Feelings mattered to Teresa …

The editorial "Dark Nights" (Oct. 2) astutely notes that Mother Teresa's experience of spiritual darkness does not diminish her evident holiness. However, the editorial's ultimate conclusion that her feelings were not the point goes awry, denigrating the importance of feelings in faithful relationships and assuming an enlightenment conception of God unsupported by scripture.

In lifelong relationships of committed love, the initial desire for the beloved often results not in the absence of longing, but in an increasing desire for what the beloved desires, as the two become more like one. And in telling of God's relationship to creation, scripture speaks not of a self-fulfilled God, but of a God with unfulfilled desire without us.

In that vein, rather than evidence of her lack of saintliness--or as the CENTURY would have it, an indication of the unimportance of feelings (which initially drew her toward God and were evidently so important to who she thought she was)--Mother Teresa's unfulfilled longing for God is more a testament to scripture and God's redemption of her personality and work, when understood as reflecting her closeness to the trinitarian God who longs for relationship with us but is continually abandoned by us.

Dan Orfield

Houston, Tex.

COPYRIGHT 2008 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning