for decades. Practicing any religion
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  there was illegal for most of her adult life. She wasn't allowed back in Albania until 1989,
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  when the regime was finally losing its grip. More than 60 years after she had left as a
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  teenager. She sent help to Armenia after a devastating earthquake in 1988. worked with victims of
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  the Chernobyl disaster and set up missions in famine-stricken Ethiopia, always going toward
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  whichever crisis had the fewest people willing to show up for it. And almost everyone who
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  watched her from the outside assumed the same thing, that a woman who gave her whole life
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  to this kind of love must be overflowing with an obvious, unshakable closeness to God, that
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  the joy on her face came from a well that never ran dry. Here's what nobody knew until after
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  she died. For most of those same decades, the ones where she's founding hospices, winning
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  the Nobel Prize, becoming a global symbol of faith, she was writing letters to her spiritual
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  directors, priests she trusted with her most private thoughts, describing something almost
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  nobody expected. She said she couldn't feel God's presence at all, not comfort, not closeness,
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  nothing. She described a kind of interior darkness that started not long after she began her work
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  with the poor. And by her own account, it lasted with only a few brief exceptions for the rest
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  of her life. In these letters, she wrote about praying into what felt like complete silence,
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  about continuing to believe in God while feeling emotionally almost nothing back, about smiling
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  at the people she served running an order built entirely on love while privately describing
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  her own soul as empty. These letters weren't public. She asked more than once that they
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  be destroyed after her death. Her spiritual directors didn't destroy them, and years after
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  she died, with the church's permission, they were published in a book. That's the only reason
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  any of us know this part of her story at all. So, Why didn't they honor her wishes? The priest
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  overseeing her case for sainthood, Father Brian Kolodichuk, argued the letters were too important
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  to lose. He believed they proved the depth of her faith better than anything else could,
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  and that they could genuinely help other people carrying the same kind of darkness, people
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  who might think something's wrong with them for feeling it. The Vatican agreed. and the
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  letters were published as part of the official case for declaring her as a saint. The church
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  took something she wanted destroyed and decided the world needed it more than she needed her
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  privacy. Now, I wanna be careful here because I know that sounds like it could shake someone's
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  faith instead of building it up, but there's actually a long tradition in the church for
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  exactly this experience. A 16th century Spanish priest and mystic named Saint John of the Cross
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  wrote about it directly centuries before Mother Teresa was born. He called it the dark night
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  of the soul, a stretch of time, sometimes years, where prayer feels like talking into an empty
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  room and God feels completely absent, even though the person keeps praying anyway. Some of the
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  most respected Christian mystics in history describe something similar. Mother Teresa's
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  version of it just happened to last for decades and happened to hit a woman the whole world
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  assumed was the most spiritually satisfied person alive. There is a difference worth naming here
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  too. This was not doubt in the sense of not believing God existed. She never stopped believing
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  that. What she lost for most of her adult life was the feeling of it. The sense of closeness,
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  the comfort, the emotional confirmation that a lot of us assume is supposed to come with
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  real faith. She kept the belief. She just carried it without ever feeling it confirmed back to
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  her. Now on how solid this part of the story is historically, this is actually the best
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  documented episode we have done. Every other Saint we have covered, we are working from
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  accounts written down after the fact, sometimes centuries after. This one comes straight from
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  her own handwriting, letters she actually wrote, kept and later authenticated by the church
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  itself and published with the Vatican's approval as part of the process that led to her canonization.
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  There is very little guesswork here. If anything, this is the one where you can trust almost
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  every detail. What gets me is what she did with it. She didn't quit. She didn't stop serving.
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  She didn't... even tell most of the people closest to her. Most of her own sisters in the order
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  she ran had no idea any of this was happening inside of her. She kept running an order built
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  on love, kept picking up dying strangers off the street, kept smiling for cameras and comforting
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  grieving families for nearly 50 years while privately telling her confessor she could not
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  feel the God she was doing it all for. Her health started failing years before the end. She had
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  a heart attack in Rome in 1983 while visiting the Pope, and another one in 1989 that briefly
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  stopped her heart entirely. She was revived and kept going. She had a pacemaker put in
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  after that, plus bouts of pneumonia and heart trouble that kept landing her in hospitals
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  throughout the 1990s. And she finally stepped down as head of the Missionaries of Charity
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  in March of 1997. handing the order over to a successor after nearly 50 years running it.
