中文摘译 ===== Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith By 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 …… 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." 这本新书Come Be My Light 主要是Teresa修女跟神师66年间关於灵修生活的信件 这些信显示了修女在她生命的最後50年 她没有感觉天主的存在 天主不在她的心里 也不在弥撒圣祭里 That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, … 天主的缺席从她在加尔各达为穷人跟临死的人服务就开始了 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." 天主教 保守派跟自由派都觉得 这本书会是一个里程碑 保守派说 这本书跟奥斯丁的忏悔录 汤玛斯摩顿的七重山 一样重要 Martin自由派的 说 这本书会是一个新的牧灵服务 这本书可以对那些有怀疑的 天主不在他们的生活里的人服务 就是所有的人 无神论 怀疑论 寻找意义的人 相信的人 所有的人 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. 无神论者就不同意 Christopher Hitchens, "God Is Not Great" 的作者, 说 修女 好像一个 拿着火把的女人 在门口等她的丈夫回来 其实 她的丈夫 30年前跟她说 他要去买香菸 就再也没有回家过了 … Prequel: Near Ecstatic Communion [Jesus:] Wilt thou refuse to do this for me? ... You have become my Spouse for my love - you have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far - Are you afraid to take one more step for Your Spouse - for me - for souls? Is your generosity grown cold? Am I a second to you? [Teresa:] Jesus, my own Jesus - I am only Thine - I am so stupid - I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You wish - as You wish - as long as you wish. [But] why can't I be a perfect Loreto Nun - here - why can't I be like everybody else. [Jesus:] I want Indian Nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little children ... You are I know the most incapable person - weak and sinful but just because you are that - I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse? - in a prayer dialogue recounted to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier, January 1947 … The Onset 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. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart? - addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated … Explanations Tell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my soul? - to the Rev. Lawrence Picachy, August 1959 … Most religious readers will reject that explanation, along with any that makes her the author of her own misery - or even defines it as true misery. Martin, responding to the torch-song image of Teresa, counterproposes her as the heroically constant spouse. "Let's say you're married and you fall in love and you believe with all your heart that marriage is a sacrament. And your wife, God forbid, gets a stroke and she's comatose. And you will never experience her love again. It's like loving and caring for a person for 50 years and once in a while you complain to your spiritual director, but you know on the deepest level that she loves you even though she's silent and that what you're doing makes sense. Mother Teresa knew that what she was doing made sense." Martin对那个拿火把的女人的比喻 回答说 修女比较像是 你结婚了 找到爱情 也相信你们的婚姻是神圣的 可是 你的太太God forbid 中风了 然後昏迷 你再也没有经验到她的爱 你一直照顾她 爱她 同时你还是会跟你的神师抱怨 可是在你的内心深处 你知道 她还是爱着你 虽然她一直沉默 而你做的 是对的 修女知道 她做的 是对的 Integration I can't express in words - the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me - for the first time in ... years - I have come to love the darkness - for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus' darkness & pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a 'spiritual side of your work' as you wrote - Today really I felt a deep joy - that Jesus can't go anymore through the agony - but that He wants to go through it in me. - to Neuner, Circa 1961 There are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividness and remain its captive, or without necessarily "conquering" it, to gradually integrate it into the day-by-day. After more than a decade of open-wound agony, Teresa seems to have begun regaining her spiritual equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. The Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she turned to him with her "darkness," he seems to have told her the three things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving for God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work for Jesus. 修女跟Joseph Neuner通信 她说到她内心的黑暗 他告诉修女三件事 A 这不是人能治疗的 B 你感觉天主不存在 并不表示祂真的不存在 C 她对天主的渴求 是天主隐藏存在的sure sign This counsel clearly granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release. For all that she had expected and even craved to share in Christ's Passion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate the particular moment on the Cross when he asks, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum, his felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross, that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling, made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, "It was the redeeming experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus' passion." And she thanked Neuner profusely: "I can't express in words - the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me - for the first time in ... years - I have come to love the darkness. " ….. A New Ministry If this brings You glory - if souls are brought to you - with joy I accept all to the end of my life. - to Jesus, undated … At the time, Muggeridge was something of a unique case. A child of privilege who became a minor celebrity, he was hardly Teresa's target audience. Now, with the publication of Come Be My Light, we can all play Muggeridge. Kolodiejchuk thinks the book may act as an antidote to a cultural problem. "The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on," he says. "And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms." 真正的爱是承诺 忠贞跟会受伤的 修女没有感觉基督的爱 她可以就不做了 可是她还是为了耶稣 每天早上4:30起床 还是说 你(耶稣)的快乐就是我想要的 就算你不用宗教的用语 这都是很有力的例子 America's Martin wants to talk precisely in religious terms. "Everything she's experiencing," he says, "is what average believers experience in their spiritual lives writ large. I have known scores of people who have felt abandoned by God and had doubts about God's existence. And this book expresses that in such a stunning way but shows her full of complete trust at the same time." He takes a breath. "Who would have thought that the person who was considered the most faithful woman in the world struggled like that with her faith?" he asks. "And who would have thought that the one thought to be the most ardent of believers could be a saint to the skeptics?" Martin has long used Teresa as an example to parishioners of self-emptying love. Now, he says, he will use her extraordinary faith in the face of overwhelming silence to illustrate how doubt is a natural part of everyone's life, be it an average believer's or a world-famous saint's. Martin用宗教的话说 我知道有些人 觉得被天主遗弃了 或是怀疑天主的存在 这本书跟他们有一样的经验 可是它显现了修女对天主 全部跟完整的信赖 谁会想到这麽有信仰的女人 会对信仰有这麽大的挣扎 修女特别的信仰 克服了沉默 同时也指出 怀疑是很自然的事 不论你是一般的信友 或是全世界知名的圣人 Into the Light of Day Please destroy any letters or anything I have written. - to Picachy, April 1959 Consistent with her ongoing fight against pride, Teresa's rationale for suppressing her personal correspondence was "I want the work to remain only His." If the letters became public, she explained to Picachy, "people will think more of me - less of Jesus." The particularly holy are no less prone than the rest of us to misjudge the workings of history - or, if you will, of God's providence. Teresa considered the perceived absence of God in her life as her most shameful secret but eventually learned that it could be seen as a gift abetting her calling. If her worries about publicizing it also turn out to be misplaced - if a book of hasty, troubled notes turns out to ease the spiritual road of thousands of fellow believers, there would be no shame in having been wrong - but happily, even wonderfully wrong - twice. --

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