Mother Theresa - Step three personified

Over the past couple of months I've found myself thinking about Mother Teresa a lot.  A few years ago I watched a movie about her called The Letters.  I was very surprised to learn that during the last half of her life, deep down inside, she felt completely cut off from the Lord, lost in a dark spiritual fog.  I can understand why I am in darkness, but how on earth can someone as amazing as Mother Teresa feel cut off from God?  She was extremely Christlike - shouldn't she have basically been bathed in the Spirit her whole life?

Well, that's kind of what the first half of her life were like.  She felt united with Jesus.  She felt His presence.  She wrote about being in love with Him and being his "little spouse." She wrote that she would give everything, including her life, for Him.  She had conversations with Him about the ministry He wanted her to start, and she even had some visions.  She loved and trusted Him so much that she vowed to do whatever He told her to do.

But during the last half of her life (44 years!), except for one 5-week period where she felt bathed in God's love, she felt completely cut off from Him.  During this time of her life she wrote many letters to her superiors where she mentioned her inner darkness.  An excerpt from a prayer she wrote:

"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love—and now become as the most hated one—the one—You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I want—and there is no One to answer—no One on Whom I can cling—no, No One.—Alone … Where is my Faith—even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness—My God—how painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith—I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart—& make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them—because of the blasphemy—If there be God—please forgive me—When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven—there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul.—I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul."

Since finishing step 2, I've also been thinking a lot about step 3 - giving your life and will to the Lord.  Mother Teresa has been an incredible example to me of one who has given herself, heart and soul, to Him.  As I read her letters, I was amazed at how devoted she was to God despite feeling spiritually forsaken.

"There is so much contradiction in my soul.—Such deep longing for God—so deep that it is painful—a suffering continual—and yet not wanted by God—repulsed—empty—no faith—no love—no zeal. … Heaven means nothing—to me it looks like an empty place—the thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God. … I am only His—so He has every right over me. I am perfectly happy to be nobody even to God. …"

"I long for God—I want to love Him—to love Him much—to live only for love of Him—to love only—and yet there is but pain—longing and no love. … All these things were so natural to me before—until Our Lord came fully in my life—I loved God with all the powers of a child's heart. He was the centre of everything I did & said.—Now Father—it [is] so dark, so different and yet my everything is His—in spite of Him not wanting me, not caring as if for me. .. .My heart & soul & body belongs only to God—that He has thrown away as unwanted the child of His Love.—And to this, Father, I have made that resolution in this retreat—To be at His disposal. Let Him do with me whatever He wants, as He wants, for as long as He wants."

"If there is hell—this must be one. How terrible it is to be without God—no prayer—no faith—no love. ... I do not ask Him to change His attitude towards me or His plans for me.—I only ask Him to use me."

"All these years I have only wanted one thing—to know and do the Will of God. And now even in this hard and deep darkness—I keep on wanting only that. The rest He has taken all—and I think, He has destroyed everything in me—The only thing that keeps me on the surface—is obedience."

She wrote once that she was willing to feel forsaken for eternity if that's what He wanted.  That is some serious commitment to her vow!

Now it's time for me to give my will and life to the Lord.  It's scary.  Mother Teresa gave her will to Him during a time in her life when she felt perfectly united with Him, and kept that vow faithfully despite feeling spiritually forsaken.  Am I to give my will to Him when, despite my best efforts, I don't feel like I really know Him?

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Two final quotes from her letters that I thought were too good to leave out.

"Jesus wants me to tell you again … how much is the love He has for each one of you—beyond all what you can imagine. … Not only He loves you, even more—He longs for you. He misses you when you don't come close. He thirsts for you. He loves you always, even when you don't feel worthy. … Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you—you can’t begin to know who He wants to be for you. Or who He wants you to be for Him."

"Your longing for God is so deep and yet He keeps Himself away from you. He must be forcing Himself to do so—because He loves you so much—the personal love Christ has for you is infinite."

Never alone

I have spent almost all of my life feeling cut off from my Heavenly Family.  Despite my months and years of pleading, I have yet to feel any type of connection.  My failure to feel some indication that Someone is listening to my prayers has led to my belief that I’ve been abandoned by God, that I’m supposed to go through this earth life all alone, that life is a test and Them giving me any indication that They're there would be cheating.

It's hard for me to believe that I can have any type of relationship with Them when I don't feel anything coming from Them.  Logically, I know I had a relationship with Jesus and my Heavenly Parents in the premortal life, that most likely we were very close. My brain knows it, but my heart doesn't.

In an attempt to get my heart in line with my brain, I've started to imagine and write down what my interactions could have been like with my Heavenly Family, usually but not always in the premortal life.  My goal is to get my heart to feel so I can believe.

When my family went through a horrific trial, I prayed for comfort and to feel peace and felt nothing. I felt abandoned and alone. I wondered where God was during this difficult time in my life. Recently I felt like exploring what Jesus had actually been doing during those days I had been begging for comfort. This is what I came up with.

