Poverty and Interiority in Mother Teresa

Poverty and Interiority

The twelfth century signaled major developments in how the Western church related, theologically and experientially, to poverty. While works of mercy aimed at caring for the poor had been central to Christian practice from before the monastic period, and medieval monks and nuns had long eschewed individual ownership, mendicancy emphasized poverty as a good worthy of evangelical imitation. Mendicant thinkers likewise produced some of Western theology’s most original texts on interior poverty, but the relationship between it and the imitative, material emphasis of evangelical poverty, was not always clear.

For Meister Eckhart—one of the most noteworthy architects of interior poverty—a certain silence here may have been intentional. A fourteenth-century Dominican, he saw poverty primarily as an inward practice of noetic self-dispossession—a necessary discipline on the self’s Neoplatonic journey toward actualization in God. “There are two kinds of poverty,” he wrote. “The one [material, imitative] is external poverty, and this is good and much to be commended . . . About this poverty I shall say no more now. But there is another poverty, an interior poverty, to which this word of our Lord applies when he says, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’” ³ Acknowledging the good of evangelical poverty, Eckhart prioritized interior negation as a means of silencing the soul’s desire for created things and making it transparent to its uncreated Source. The “poor man,” he wrote, is “one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing” of himself. But because he worried about well-intentioned practices becoming idols for the soul to grasp and possess, Eckhart chose not to explore strong links between evangelical renunciation and interior dispossession.

Writing three centuries later, the Carmelite reformer John of the Cross did discuss how material relinquishment could help mediate spiritual poverty, but it is unclear the extent to which he thought this practice was grounded in the mendicant call to Christ-imitation. His concern, like Eckhart, was to silence destructive forms of desire that manifest along the self’s journey toward mystical union. In the Ascent of Mount Carmel, the active night of the senses occurs as God helps souls say “no” to the minor, created goods that distract them from the transcendent Good they desire most. In book one, souls “fired with love’s urgent longing” ⁴ are invited to enter a night of the senses by depriving themselves of their “appetites for worldly possessions.” ⁵ Created goods are not bad in and of themselves, but their beauty is limited, and attachments can prevent souls from entering into ecstatic union with the limitless God who is “a dark night to the soul in this life.” To enter this supreme Darkness, souls must relinquish all substitute creaturely lights:

The eye feeds on its objects by means of light in such a way that when the light is extinguished the eye no longer sees them. Similarly do people by means of their appetites feed and pasture on worldly things that gratify their faculties. When the appetites are extinguished—or mortified—one no longer feeds on the pleasure of these things, but lives in a void and in darkness with respect to the appetites. ⁶

John acknowledges the inner listlessness and desolation this stripping can produce, and recommends faith as the only grace able to carry the soul through its purgation. ⁷ Nevertheless there is, as with Eckhart, a reluctance to linger on exterior practices when talking about the soul’s journey. John’s courage to be poor was forged in the most extreme physical moments of his life, as he languished lice-ridden, subsisting on bread scraps in a cell. And yet he seems eager to move past what he calls the “lot of beginners,” ⁸ and instead emphasizes at all stages the importance of interior dispossession.

If the Dominican and the Carmelite tended to mute links between interior poverty and imitative, material renunciation, Thomas of Celano, Bonaventure, and other early Franciscans interpreted Francis as one whose interior experience was bound up inextricably with material Christ-imitation. Seeking to experience the depths of his creaturely dependency, Francis stripped himself naked before the Bishop of Assisi, returned his belongings to his earthly father, and relinquished body and soul to “Our Father who art in heaven.” At the end of his life, likewise, Francis exposed his body and laid naked on the ground to show “that he had nothing in common with the world.” ⁹

Eckart and John were right to highlight the riskiness of a spirituality that links interior transformation so strongly with external practice, and one could argue that aspects of Mother Teresa’s spirituality—which exemplify the Franciscan convergence of interior and evangelical poverty—might have given them pause for concern as spiritual directors. For Mother Teresa as for Francis, poverty was experienced as a way of concretizing the self’s wholehearted reliance on divine Providence and its detachment from anything that might distract the soul from love of God alone. But Mother Teresa went beyond Francis in some surprising ways, and her aim was ultimately different from all three representatives of the great mendicant traditions.

For Francis, interior poverty developed through an evangelical practice that emphasized the material. He kissed lepers, chased down beggars, and clawed madly at his own clothes to give them to the poor. Mother Teresa’s compassion for material poverty was equally urgent, as evidenced by the shocking encounters with it that filled her speeches and interviews. ¹⁰ So bothered was she by visceral, physical forms of poverty that from the start of her work she instituted a fourth vow to complement the traditional three taken by mendicants, promising to offer “whole-hearted and free service to the poorest of the poor.” ¹¹ According to the decree of her congregation’s erection, this vow would require her sisters to “spend themselves unremittingly in seeking out . . . even amid squalid surroundings, the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the infirm, the dying.” ¹² That Mother Teresa saw her evangelical emphasis as basically Franciscan is attested to by a February 7, 1948 letter to the Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Religious, sent prior to the foundation of her order:

Since September 1946 Almighty God is calling me to devote myself entirely to a complete poverty after the example of the great Saint of Assisi and to the entire service of the Poor in the slums and back streets of the city and elsewhere, to take care of the sick and dying, to draw away the little street children from sin and evil, to help the beggars and the starving. To enable me to do this kind of work, a life of prayer and self-sacrifice is necessary: to approach the poorest among the poor one must become like unto them, to attract the poor of Christ, complete poverty is essential. ¹³

Asked by the Archbishop of Calcutta whether there weren’t congregations already in existence that could serve the poor as she envisioned, Mother Teresa was clear: “No. First, because they are European. When our Indian girls enter these orders—they are made to live their life—eat, sleep, dress like them. In a word, as the people say—they become ‘Mems.’ They have no chance of feeling the holy poverty.” ¹⁴

But while material poverty provided a tangible outlet for Mother Teresa’s practice of Gospel imitation, she always believed that the fiercest poverty occurred at a mental or existential level: “There is much suffering in the world.” She wrote: “Material suffering is suffering from hunger, suffering from homelessness, from all kinds of disease, but I still think that the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one. I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.” ¹⁵

Mother Teresa’s sensitivity to this kind of poverty sharpened alongside her own growing feelings of alienation and spiritual abandonment, which garnered international attention after the release of Come Be My Light in 2007. But a key development in her journey seems to have occurred in the early 1960s, while receiving spiritual direction from the German Jesuit Josef Neuner. After over a decade of profound interior darkness, she welcomed a breakthrough:

Dear Father,

I can’t express in words—the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me.—For the first time in this 11 years—I have come to love the darkness.—For I believe now that it is a part, 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.—More than ever I surrender myself to Him.—Yes—more than ever I will be at His disposal. ¹⁶

As former postulator for the cause of her canonization, a central contention of Brian Kolodiejchuk’s commentary in Come Be My Light is that Mother Teresa’s inner darkness went beyond the purgative experience found in John of the Cross and other mystics of the night, and was a form of participation in the suffering of Jesus for the redemption of the world.

There is definitely something of this self-understanding in Mother Teresa’s writings, as we shall see. But her overarching concern seems to have been the task of loving God and consoling Jesus present in the poor. Her darkness had less in common with the self-actualizing, Neoplatonic forms of mystical union espoused by John and Eckhart, and more with late medieval and early modern affective mysticisms that emphasized intimacy with the suffering Christ. ¹⁷ These traditions melded with theologies of reparation and became prominent in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American Catholicism, especially among female religious. ¹⁸ Crucially, whereas John, Eckhart and even a Franciscan like Bonaventure saw poverty as beneficial to the soul’s own soteriological ascent, personal spiritual growth was never Mother Teresa’s primary consideration. Instead, she was motivated by altruistic concern for one who was wholly separate from herself. The vocation of a missionary of charity, she believed, was simply to “belong to Jesus,” and this required a labor of contemplative presence. ¹⁹

