Mother Teresa as a psalm

Sep. 07, 2012
By David Van Biema, Religion News Service

On Sept. 5, 1997, the world mourned when Mother Teresa, whose work with the poorest of the poor made her a global icon, died of a heart ailment at age 87.

Exactly 10 years later, the world did a double-take when a volume of Teresa's private letters revealed that the tireless, smiling nun spent the last 39 years of her life in internal agony. Jesus, she wrote, no longer seemed present to her, in prayer or even in the Eucharist. In letter after tormented letter she described an unrelenting spiritual "dryness," a "torturing pain." Her smile was "a big cloak" of deception. She admitted at one point to doubting God's existence. Eventually, she apparently became more reconciled to her condition; but as far as we know, she died with it.

The news was disorienting. The late Christopher Hitchens, Teresa's constant critic, claimed it proved she was a "confused old lady who ... for all practical purposes had ceased to believe." Her Catholic church remained unperturbed: Pope John Paul II had already alluded to her "inner darkness" as a "test" she had aced. Yet for many, the question remained: How, short of hypocrisy or a psychotic break, could such alienation coexist with such obvious devotion?

The paradox still shocks me. But lately, I've encountered the same starkly binary voice -- in a set of 3,000-year-old poems. Written in around 1000 B.C., the 150 prayers in the Book of Psalms helped shape both Judaism and Christianity, are still memorized by some congregations, and live on in liturgy, hymnody and private prayer. Some are pure jubilation -- the word "hallelujah" originated in psalms. But just as many -- the "psalms of complaint" -- sound like ... well, like the private Mother Teresa.

http://ncronline.org/news/women-religious/mother-teresa-psalm