Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta Paperback – October 13, 2009

I was ambivalent about the release of this "memoir" for a very long time, despite being a considerable admirer/devotee of the good Mother and her Sisters in the Missionaries of Charity -- souls who continue to "live" the Gospel up at the sharp end. One of the graces about reading of Teresa's life is that I do not ever come away feeling self-conscious about my own comparatively abysmal spiritual deficiencies. Rather, I always feel inspired ... As if I have indeed encountered heroic Christian virtue/witness. We need all we can get of that. Bitter cynics will always be repelled by abject holiness, so those sybaritic louts who have sought to discredit Mother Teresa always get a mere eye-roll from me: please, folks -- if you're going to focus your energies on exposing religious hucksters, have a gander at any number of televangelists currently snug in their mansions and/or Lear jets. Mother Teresa's life and work have already been scrutinized to the nth degree by the Vatican's own canonical "devil's advocates" and the woman is virtually beyond reproach, so just deal with it already.I guess that sort of invasive spotlight on Mother's private life was also the big reason I did not want to read this book for the longest time. Teresa explicitly and frequently asked her superiors and friends to burn her private letters (not because she had anything to hide, but because she was the embodiment of humility and wanted no attention for herself. "I want Jesus to be credited for everything, always," she repeats throughout her private correspondences. And she meant it.) I did not agree with the overarching claim of the Catholic Church that view her life as some sort of "saintly property" -- and I do not respect her superiors/friends for disobeying/betraying her wishes, even though I know they "meant well" within a Roman Catholic canonical purview and that they loved her. I do not have a problem with the very edifying and beautiful Catholic veneration of particularly heroic Christians ("saints"), but I recoil from some of the more ghoulish and untoward excesses associated with said devotion. I rue the day when Mother Teresa is fully canonized and The Church will literally plunder her tomb for pieces of bone to be dispersed around the world and poke and prod her remains ... To say nothing of the cheap made-in-China dashboard statues of the good mother that will crop-up by the millions. The cult of the saints has not, by any means, always been one of the more tasteful aspects of Roman Catholic orthopraxis. The witness of Mother Teresa's extraordinary love for Christ made manifest in her care for the poor, her approved writings, and the happy surety of her heavenly intercession ought to be more than enough.But we now have access to the private letters she wanted destroyed, so (in graceful fashion) we are indeed better for their preservation, not worse. What do her private letters reveal? They reveal much that one would expect from a woman who clearly lived the life of a true Christian mystic along the lines of Paul of Tarsus, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, etc. She experienced profound episodes of spiritual aridity and immolation as she went about her prayerful way, but these episodes (like those experienced by St. Paul and others ... even millions of "everyday" Christians) only drew her more deeply to her Light, which was always and exclusively Christ. In many ways, one can see the miracle of this "dark dance with the Lord" -- her vocation was not based upon being cloistered and immersed in lonely contemplation. She could have lived that life, mystic that she was, and perhaps would have produced writings of astonishing spiritual complexity. Her personal love of Christ was so profound that such a contemplative life may even have been her natural "tendency" --she was shy and unwilling to attract attention to herself in any way. If had been swept off her feet in daily mystical raptures, the Missionaries of Charity would never have come into existence. It is extraordinary to read these letters and see the ways in which God clearly challenged her faith, and tested her soul for the good of the vocation to which she had been summoned, and it was a backbreaking one. The ineffable beauty of it all, of course, is that Mother Teresa put her belief solidly in Christ even when he seemed light-years away to her, even when the tragedy of the human condition could have easily overwhelmed her circumstances. When God seemed to hide his face from her, she sought him out all the more passionately and relentlessly. And she held fast to her conviction that the friends of Christ should always, always be cheerful. She suffered disconsolate moments, but did not waver. THAT is faith, and her story (heroic virtue or no heroic virtue) is the story of every Christian believer. That is another theme Teresa touched-upon constantly in her letters; all Christians are called to be saints, wherever they are, in big ways ir small ways. It's all about faith. I would recommend reading Paul's letters to the Corinthians before reading this book, as a spiritual preparation, and certainly the Gospel accounts of Christ's desert sojourn and his anguish in Gethsemane, etc. Spiritual tests are part of the Christian path, and Teresa was not exempt. Thank heaven.Her letters do not in any way contain accounts only of her spiritual "desert" times. There were of course many oasis moments for the reader to now behold, and the entire collection certainly sheds a frankly thrilling light upon the spiritual profundity empowering the ministry of a tiny woman who lived only to love Christ and to express that love without reservation by seeing him in "the least of" his brothers and sisters.

This is the story of a holy woman's journey with Christ, her growth in relationship and spirit told through her letters, with narration by a man of the Roman Catholic cloth. A stunning and revealing story, "Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the `Saint of Calcutta'" edited and with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., Ph.D. tells us of Christ's thirst, his loneliness for human souls, and the same expression returned in love through need by reciprocity--a mirror of living the Cross in letters and in service to others by a Roman Catholic Nun. There is lots of light in this book.In the chapter, "God Shows his Nothingness to Show his Greatness," Mother Teresa's spiritual experience is described:"Her long experience of darkness, her sense of rejection, her loneliness, the terrible and unsatisfied longing for God, each sacrifice and pain had become for her as one more `drop of oil' that she readily offered to God, to keep the lamp--the life of Jesus within her--burning, radiating His love to others and so dispelling the darkness."A sometimes apophatic experience of Christ, after years of much darkness and unknowing, Mother Teresa came to recognize and live the Christ experience as a knowing by his feeling of God's abandonment on the Cross, and his tears and need, his suffering and darkness at his time of the Cross and during his life. Mother Teresa found a union of understanding with Christ--through Christ a holiness of spirit and a gift to mankind. This is a work of religious history, through letters of intimacy; the work is a service of literary religious feeling and belief.The book reveals her service to the poorest of the poor. Her obedience to the Church and her obedience in faith is literally a marvel of discipline and rigor. It is by the strength of God that she was given such Obedience, and to God she devoted her life in service. So this book demonstrates in words and letters. A marvelous revelation of personal letter writing, the confession of an unknowing-knowing journey and suffering which she recognized as sharing in the suffering of Christ.Observers have claimed that her journey was a failure of faith, and a darkness of spirit that made her despair. True, she experiences despair and writes of her pain, but evidenced by her continued work and prayer, she maintained faith and journey with Christ in the most holy of ways. So I postulate based on her letters and the narrative written by Father Kolodiejchuk, a member of the Missionaries who works towards the Cause of Beatification and Canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.A famous Nun of her time in the 20th Century, Mother Teresa's book of letters and her life as a light of Christ, will have a place in religious literature for decades to come. This book is a most interesting and fulfilling book for people interested in the religious life, and living with Christ through their own relationship and religious life as Christians. For Mother Theresa and her religious worked tirelessly for the poorest of the poor, in a special way of religious devotion.Many of these poor lived and live on the streets of Calcutta, in a hole, or a dirt floor shack. The religious Order Mother Teresa founded, the Missionaries of Charity, provide their service in many cities in India and other parts of the world including the United States. Many or much of the poor helped by Missionaries of Charity (mostly Nuns, but a few Brothers and some Priests), are as poor or many significantly poorer than those poor described in the sociology book "Poor People," by William T. Vollmann.From the Rules of her Order, started and led during her lifetime mostly as Mother Superior: "The General End of the Missionaries of Charity is to satiate the thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for the love and souls by the Sisters [through] absolute poverty, angelic charity, cheerful obedience." To do this they carry "...Christ into the homes and streets of the slums, [among] the sick, dying, the beggars and the little street children..." People all over the world admired this woman who was born in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1910 and died 1997. The Roman Catholic Church beatified her in 2003.The dust cover quotes her famously: "If I ever become a Saint--I will surely be one of darkness. I will continually be absent from Heaven--to light the light of those in darkness on earth." A chilling note, a note enough to give one a chill, Mother Teresa lived a good life and her Order remains active today. They bring light to darkness.This calling is a noble means of doing God's work, and in the religious life serving and connecting to Christ. The book tells of this work and its development, both the order itself as a developing group of religious, but mainly of Mother Teresa's relationship and struggles of spiritual and religious significance in her saintly life and holy connection to Jesus Christ: Letters that cast a light on Christ and his relationship with mankind.--Peter Menkin, 4th week of Advent (Sunday) 2007

This book gives a look into Mother Teresa that we all need. This woman was amazingly faithful but struggled in her faith. In this book you hear about her journey in her own words. To find out this modern saint struggled with her faith just like so many of us do- but that she was able to do such wonderful things is encouraging. This is a must read!