Mother Teresa saw the poor as the special locus of Jesus’s incarnation, and linked their inner sufferings with Christ’s abandonment on the cross. For this reason, her Christ-imitation had a strongly interior orientation. Her vocation found fulfillment in imitative, incarnational participation with the poor in the sufferings of abandonment—an experience of intimate solidarity by which she believed herself able to console Jesus. The level of self-abnegation required to fulfill this vocation is indicated by a letter of instruction to her sisters dated April 1, 1981. Here, Mother Teresa suggests that the passion involved not just Jesus’s subjective feeling of abandonment, but—at least on some mysterious level—the temporary renunciation of his identity as God’s beloved son:

At the Incarnation Jesus became like us in all things except sin; but at the time of the Passion, He became sin.—He took on our sins and that was why He was rejected by the Father . . . Those words of His on the Cross were the expression of the depth of His loneliness and Passion—that even His own Father didn’t claim Him as His Son. That, despite all His suffering and anguish, His Father did not claim Him as His beloved Son . . . Do you connect your vows with this Passion of Jesus? Do you realize that when you accept the vows you accept the same fate as Jesus? ²⁰

Mother Teresa describes the interior dimension of Jesus’s passion as the result of his objective rejection and loss. In the only collection of academic essays currently published on Mother Teresa, Robert Garrity claims that her assertions about the Son’s abandonment reflect a theological “mistake” on Mother Teresa’s part, and urges readers to give her a “free pass,” since she could “simply have been having a bad day.” ²¹ While Garrity may be right to reject this passage as a rigid reflection of Teresian dogma, her voice—which here expresses a deep-seated and significant theological intuition—should not be silenced out of hand. While she certainly believed that she was loved by God, and desired this awareness for her sisters too (as we shall see), this passage helps illustrate how Mother Teresa’s vow of poverty involved not only interior simplicity and detachment of the sort valued by most premodern proponents of evangelical poverty, but the risk of genuine self-annihilation. As she wrote to her Co-workers in 1974:

You had [sic] said “Yes” to Jesus—and He has taken you at your word—. . . Your word to God—became Jesus—Poor and so this terrible emptiness you experience. God cannot fill what is full.—He can fill only emptiness—deep poverty—and your “Yes” is the beginning of being or becoming empty . . . Does not matter what you feel—as long as He feels alright in you . . . This is the poverty of Jesus. You and I must let Him live in us & through us in the world. ²²

Of course, the challenging nature of her apostolate and the pastoral context of her counsel here suggest that Mother Teresa’s words should be understood less as a precise theological declaration on the value of suffering or the nature of God, and more as a kind of love language struggling to articulate itself through disparate and occasionally distressing statements and intuitions. ²³ It is possible that her intensely sacramental experience caused her to import the afflictions of the poor into her descriptions of Christ’s suffering, and one should recognize that contrasting instincts shaped her lexicon as well: “Suffering in itself does not bring joy,” she is often cited to have said, but only “Christ as seen in suffering.” ²⁴

In an interview for a 1986 documentary by Ann and Jeanette Petrie, Mother Teresa even pushes back against the idea that one should pursue poverty, and highlights instead the virtue of spiritual surrender:

To be where he wants you to be. If he puts you in the street—if everything’s taken from you and suddenly you find yourself in the street, to accept to be in the street at that moment. Not for you to put yourself in the street, but to accept to be put there. This is quite different. To accept if God wants you to be in a palace, well then to accept to be in the palace . . . To accept whatever he gives, and to give whatever he takes with a big smile . . . And to accept to be cut to pieces, and yet every piece to belong only to him. ²⁵

