Mother Teresa's Doubts

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.

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Mother Teresa's writings are not contradictory nor hypocritical. Rather, they reflect the essence of what Eric Hoffer called "The True Believer." Her self-abnegation-- her willingness to walk through dung while ministering to lepers-- has less to do with spiritual purity than it does with psychological sickness. As Hoffer notes: "The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources-- out of his rejected self-- but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. Though his single-minded dedication is a holding on for dear life, he easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings." It is exactly these people who are more Catholic than the pope and more marxist than Marx that promote and perpetuate mass movements that change the world for good or for ill. Hoffer ends his book by noting that fanaticism is among the only four really important invetions made between 3,000 BC and 1,400 AD-- a Judaic-Christian invention. "And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul, the world also received a miracuous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead-- an instrument of resurrection."