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※ 編輯: falstaff 來自: 76.204.30.14 (08/26 23:05)
※ sitifan:轉錄至看板 Christianity 08/27 00:19
中文摘譯
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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."
這本新書Come Be My Light 主要是Teresa修女跟神師66年間關於靈修生活的信件
這些信顯示了修女在她生命的最後50年 她沒有感覺天主的存在
天主不在她的心裡 也不在彌撒聖祭裡
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began
tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, …
天主的缺席從她在加爾各達為窮人跟臨死的人服務就開始了
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 保守派跟自由派都覺得 這本書會是一個里程碑
保守派說 這本書跟奧斯丁的懺悔錄 湯瑪斯摩頓的七重山 一樣重要
Martin自由派的 說 這本書會是一個新的牧靈服務
這本書可以對那些有懷疑的 天主不在他們的生活裡的人服務
就是所有的人 無神論 懷疑論 尋找意義的人 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.
無神論者就不同意
Christopher Hitchens, "God Is Not Great" 的作者, 說
修女 好像一個 拿著火把的女人 在門口等她的丈夫回來
其實 她的丈夫 30年前跟她說 他要去買香菸 就再也沒有回家過了
…
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對那個拿火把的女人的比喻 回答說
修女比較像是 你結婚了 找到愛情 也相信你們的婚姻是神聖的
可是 你的太太God forbid 中風了 然後昏迷
你再也沒有經驗到她的愛
你一直照顧她 愛她 同時你還是會跟你的神師抱怨
可是在你的內心深處 你知道 她還是愛著你 雖然她一直沉默
而你做的 是對的
修女知道 她做的 是對的
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 她說到她內心的黑暗
他告訴修女三件事
A 這不是人能治療的
B 你感覺天主不存在 並不表示祂真的不存在
C 她對天主的渴求 是天主隱藏存在的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."
真正的愛是承諾 忠貞跟會受傷的
修女沒有感覺基督的愛 她可以就不做了
可是她還是為了耶穌 每天早上4:30起床
還是說 你(耶穌)的快樂就是我想要的
就算你不用宗教的用語 這都是很有力的例子
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用宗教的話說
我知道有些人 覺得被天主遺棄了 或是懷疑天主的存在
這本書跟他們有一樣的經驗 可是它顯現了修女對天主 全部跟完整的信賴
誰會想到這麼有信仰的女人 會對信仰有這麼大的掙扎
修女特別的信仰 克服了沉默
同時也指出 懷疑是很自然的事
不論你是一般的信友 或是全世界知名的聖人
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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