Mother Teresa's mental state

[Elind]

I'm curious about opinions on the latest article in Time about Mother Teresa.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

I'm not an expert, nor a fan, nor have I read Hitchens on the Missionary Position, but it struck a very personal chord with me.

I was surprised to read what I thought was eloquent, albeit poetic, prose from her, and the frankness was certainly admirable, if not simply a sign of very human weakness. Not what I would call saintly in my view of the word.

But what really struck me was how exactly her emotional descriptions corresponded with what I had once felt many years ago, although with one or two big differences.

I never had a crush on Jesus, and I never heard voices telling me what to do.

But I did have depression, which she describes to a tee. Substitute Jesus and God, for Meaning of Life and so on, and it's exactly the same thing I once knew.

Our experiences differ however in that she never got rid of her delusions. I realized that better days that I remembered were possible and that they and their stimuli were were the goal to work for. 20 years later those episodes eventually faded.

Mother Teresa instead seems to have coped by justifying her suffering as the will of God, and then continued her task largely on the basis that this was what she HAD to do.

How much more eloquent and admirable all this would have been if her writings had instead told us that what she came to realize was that what she should do is transfer the, inescapably ambiguous by her own words, hots she had for Jesus, to a simple love for her fellow human beings, and given the world its first ever true atheist saint.

 

[JoeEllison]

Instead of an "atheist saint", she was an instrument of evil, who I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for?

 

[Elentar]

She had invested so much in her beliefs that she couldn't quit. She had to make rationalisations for staying, or throw her entire life away, and start over. That would have been terrifying. We didn't have that much invested, so we were able to escape--although some of the people who worked with her suspected, at the end, that she had in fact become an atheist.

 

[Elind]

She had invested so much in her beliefs that she couldn't quit. She had to make rationalisations for staying, or throw her entire life away, and start over. That would have been terrifying. We didn't have that much invested, so we were able to escape--although some of the people who worked with her suspected, at the end, that she had in fact become an atheist.

It will be interesting to see how the Pope manages these revelations in regard to their usual contortions on sainthood.

As to your last sentence. Is that something that was in the letters, beyond what Time quotes as "normal" testing of the faith?

 

[Abdul Alhazred]

Didn't Saint Augustine go through torments of doubt, too?

It's just one of those "saint" things, see?

 

[Elind]

Instead of an "atheist saint", she was an instrument of evil, who I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for?

I've been there, so I can feel for anyone who suffers depression. Takes the fun of life away and all that. I guess I'm more inclined, knowing this, to take it out on the pious ones who want to make something else of her obvious mental condition in more ways than one.

 

[Elind]

Didn't Saint Augustine go through torments of doubt, too?

It's just one of those "saint" things, see?

Yes, I think I do. Suffering for the Gods is an easier out than getting your own act together.

 

[JoeEllison]

Didn't Saint Augustine go through torments of doubt, too?

It's just one of those "saint" things, see?

He was a big fan of torture and suffering as well, IIRC.

 

[Puppycow]

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."

So the church unilaterally decided to publish the correspondence that she wished to keep private?

 

[JoeEllison]

I've been there, so I can feel for anyone who suffers depression. Takes the fun of life away and all that. I guess I'm more inclined, knowing this, to take it out on the pious ones who want to make something else of her obvious mental condition in more ways than one.

I'm not even sure what the point of publishing this was, except to mitigate the disaster of cruelty and inhumanity of her life by blaming depression?

 

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

As someone who feels Mother Theresa was a well intentioned but extremely misguided and incompetent faux humanitarian, I don't quite know what to make of these letters.

As an ex-Catholic, I sympathize with her doubts and struggle but I really can't say what it says about her or her work. Like Joe, I don't see what the point was of publishing this stuff.

 

[JoeEllison]

As someone who feels Mother Theresa was a well intentioned but extremely misguided and incompetent faux humanitarian, I don't quite know what to make of these letters.

As an ex-Catholic, I sympathize with her doubts and struggle but I really can't say what it says about her or her work. Like Joe, I don't see what the point was of publishing this stuff.

I could draw all sorts of negative conclusions from it... the first being that she projected her misery onto other people, so was unable to help anyone. It gets worse from there.

 

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

That's actually an intriguing possibility.

I know struggling with my religion made me miserable and made me feel like an outsider and it probably affected the people around me negatively...but I don't know you can blame maltreating AIDS patients on it.

So what other inferences do you draw from it?

 

[JoeEllison]

That's actually an intriguing possibility.

I know struggling with my religion made me miserable and made me feel like an outsider and it probably affected the people around me negatively...but I don't know you can blame maltreating AIDS patients on it.

So what other inferences do you draw from it?

She could have on some level enjoyed the pain of others, and felt that their pain somehow alleviated her own? Or, maybe worst of all, she could have seen worldwide human suffering as a giant test of her faith, so she surrounded herself with pain and even encouraged it, hoping to rediscover her faith that way.

 

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

You know, you could be right.

She very well could have been trying to redeem herself through the suffering of others. Martyring herself, if you will. Christopher Hitchens has said that she wasn't a friend of the poor, she was a friend of poverty in the way she didn't try to change poverty but embraced it. So that would fit in perfectly.

So blindly believing Christians screw up and doubting introspective Christians screw up even worse.

 

[nosho]

From the top of Page 5 of Time Magazine's Web presentation:

... 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

I have the impression that Mother Teresa experienced this "darkness" as part of her lifelong journey of self abnegation. From a western perspective, it might look like nothing but dissonance in regard to the notion faith, a problem from which one would seek to recover. I think it's likely, however, that Mother Teresa ultimately abandoned all hope of recovery. Yet she kept on doing what she felt she could to help others. Her actions and her letters appear to me to be part of the same orientation of getting closer to selflessness.

She was in India. Her letters exploring issues of self and suffering sound to me like the words of someone who had been influenced by eastern thought.

 

[neutrino_cannon]

My understanding is that declaring a saint falls under Papal infallibility, but beatifying someone does not. Sainthood is therefore declared only after a correspondingly more rigorous process.

I wouldn't be surprised, therefore, if the Church tries to distance itself from Teresa at some point if public opinion of her becomes more realistic.

 

[Drummer]

So the church unilaterally decided to publish the correspondence that she wished to keep private?

Good point. I always thought that the secrecy of the confession was sacred to the catholic church. Can you imagine what would happen to a doctor or a lawyer who publish their patient's/ client's files after they've died? I guess that's just one more of those wordly things that religion feels it's exempt of. It also raises questions on why they would want to publish it.

 

[Puppycow]

Good point. I always thought that the secrecy of the confession was sacred to the catholic church. Can you imagine what would happen to a doctor or a lawyer who publish their patient's/ client's files after they've died? I guess that's just one more of those wordly things that religion feels it's exempt of. It also raises questions on why they would want to publish it.

Well, I think the Catholic Church wants to exploit Mother Teresa for all she's worth. I suppose that it is not completely unusual to publish diaries and private correspondence of famous people for historical reasons, but in this case these communications were supposed to be to a confessor AND she specifically asked that they be destroyed. Is the church not betraying her in this? From the church's perspective she is a very holy person.

 

[Elind]

It also raises questions on why they would want to publish it.

Reading some of the other comments by church members and her contacts, it seems clear that, in typical religious spin character, her letters are "proof" of the wonders of faith and complexity of God's actions. In fact it seems that this is the conclusion she came to, with help from her confessor.