There are many things to consider here, but one of them is NOT how Mother Teresa “ended up”. Her life was in God’s hands and so her judgment is not ours to make and anyone should hesitate to do so. It is God’s mystery, not ours, how things were when she met her God face-to-face.
What I do know is that it isn’t at all uncommon for good and holy Christians to go through periods of spiritual dryness, of darkness and of doubt. Some call it the “desert experience”. Others refer to it as the Dark NIght (both in the sensory sense and in the spiritual sense). It is understood to be time of purification.
We have the Psalms to illustrate that to us—with their times of praise and temple worship and then their times of suffering and seeking God in moments of trial. We all know of the Psalm 23 “valley of darkness”, but so beautifully expressed also is the whole of Psalm 84-—”when they go through the Bitter Valley they make it a place of springs”.
It is the testimony of our lives and how we endure with God’s grace—as St.Paul writes: “all is grace”.
I think now especially of Fr. Walter Czisek as he writes of his 23 years in the Russian Gulag-—and Fr. Van Than as he smuggled his letters out to his people while suffering and imprisoned in Viet Nam.
Each of us is given that measure which God in His mysterious and wonderful will has designed for us. For some, it will be much easier than for others and we don’t know why this is so—we only know that it is.
Mother Teresa may not have had a “mask” or a “cloak” as much as it may have been God’s will to conceal from the world at large the true measure of her holiness—a sort of mini-version of the Mose’ veil.
We poor mortals just don’t know it all. Though we did try it once—in the Garden. It obviously failed.
Hardest book I ever read.
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
by
Saint John of the Cross
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/john_cross/dark_night.txt
Spiritual persons, we are told, do not enter the second night immediately
after leaving the first; on the contrary, they generally pass a long time,
even years, before doing so, [10] for they still have many imperfections,
both habitual and actual (Chapter ii). After a brief introduction (Chapter
iii), the Saint describes with some fullness the nature of this spiritual
purgation or dark contemplation referred to in the first stanza of his poem
and the varieties of pain and affliction caused by it, whether in the soul
or in its faculties (Chapters iv-viii).
Bump for this excellent post.