Mother Teresa — Come Be My Light — A Review (Part 1)

September 11, 2007

There has been a fair amount of coverage related to the Time Magazine article ‘Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith’.

This article talks about a new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever ? or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

Over the next several weeks, we will make a humble attempt to discuss this new book and Mother Teresa in light of scripture. We will not have the same perspective as many, but we invite you to come along with us and share your thoughts. Your comments will be moderated. Just about the only thing we will not allow is foul or suggestively foul language.

So, the full title of the book is, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”

Here is the text of the front inside cover:

During her lifelong service to the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa became an icon of compassion to people of all religions; her extraordinary contribution to the care of the sick, the dying, and thousands of others nobody else was prepared to look after have been recognized and acclaimed throughout the world. Little is known, however, about her own spiritual heights or her struggles. This collection of her writings and reflections, almost all of which have never been made public before, sheds light on Mother Teresa?s interior life in a way that reveals the depth and intensity of her holiness for the first time.

Compiled and presented by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., who knew Mother Teresa for twenty years and is the postulator for her cause for sainthood and director of the Mother Teresa Center, Mother Teresa brings together letters she wrote to her spiritual advisors over decades. A moving chronicle of her spiritual journey?including moments, indeed years, of utter desolation?these letters reveal the secrets she shared only with her closest confidants. She emerges as a classic mystic whose inner life burned with the fire of charity and whose heart was tested and purified by an intense trail of faith, a true dark night of the soul.

Published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of her death, Mother Teresa is an intimate portrait of a woman whose life and work continue to be admired by millions of people.

In Part 2, we will provide an outline of the book, and cover the Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1.

Posted in Book, Book Review, Books, Catholicism, Church History, Mother Teresa, Roman Catholicism