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Jesus and I were walking side by side on a path that wound through a lush green park.

“Where were You after <horrific event>?” I asked Him, staring at the ground.  “I felt like You’d abandoned our family.”

“Abandon you? Never!” He responded.

He stopped walking, put His hands on my shoulders and forced me to look at Him.  “I have never abandoned you.  You just couldn’t tell I was there.”

“Were you there at the temple the day after <horrific event>?” I asked, pulling away and starting to walk down the path again.

“Of course,” He said, falling into step with me.  “I sat next to you as you waited for your turn to do initiatories.  You were crying.  You felt like your heart was breaking.  You were embarrassed about crying so much.  I wanted to hug you and console you but you couldn’t perceive it.

“When it was your turn, you cried through the entire ordinance.  I followed you from booth to booth.  I couldn’t leave you alone through this.  You just couldn’t tell I was there.

“After your second name was finished, you left and asked the woman at the desk if you could go to the celestial room.  I walked next to you up the stairs and into the celestial room.  You sat under the big stained glass window on the couch.  I sat next to you.  I put my arm around you but you couldn’t sense it.  You cried and cried and wondered why your family was having to go through this.  You felt abandoned.  But you weren’t.  I cried with you the whole time on that couch in the celestial room.  I wanted to comfort you but you couldn’t feel it.  I wanted you to know I was there but you couldn’t sense it.

“You kept thinking that We had abandoned you.  That was the furthest thing from the truth.  I was there with you, crying with you.  I felt every feeling you felt.  I know you thought I’d abandoned you.”

He stopped walking and paused for a second.

“It hurt to know that you didn’t trust that I would always be there with you.”

His eyes were teary as He spoke those words.  That made me feel awful.  I looked away, my own eyes starting to water.

“I could never abandon you, <my name here>,” He told me.  “Not for a single second.

“I tried to talk to you, to tell you everything would be okay, to tell you I was with you, but you couldn’t hear it. You weren’t spiritually sensitive enough to pick up on any of that.”

Shame and guilt welled up in me.  I stared at the ground.

“But now you are,” He told me.  He lifted my chin to make me look at Him.  “And even when you can’t feel Me near, I’m always there.”

The shame and guilt were swept away and replaced by love and gratitude.  All I could do was throw my arms around Him and sob into His chest.

“I’m sorry I didn’t trust You.”

He hugged me back and whispered, “You do now, and that’s all that matters to Me.”

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Writing it was really cathartic.  It seems hard to believe, but I actually don’t feel alone when I think about that experience anymore. I’m starting to believe that I hadn’t been abandoned at that point in my life; I just wasn’t spiritually sensitive enough to feel any heavenly help.

I don’t believe any of my stories are real or that I’m picking up on things from the other side of the veil.  But they’re helpful to me because they help me feel and believe I had a connection with Them, and that I can have a connection with Them again in the (hopefully not-too-distant) future.

True Confessions: The ARP meeting

Another example of how I'm no spiritual giant:

I volunteer with a nonprofit in my community.  The nonprofit holds an LDS Addiction Recovery Program meeting each week for the addicts in their program, which I love to go to.  The atmosphere is wonderful and I learn so much about the others in the room and their testimonies - and they have a chance to learn more about me.

One night in January I showed up at the meeting location and found out that the schedule for the night had changed at the last minute.  The group was supposed to do a different activity that night, but they weren't prepared for that activity.  Someone talked to one of the guys in charge of the nonprofit and he said the volunteers at the meeting should all share what God means to them and what the Church has done for them.  This was probably the last thing I wanted to share with the group.

The male ARP facilitator shared his testimony first.  I was planning to go after him because I figured I would look less bad if others ended on a high note, but his wife beat me to it.  Then the only other volunteer left besides me followed her.  As she spoke I knew it was not going to go well for me.  She talked about how she feels close to God when she prays, and she feels His love when she prays, and stuff like that.  Oh, awkward.  I wanted to die.

So then it was my turn.  I said I grew up in the church, there were probably 30 Mormon kids [in my grade] in my school but most of them weren’t “good.”  The church kept me out of trouble but probably also made me a bit self-righteous.  I know the Atonement is real and that Jesus lives.  I know God is there.  But I don’t have a relationship with Him.  I’ve felt His love once but have never felt close to Him.  I said I’d completely rearranged my priorities 10 months ago and started engaging in long sincere prayer and meditation and real scripture study.  I said I’d removed all worldly distractions from my life so I’m really boring; I don't watch TV like everyone else.  (That got some laughs.)  I said I figured there had to be something higher than the spiritual rut I was in, and I was going to do all I could to find it.  I was totally crying as I talked.  Thankfully, that room was a safe space for me to share, even though I didn't want to and still felt completely humiliated.

I won't give up.  I'll continue to ask.  Someday I will have that testimony!