It is noteworthy, though—and perhaps indicative of the cost of her labor among destitute people—that even here what Mother Teresa seems to expect from surrender is self-annihilation and pain. Moreover, correspondence with her spiritual directors throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s reveals a complex relationship with suffering—the synthesized outgrowth of her spiritual aridity and desire. Writing to Lawrence Picachy in 1960, she explains, “For my meditation I am using the Passion of Jesus—I am afraid I make no meditation—but only look at Jesus suffer—and keep repeating—‘Let me share with you this pain!’” ²⁶ Writing two years later to Josef Neuner, she expresses her feeling that God wants her to “abstain from the joy of the riches of spiritual life,” and adds, “With my whole heart I want it to be just like this—because He wants it.” ²⁷ Mother Teresa believed that God wanted her to participate, spiritually, in the sufferings of Jesus, and because she wanted to imitate the will of God—and because of the intensity of her love for Jesus—she herself began to welcome her suffering as a form of solidarity and communion with his presence in the poor. Here and in other places we see a subtle blurring of the line between suffering accepted because of its inevitability, and suffering sought by a soul hungry to relinquish everything to the God it loved, including, even, the consolations of love itself. Instances of such line-blurring are common in the pious nineteenth- and twentieth-century lives with which Mother Teresa had most in common, and in her case, it became the means through which her practice of evangelical poverty matured. While mendicants concerned with the self’s Neoplatonic return and actualization in God saw evangelical poverty as something mostly distinct from interior poverty (Eckhart, John), or as a symbol of interior denudation (Bonaventure’s Francis), Mother Teresa’s emphasis on the consolation of Jesus was such that her evangelical practice became in some ways indistinguishable from her experience of interior poverty—an experience that involved not only detachment or some other spiritually beneficial state, but genuine privation and loss for the sake of the Other. And this transformed her evangelical practice into the staging ground for a dynamic affective relationship between the abandoned Christ, herself in her own felt alienation from God, and the spiritually and emotionally destitute “poor” in whom their mutual desire for love met.

Infinite Thirst

We have seen how Mother Teresa’s evangelical practice risked drawing her more and more in the direction of self-annihilation and loss. It involved deepening her existential solidarity with the poor, and, as we shall see in the third part, was perhaps given further impetus by her proclivity for the theologies of redemptive suffering affirmed by Kolodiejchuk. But counterintuitively—and very importantly—Mother Teresa’s desire to share in the rejection of the poor seems to have emerged from a strong intuition of divine love. ²⁸ She believed that God had called her to share the lovelessness of the poor out of the intensity of God’s love for them, God’s desire for their reciprocal love, and God’s love for her as his chosen agent. Describing her interior dialogues with Jesus to the archbishop of Calcutta in 1947, Mother Teresa recalls Jesus referring to her repeatedly as “my own little spouse,” and begging her to unite herself with his suffering for the love of the poor:

I want Indian Missionary Sisters of Charity—who would be My fire of love amongst the very poor . . . [to] offer their lives as victims of my love . . . You will suffer and you suffer now—but if you are my own little Spouse—the Spouse of the Crucified Jesus—you will have to bear these torments on you heart . . . Little one . . . how it hurts—if you only knew—to see these poor children soiled with sin. I long for the purity of their love.—If you would only answer my call . . . For them I long—them I love. ²⁹

Here we see that Mother Teresa’s evangelical practice involved an intimate three-way exchange—between the crucified Christ, Teresa (the little Spouse), and the very poor—that held love and suffering in considerable tension.

The motif that best signaled and symbolized possibilities for this exchange, in Mother Teresa’s view, was Jesus’s thirst, which appears historically first in the story of the woman at the well in John 4:7 and later at the crucifixion scene in John 19:28. Both passages have been the subject of allegorical interpretation from the patristic period, beginning at least with the biblical commentaries of Augustine, and are mentioned by several of the early modern and modern figures who came to influence Mother Teresa. ³⁰ In one of the most poignant available letters written to her religious congregation, occasioned by John Paul II’s 1993 Lenten letter, Mother Teresa drove home how central Jesus’s thirst was to the charism of the order. ³¹ On September 10, 1946, while traveling between Siliguri and the Himalayan hill station of Darjeeling, Mother Teresa reported experiencing a series of dialogues during which Jesus shared his thirst for love and pleaded for her help.

Fifty years later, Mother Teresa wrote to her sisters:

Holy Father’s letter is a sign . . . that the time has come for me to speak openly of the gift God gave Sept. 10—to explain as fully as I can what means for me the thirst of Jesus. For me it is so clear. Everything in [the Missionaries of Charity] exists only to satiate Jesus. His words [“I thirst”] on the wall of every MC chapel, they are not from the past only, but alive here and now, spoken to you.

The letter goes on to describe Jesus’s longing not just as the driving force behind her order’s activities, but as a reality that expresses itself sacramentally in the poverty of every human heart. She writes that the thirst of Jesus

is the source of every part of MC life. It gives us our Aim, our 4th vow [“wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor”], the Spirit of our Society. Satiating the living Jesus in our midst is the Society’s only purpose for existing . . . [If] you believe [this], then You will hear, you will feel His presence, Jesus saying to YOU “I Thirst.” . . . Jesus’ thirst will never leave you. Jesus thirsting in the poor you will have with you always. . . . Jesus thirsts even now, in your heart and in the poor—he knows your weakness. He wants only your love, wants only the chance to love you . . . Hear him. Hear your own name.

For Mother Teresa, the thirst of Jesus crucified was not just a literal, historical reality, but an aspect of the divine life amplified in time through the sacramental presence of human neediness. Because of the Incarnation, creaturely privation and divine desire confronted her as the exact same reality: the divine Love that draws all things back to itself in classical theology was made manifest as Jesus’s human thirst for love. In God’s humanity, divine desire became poverty, and this poverty was infinite because of Christ’s divinity. ³² This is not to say that Mother Teresa would necessarily have articulated a doctrine of divine passability. The fact that her words were chosen more for their affective forcefulness than their dogmatic precision is evidenced by the way she solved the problem she created: “Our aim is to quench this infinite thirst of a God made man,” she wrote in an undated explanation of her order’s original constitutions. “Just like the adoring angels in Heaven ceaselessly sing the praises of God, so the Sisters, using the four vows of Absolute Poverty, Chastity, Obedience and Charity toward the poor ceaselessly quench the thirsting God by their love and by the love of the souls they bring to Him.” ³³ Here Mother Teresa suggests that in union with God, the creaturely capacity expands to reciprocate God’s infinite love—a theological move that was especially important among female mystical writers of the late medieval period. ³⁴

But she who named herself after “the little Teresa, not the big one” (not the mystic of Ávila), would have struggled to claim this ability for herself in a positive, actualizing sense, and instead relied on kenotic self-abasement to articulate her love. For Mother Teresa, to even hear divine desire speaking in Jesus’s thirst required one to experience and accept one’s own spiritual neediness in solidarity with the neediness of others. This perspective has perhaps helped fuel accusations that Mother Teresa’s darkness was a product of her own making. As an avenue for achieving personal spiritual growth, her evangelical style may have been risky. As we have seen, the answer to why she pursued it anyway seems to be that her ultimate concern was not the fulfillment of her own spiritual journey, but the consolation of Jesus thirsting in the poor. If this is true, then the interesting question to address becomes how she arrived at this practice, and how she saw it bringing comfort to those who were suffering. In what follows, I consider two examples of how Mother Teresa’s practice of evangelical poverty developed and touched those diminished by forms of interior destitution. I close by considering some of the ethnic and geographical realities that may help further contextualize her practice for Western readers.

Comforting Jesus in the Poor

My first example involves Mother Teresa’s attempts to heal the feelings of shame often associated with poverty, if not always material poverty itself. Mother Teresa entered religious life with the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1928, and spent most of the next two decades as a teacher on the Loreto compound in Entally, Calcutta (now Kolkata). The school to which she was assigned, St. Mary’s, was staffed mostly by the Daughters of St. Anne, a congregation of unenclosed Indian religious who wore saris instead of European habits. It has even been suggested that Mother Teresa was sent to the Bengali-medium school because she was not a native English speaker, and that she was in some ways marginalized by the Irish Loreto community on account of her Albanian roots. ³⁵ Referred to in Entally as the “Bengali Teresa,” Mother Teresa helped facilitate a sodality for St. Mary’s schoolgirls together with the parish priest, Fr. Julian Henry, and there—according to Henry and several of Mother Teresa’s former pupils—she encouraged her students to serve beyond Loreto’s walls. In a 1976 interview with Indian journalist Desmond Doig, Sr. Florence, MC—once a St. Mary’s pupil called Agnes Vincent—described walking through the Moti Jheel slum with Mother Teresa, who counseled her to remember “how necessary it was that someone should care for these under-privileged people.” ³⁶

Members of her inner circle have sometimes corrected popular assumptions that Mother Teresa’s charity work was the outgrowth of her personal concern for the poor, and have cited instead the direct command of Jesus in her mystical experiences of 1946. ³⁷ But Henry suggests that failed attempts to serve the poor from within the compound helped prepare Mother Teresa for the inspiration when it came:

Now, Mother de Senacle, a Mauritian nun . . . took twenty girls from Moti Jheel . . . and tried to educate them. After a year only two were left. It was not an atmosphere the poor were used to even though they were made at home on the verandah with a good Sister looking after them. That is why Mother Teresa had to leave the Convent. ³⁸

In Mother Teresa’s view, the sense of social alienation inflicted by poverty occurred at too interior and fundamental a level to be easily undone. One could not simply thrust material privilege upon poor people and expect them to experience selfhood differently. David Porter claims that for Mother Teresa, the “conclusion was inescapable: to help the poor, one [needed to] go where the poor were.” ³⁹ One could remove the humiliating stigma of poverty only by sharing poverty as though it were nothing to be ashamed of. Moti Jheel became the site of Mother Teresa’s first makeshift school and hospice. Where Mother de Senacle’s efforts to simply undo poverty had failed, Mother Teresa was able to gather large crowds of children together to trace their alphabets in the dust.

These early fragments may help account for Mother Teresa’s ambivalence around programs promoting systemic change in later years, but they also had the effect of pulling her in a certain experiential direction. Excerpts from the personal journal Mother Teresa kept in the late 1940s illumine the sorts of experiences that formed her. Seven weeks after leaving Loreto, she wrote, “Today I learned a good lesson—the poverty of the poor must be often so hard for them. When I went rounding [sic] looking for a home—I walked and walked till my legs and my arms ached—I thought how they must also ache in body and soul looking for home—food—help.” ⁴⁰ Mother Teresa’s existential investment was such that she herself began experiencing its emotional fallout. Days of wandering like the poor caused her to assimilate their humiliations: “Today—my God—what tortures of loneliness. . . . Tears rolled and rolled. —Everyone sees my weakness.” ⁴¹ Humiliation is a recurring theme from her published writings during this period, as the judgement and scorn passed on her by European clergy and other religious was a source of real exposure and pain. ⁴²

The costly lessons of these experiences remained with her for the rest of her life. In a striking interview with friend and biographer Nawin Chawla, for example, Mother Teresa later recounted how a man who had “seen better days” was once made to feel better about his lot by learning that she ate the same poor food as him. “My eating it gave him the courage to accept the humiliation,” she recalled. ⁴³ Rather than working to ameliorate the humiliated man’s circumstance (which may or may not have been achievable), Mother Teresa intuited the distressing poverty of shame itself, and through the gift of solidarity, tried to convince him that his poverty need not debase him. That dismantling of the physical realities of poverty was of only secondary concern to Mother Teresa (a complaint of her critics), aligned with her emphasis on the loving descent of God into the human condition over and above the resurrection of humanity with Christ into glory. But in her view, the emphasis gave her access to profound interior poverties that are difficult and sometimes impossible to fully heal. While she recognized that solidarity could not always heal such poverties, she believed it could at least help undo the isolation that sourced them.

My second example involves the fascinating story of the Sick and Suffering Coworkers, a group Mother Teresa founded together with Jaqueline de Decker, a Belgian laywoman she met in Patna near the start of her venture. Like Mother Teresa, de Decker had received a call to spend herself among India’s poor, and it was decided that she would join Mother Teresa as a missionary of charity. But when de Decker returned home for what was supposed to be a brief convalescence, she was diagnosed with a debilitating chronic spine disease. According to Kathryn Spink, the realization that she could not return to India “was initially a bitter one fraught with a sense of personal failure.” ⁴⁴ De Decker shared her disappointment with Mother Teresa in 1952, and received by response an invitation that would still—in the view of both Mother Teresa and de Decker—allow de Decker to fulfil her vocation:

Today I am going to propose something to you. You have been longing to be a missionary. Why not become spiritually bound to our society which you love so dearly? . . . The work here is tremendous and needs workers, it is true, but I need souls like yours to pray and suffer for the work—you’ll be in body in Belgium but in soul in India where there are souls longing for our Lord, but for want of someone to pay the debt for them, they cannot move toward him. You’ll be a true Missionary of Charity.

Later, she added, “You are just as important and necessary for the fulfillment of our aim . . . In reality you can do much more while on your bed of pain than I running on my feet, but you and I together can do all things in him who strengthens me.” ⁴⁵

As was common among religious of her time, Mother Teresa accepted that gratuitous suffering and sacrifice could effect reparation for sin and the redemption of souls through union with Christ’s passion. ⁴⁶ Reformed congregations increasingly emphasized the goodness of the body and virtues like self-determination in the postconciliar period, and the penitential culture that once serviced theologies of redemptive suffering gradually receded. But the Missionaries of Charity was founded a mere fifteen years before the Second Vatican Council closed, and its foundress was steeped in the devotional milieu in which theologies of reparation had long flourished. Through her close association with the Jesuits in Skopje as a girl, and her relationship with Flemish Jesuits like Celest van Exem and Julien Henry in Kolkata, Mother Teresa felt a strong devotion to the Sacred Heart and to Marian spiritualities that promoted penance and reparation, like the cult of Fatima. ⁴⁷

Yet while Mother Teresa clearly believed in the redemptive value of de Decker’s suffering, her idea to claim it for the poor of India seems to have been driven first and foremost by pastoral concern for de Decker herself. In other words, Mother Teresa did not begin with a certain theology that that went out looking for suffering, but with a pastoral problem (suffering) for which she believed theology could provide an answer. But the amelioration of de Decker’s mental suffering once again depended on Mother Teresa being able to unite herself in solidarity with de Decker (i.e., with the suffering Jesus). Solidarity, as she saw it, could even draw other sufferers (i.e., “the poor”) into the circle of consolation. The prayerful sufferer and the active missionary, she proposed, could experience a mystical bond illustrated by the way a chalice embraces satiating substances—in this case, the love of the poor, which alone could slake the thirst of the poor Christ. ⁴⁸ From then on, Mother Teresa began referring to de Decker as her “second self,” and addressed her in personal letters as “Jacqueline-Teresa.” With Mother Teresa’s support, de Decker eventually established the sick and suffering link of the Co-workers of Mother Teresa, which by the early 1980s had paired over 3000 people suffering from physical and mental health conditions with individual missionaries of charity.

In 1984, and at Mother Teresa’s rare urging, Kathryn Spink published an astonishing collection of letters from these Co-workers, acknowledging the “multitude of issues over which controversy might arise” for those reading them critically. In particular, she names an “undue concentration on what might be termed the ‘pre-resurrection Christ.’” Though moving in their heroism, many of the letters do seem to fetishize suffering in ways Mother Teresa’s critics would find alarming. But the prayer emerging “from between the lines of the letters,” Spink argues, is: “Assimilate and use the shortcomings and the shadows of my life!” ⁴⁹ Again, here we see the significant existential risks borne by Mother Teresa’s incarnational style of poverty, but we also see how she was able to redeem experiences that for many could never be sources of communion or consolation.

