Mother Teresa

She Wore the “Stigmata”
Stamped on her Soul

By Brian Kolodiejchuk, MC

During the cause of beatification, unknown aspects of Mother Teresa’s inner life emerged. Among these, the most surprising is the experience of darkness that marked 50 years of her life. She, who had given herself totally to Jesus, lived all the doubts that torment the consciences of men of our time
Mother’s mysticism is ordinary. Poverty marked her entire life, and she wore the “stigmata” stamped on her soul, hidden from everyone, sharing the anguish of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, but also His surrender to the will of the Father (“not My will, but Thine be done”). In this sense she experienced also the illness of the spirit that marks the contemporary world, and she bore its weight. Her love and service given to the poorest of the poor are before everyone’s eyes. We did not know in what measure she had shared and served also the spiritual poverty of so many people. I believe that Mother Teresa in some way renewed the concept of holiness, not because anything happened to her that was different from other saints (the dark night of the soul is certainly no novelty), but because she forcefully showed us again that holiness is not measured by the degree of human perfection, but by the ability to remain clinging to the love of Jesus Christ, accepting the cross of one’s own poverty. Mother Teresa reminds the whole world that the saints are men and women like everyone else and that holiness is accessible to everyone. As she herself said, “Holiness is not a luxury for a few, but a simple duty for you and for me.” And it is also the road that Mother Teresa reopened for the men and women of our time.

The apostle of joy who smiles at Jesus
Mother Teresa wrote, “My second aim is to become an apostle of joy, to console the Heart of Jesus through joy. Please ask Mary to give me her heart so that I may more easily accomplish His desire for me. I want even to smile at Jesus, so as to hide from Him too, if possible, the suffering and darkness of my soul.” Everyone looked at her joy and her smile. Mother bore her cross alone, as those who are truly “mothers” know how to do, not placing on their children’s shoulders the burden of their sufferings and worries. This is a good example of the profundity that her simplicity concealed.

Distance, desire, and the anchor of prayer
In her was darkness, the sensation of being abandoned, of being unloved, but also and always the desire to be united to Jesus, “to love Him as He has never been loved before.” And the distance was felt so painfully precisely because her desire was so strong. The love she felt for Jesus “armed” her will, and even in the most difficult moments of total aridity, when her soul almost could not feel anything, she bent her knees and prayed, even if prayer seemed to her only a mechanical repetition. It was, on the contrary, the “anchor” that kept her within Christ’s love. Over the years, this experience purified her, and the darkness became an aware sharing of the abandonment and anguish experienced by Jesus on the cross, and at the same time an even deeper submergence into the condition of the poorest. One could say that her vocation embraced not only serving the poor and being poor herself, but also sharing what the poor feel: desolation, loneliness, and feeling rejected and unloved.