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Post by Unsurprised 2x2 on Aug 24, 2007 6:42:27 GMT -5
From cnn.com comes this interesting article.
Decades of correspondence by Mother Teresa show that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever. The man who compiled her letters, many of them against her wishes, says he is producing a book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
And to quote from this article - Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work.
I can't get my mind around the way a lot of people "worship" God. So a question - was "Mother" Teresa saved?
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Post by Tessa on Aug 24, 2007 6:55:14 GMT -5
"Mother" Theresa's comments in letters are not alone. Similar questionings have been uttered by many others, including Billy Graham, Charles Dobson, Charles Stanley, Rowan Williams, Benedict.... etc
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shushy
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Post by shushy on Aug 24, 2007 6:56:17 GMT -5
He was there alright. Just because you cant feel his presence doesnt mean he has moved.
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Post by Trinity on Aug 24, 2007 7:04:51 GMT -5
Teresa may not believe in God, or Christ, but she is saved because she believes in the Trinity
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Post by Nonsense on Aug 24, 2007 7:24:33 GMT -5
Teresa may not believe in God, or Christ, but she is saved because she believes in the Trinity This has got to be a bert or git type dig. Statement counterdicts itself.
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Post by wingsofaneagle on Aug 24, 2007 8:52:10 GMT -5
David too went through periods in his life when he felt that God had left him. I think we all do. I think Mother Theresa needed an extra portion of faith however due to the poverty and death that she worked amongst every day. I can't imagine the amount of faith you would need for that! It is very difficult to see God in suffering.
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Post by perhaps on Aug 24, 2007 8:56:23 GMT -5
perhaps she didn't feel God any longer because she finally realized the illusion she had believed in was simply that: an illusion. she was mother theresa and could hardly renounce god at that point.
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Post by wingsofaneagle on Aug 24, 2007 8:58:53 GMT -5
You mean that what she thought to be true about God was just an illusion? Do you think God is just an illusion?
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Post by jh62unlogged on Aug 24, 2007 9:01:49 GMT -5
I think when we start worrying about whether this person or that person was saved, we're not spending enough time on our own relationship with God. Who are WE to decide this?? Does it even matter what we think? Not in the least.
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Post by wanttobewithGod on Aug 24, 2007 16:16:30 GMT -5
jh62unlogged: This is basically (ok, exactly) what I was trying to say in my post the other day, but I was misunderstood. Perhaps I didn't write it correctly, dunno...but thanks. Just what I wanted to get across. M.
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Post by Encourage on Aug 24, 2007 18:44:32 GMT -5
I do know that Mother Theresa thought it was important for Hindus, Muslims and other people she worked with, to die with dignity which she helped them do. From what I have read, I do not believe that Mother Theresa thought a person could only be saved through the blood of Jesus Christ.
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Post by mirror on Aug 26, 2007 3:07:58 GMT -5
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007 Mother Teresa's Crisis of FaithBy David Van Biema Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979 On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive." Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have free hand."
The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
And in fact, that appears to be the case. 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."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.
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.
Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone."
Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.
Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.
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Read the rest at www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html
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Post by mirror on Aug 26, 2007 3:12:12 GMT -5
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shushy
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Post by shushy on Aug 26, 2007 3:27:40 GMT -5
When I read this account it brought tears to my eyes. Mother Teresa was a woman of God. There is no doubt. She was first a servant of Christ doing the work of Faith with the poor and destitute. She was also an intercessor. As an intercessor she experienced the empathy/pain/disaapointment and anguish the people were going through. She physically felt their pain. This enabled her to pray and keep crying out to God and trusting Him on behalf of these people. Because she coudlnt 'feel' Gods presence, it was not an indicator of his absence. She was no different to so many men and women of God we read of in scripture who went through similar experinces. David, Elijah, Job, periods of deep despair, feeling that God had turned his face away from them, wanting to die, depression, but always remaining faithful and worshiping HIm. On a spiritual level she was fighting opposing spiritual forces of darkness. She was a faithful woman who had incredible endurance. She didnt buckle under the pressure. Had true love for humanity. Therefore it would be regarded by God as her religion[not catholosism] was noteworthy ie: widows and orphans.
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Post by 2x2 Fact on Aug 26, 2007 7:47:18 GMT -5
As a brainwashed 2x2 that I am. Because Mother Teresa did not Profess... via a worker she cannot be saved.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2007 3:31:18 GMT -5
This powerpoint presentation describes much of the basis of the Christian spirit -- to me it is beautiful. On the other hand, waving a 'Christian' label is NOT part of the spirit of Christ. www.anotherstep.net/MotherTeresa.pps
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