As a way of suggesting further avenues for study, it is worth mentioning one other dimension of Mother Teresa’s story that may shed light on the origins of her approach to evangelical poverty and suffering: her cultural roots and context. This territory is somewhat fraught. In the West, Mother Teresa’s attempts to live like the poor gave her a moral authority that disturbed critics who saw her being used to justify social and political inactivity. Although Mother Teresa became a hero for Western admirers in the 1970s, it is not clear that she should be thought of as a fully Western figure or that people of the West truly understood her mission. ⁵⁰ (This may explain, in part, why so many have felt scandalized by revelations that she was not primarily a charity worker.) Western media sources and certain Indian political groups are becoming increasingly suspicious of Mother Teresa’s missionary legacy in India. And yet while Mother Teresa arrived and worked in India as part of a colonialist missionary system, her own identity was more complicated. She was a daughter of the Ottoman Empire and her father was a proud Albanian nationalist. ⁵¹ Her family clung to its historic Catholic faith while belonging to an ethnic minority that mostly converted to Islam under Turkish rule. Her Albanian biographer, Lush Gjergji, sees this heritage as having as much and perhaps more than Catholic theology to do with her emphasis on sacrifice and spiritual fidelity. ⁵² And while Indian opinions of Mother Teresa were never homogeneous and seem to be shifting in India’s current political climate, it was in the East that her humanitarian approach first won respect not only among the great number of young Indian women who joined her, or among many of the poor, but among prominent intellectuals and nationalists in the decades following India’s independence. ⁵³ In this tradition, Navin Chawla—an Indian civil servant and biographer of Mother Teresa—saw her incarnational emphasis as distinctly Eastern in its sensibility and effectiveness, akin to the witness of Mohandas Ghandi:

While the Mahatma was a man spurred by impulses that went beyond politics, Mother Teresa eschews politics completely. Yet they both understood well the power of symbolism. She gave up her convent habit for a coarse sari woven by leprous hands, and he wore a hands-spun dhoti, not elegantly draped down to his feet, but as a loincloth . . . Despite hardships, [Mother Teresa] converted her poverty into freedom and created from her nothingness a powerful instrument for religious and social action. Gandhiji, meanwhile, had created satyagraha, a nonviolent striving after truth. He called it an argument of suffering, voluntarily undergone. Knowing that he was unable to match the might of Empire by conventional means, he developed “nonviolence” as his weapon. With it he inspired his followers to accept even physical torment without resistance, until the perpetrator was shamed into ceasing. In this, both Gandhi and Mother Teresa came to recognize the power of innocent suffering. ⁵⁴

Mother Teresa’s form of “innocent suffering,” as Chawla points out, was her voluntary poverty—a prophetic lifestyle aimed at winning respect for the poor through the witness of her own austerity and the purchase of interior humiliation. ⁵⁵ While I have tried to frame Mother Teresa’s emphasis on solidarity in theological terms, it is possible that her Albanian roots and Indian context had more to do with shaping her approach than critics and supporters alike have yet considered.

Conclusion

In this article I have tried to show how Mother Teresa’s approach to evangelical poverty represents a substantial development of mendicant theology and experience. While key mendicant theologians of the past tended to imitate Christ’s material poverty as a way of facilitating detachment and spiritual growth, Mother Teresa imitated the poverty of Jesus’s interior sufferings so that she could console him in the disguise of the alienated poor. I explored the affective tension that facilitated this practice, and some of the ways it may have left her vulnerable to feelings of spiritual darkness. I closed by tracing the development and success of her practice through two stories from her life and ministry.

The stories raise a number of questions: If her evangelical practice helped dispose Mother Teresa to the darkness for which she is now so well known, to what extent did this occur, and what were other contributing factors? Were her successes only possible because of her personal sacrifices? Can one engage the contemplative wisdom of her practice while remaining oriented toward spiritual wholeness? Does she offer a helpful development of the tradition that others should follow, or is her path something others should admire but not imitate, or perhaps not admire at all? While many of Mother Teresa’s critics remain ignorant of the role and status of spiritual darkness in Christian traditions, some with theological literacy have also expressed unease over the ways sacrifice and suffering seemed to function in in her spirituality. ⁵⁶ Champions of Mother Teresa could hastily dismiss these fears, just as critics glibly reject claims that her work genuinely alleviated suffering. But either response would risk closeting her away from honest and fruitful theological reflection. If Mother Teresa’s story can help us think more deeply about how to embrace those who experience feelings of loneliness and rejection, then she will have been allowed to continue her mission of comforting the suffering Christ she loved on earth. Given the richness and complexity of her experience, one can only hope to see theological engagement with Mother Teresa flourish in the future.