The German Jesuit And Mother Teresa

On her spiritual journey

In 1957 a Jesuit priest, Joseph Neuner, wrote an article about Mother Teresa for a German mission magazine. A few years later he visited Calcutta and they met again. Later she wrote to him, touching on the highlights of her spiritual journey: “In Loreto, Father, I was very happy. I think the happiest nun. Then the call came. Again and again He asked in 1946. I knew it was He. Fear and terrible feelings - fear lest I was deceived. But as I have always lived in obedience I put the whole thing before my spiritual father, hoping the whole time that he will say it was all Devil's deception. But no, like the voice, he said it is Jesus who is asking you. Then ... my Superiors sent me to Asansol [West Bengal] in 1947. And there [it was] as if Our Lord just gave Himself to me to the full."

“The work started in December 1948. By 1950, as the number of the Sisters grew, the work grew. Now, Father, since 1949 or 1950 this terrible sense of loss, this untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God, which gives me that pain deep down in my heart. Darkness is such that I really do not see, neither with my mind nor with my reason. The place of God in my soul is blank. There is no God in me. When the pain of longing is so great I just long and long for God and then it is that I feel He does not want me, He is not there. My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls - to go where? Why all this? Where is the soul in my very being? God does not want me. Sometimes I just hear my own heart cry out ‘My God' and nothing else comes. The torture and pain I can't explain. From my childhood I have had a most tender love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament but this, too, has gone. Yet I would not miss Holy Communion for anything.

“You see, Father, the contradiction in my life. I long for God - I want to love Him, to live only for love of Him, and yet there is but pain - longing and no love. Years back, about 17 years now, I bound myself under pain of Mortal Sin not to refuse Him anything. Since then, I have kept this promise and when sometimes the darkness is very dark and I am on the verge of saying ‘no' to God the thought of that promise pulls me up.

“I want only God in my life. 'The work' is really and solely His. He directs every movement I take, puts the words in my mouth, makes me teach the Sisters the way. All that and everything in me is He. This is why when the world praises me it really does not touch my soul.

“Before I could spend hours before Our Lord, loving Him, talking to Him; now not even meditation goes properly. Yet deep down in my heart that longing for God keeps breaking through the darkness. When outside in the work or meeting people there is a presence of somebody living very close - in me. I don't know what this is but very often, that love in me for God grows more real. I find myself telling Jesus unconsciously strange tokens of love.

“Very often I long to make use of the food I give my Sisters but I can never do it. The same for spiritual books. All these things were so natural to me 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 and said. Now, Father, it so dark, so different, yet my everything is His - in spite of Him not wanting me, not caring as if for me.

“When the work started, with my whole heart I accepted everything. My Sisters, Father, are the gift of God to me, they are sacred to me, each one of them. I love them more than I love myself.

“My heart and soul and body belong 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 my darkness is light to some soul - even if it be nothing to nobody - I am perfectly happy to be God's flower of the field.”

Link to the full article (here)

Photo is of Fr. Joseph Neuner, S.J.