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  She died six months later on September 5th, 1997 at the age of 87. Now, here's a detail
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  that still catches people off guard. Just five days earlier, on August 31st, Princess Diana
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  had died in a car crash in Paris. The two women had actually met and become friends in the
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  years before. Diana had visited Mother Teresa's homes more than once and supported her work
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  publicly. For that one strange week, the world lost two of the most photographed women alive,
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  back to back, and Mother Teresa's death, which would have been a massive news in almost any
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  other week of the 20th century, got pushed to the side of a news cycle still consumed with
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  Diana's funeral. But India gave her a state funeral anyway. Heads of state and dignitaries
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  from around the world came. The streets of Calcutta, the same streets she'd once walked with nothing
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  but a siree and a plan, were lined for miles. The church started the process toward declaring
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  her a saint almost immediately after her death, faster than usual, since there's normally a
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  required waiting period after the death before the process can even begin, and that waiting
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  period was waived in her case. Canonization requires two confirmed miracles credited to
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  a person's intercession after they've died. The first came from a woman in India named
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  Monica Besra, who said a tumor in her abdomen disappeared after she prayed to Mother Teresa.
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  That miracle led to her beatification, the step just below sainthood. In 2003, under Pope John
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  Paul II, a second miracle, the healing of a man in Brazil, cleared the way for her full
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  canonization in 2016 under Pope Francis. I want to be fair here and mention something else,
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  since we have talked before about not sanitizing these stories. Mother Teresa wasn't without
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  critics, even at the height of her fame. Some journalists and doctors who visited her homes
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  for the dying raised concerns over the years about medical care, pain management, and living
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  conditions inside them, arguing, The funding she received worldwide should have brought
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  better facilities and stronger medical treatment for the people in her care. Her defenders have
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  argued her mission was never meant to replace hospitals. It was meant to make sure nobody
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  died alone and unloved on a sidewalk, which was the specific, narrow problem she set out
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  to solve in 1948. That disagreement is still debated today. I'm not going to pretend it
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  doesn't exist, but... It doesn't change the historical fact of what she built, how long
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  she kept building it, or what she was carrying privately the entire time she did. All right,
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  back to the porch. I keep thinking about the name of the book where all this came out. It's
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  called Come Be My Light. That's from the very words that started her whole mission. The call
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  she said she received on that train, telling her to go be a light for people in the darkest,
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  most forgotten corners of Calcutta. And for almost the entire time she was being that light
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  for other people, she couldn't feel any light in herself. I don't think that makes her faith
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  fake. I think it might be the most honest picture of what faith actually requires that we have
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  covered on this show. Most of us think faith means feeling something, a warmth, a certainty,
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  a sense that God is close. And most of us quietly assume that If we stop feeling that, our faith
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  would be broken or we'd have permission to stop. Mother Teresa kept going for decades without
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  the feeling at all. She kept the promises, she kept showing up, she kept loving people
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  who had nothing on days when she herself felt like she had nothing left to give it with.
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  If anyone on this earth had a right to feel God's presence, you would think it would be
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  her. She got 50 years of silence instead, and she never once used that silence as an excuse
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  to stop. think most of us treat feeling and faith like they are the same thing. Mother
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  Teresa's whole life argues they're not. Faith in her case wasn't a feeling at all. It was
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  a decision she kept making alone over and over with nothing but her word to hold her to it.
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  So here's the question this week. What are you still doing faithfully even on the days it
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  doesn't feel like anything? Is there a version of you that only shows up when it feels good?
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  And is there a version of you underneath that that could show up anyway the way she did?
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  And now it is time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Teresa of Calcutta. Thank you
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  for a woman who kept loving you out loud for 50 years while feeling almost nothing in return.
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  For anyone listening who feels far from you right now, who prays into what feels like silence.
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  Let them know they are in good company. Let them know the feeling isn't the whole story.
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  and give us all a little of her stubbornness, the kind that keeps showing up long after the
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  feeling leaves. Amen. Teresa of Calcutta is the patron saint of World Youth Day and of
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  missionaries. Anyone whose work takes them far from home to serve people the rest of the world
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  has stopped noticing, which is exactly what she spent her own life doing. Her order, the
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  Missionaries of Charity, is still active today in more than a hundred countries, still running
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  homes for the dying and the abandoned the same way she started them, with almost nothing on
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  a street in Calcutta. She was canonized in 2016 and her feast day is September 5th, the same
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  day she died. Well, that is episode 15. If this one gave you something to sit with, send it
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  to somebody who needs to hear it. Next week... We are going back to an unknown saint. Someone
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  who did something so strange with his own body that the church almost didn't know what to
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  do with him. I'm not going to tell you what it is. You will have to come back next Thursday.
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  I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on the porch with me and I will see you next week.