Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith is the most popular article on Time.com today. I just reread it this morning and find it to be fascinating. This information about Mother Teresa is a prelude to a book yet to be released about her, Come Be My Light, which will include content from some of her letters that tell of her struggles in faith. Although the Time article is long, it is worth the read. These are a couple of paragraphs from it that stood out to me:
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
. . . Kolodiejchuk thinks the book may act as an antidote to a cultural problem. "The tendency in our spiritual life, but also in our more general attitude toward love, is that our feelings are all that is going on," he says. "And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms."
This bears repeating: The "attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on." I love that (pardon the pun). But, really, that statement is spot-on. There's this cultural (mis)conception that love is merely a feeling - an abstract noun - rather than recognizing love as a verb. I know that, at times, I'm guilty of viewing love in this way. The implication is that if I'm not "feeling it," then it must not be there; it must not be real. In actuality, this "blah" feeling that comes upon me at times may be due to a number of things that have nothing to do with the presence or absence of love. Maybe I'm having indigestion, and all I'm feeling is gross. Or maybe I didn't get enough sleep, and all I'm feeling is tired. Or maybe I just watched Fox News, and all I'm feeling is brain dead.
The perception that love is only a feeling can affect the quality of our actions in so many of our relationships: spiritual union with God, friendships, relationships with strangers, relationships with enemies or those who have sinned against us, and romantic partnerships and marriages. This faulty assumption follows something along the lines of, 'If I don't feel love for you today, for whatever reason, then I must not love you and will act accordingly. And, if I don't feel like you love me today, for whatever reason, then you must not love me and will act accordingly.' This mindset does not make for enduring, loving relationships, yet it seems to be so pervasive that it almost feels absurd to recognize that feelings are not always, indeed, fact. I know I need to remind myself of this quite often, and it's still really hard for me sometimes when I'm just not "feeling" it. I'm not saying that feelings are wrong or bad or to be ignored and suppressed. Not at all. Feelings are feelings. It's when I feel that I must act on every feeling that I find myself adrift. In that aspect (and many others), Mother Teresa is truly a model of how to love and remain loving, even through the most difficult of feelings.
"It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start."
- Mother Teresa
