I do not know you Luke 13:22-30

The front cover of Time magazine this week present us with a smile-less photo of "the saint of the gutter" with the title -the secret life of Mother Teresa-. I bet that some people thought this was some saucy expose of the private life of Mother Teresa. I confess to be less of a fan of the nun, now in her way to sainthood, thanks in part to the revelation by one of my professors at University in Canada about an encounter with her in which she behave in what my professor -a nun herself- described as -irrational commandeering attitude- the excellent article by David van Biema is a reflection on the book by the principal advocate for Mother Teresa's cause of beatification The Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuck. The book is called Mother Teresa: Come be my light and will become available in September.

The book is the publication of the would-be saint personal letters to confessors and superiors. For over fifty years she complained bitterly about Jesus absence in her emotional and spiritual life. She felt like a spurned lover. She writes "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet [ a spiritual confidant at the time]. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.". As I continued reading the article I kept looking for the scandal that the title seems to promise and increasingly I realized that there was none. The title was made for the American public by some commercially savvy editor but whoever is on a spiritual path knows that doubt and faith are twin sisters. Whoever had a superficial knowledge of the Christian mystics knows that the term "Dark Night of the Soul" came from experience of the 16Th century saint John of the Cross of profoundly arid and unemotional faith journey. Eventually towards the end of the article the writer eventually makes the point that for the mystics, this kind of language was not new.

It is Rene Descartes himself, the father of consistency in western thought who said If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. Mother Teresa seems to have done just that, but if one is to believe the article in Time, she did it most of her professed life as nun, as founder of her order and as a spiritual guru of our time. She lived, not just between doubt and faith liminal as if were, but she was fully on the "dark" side. For some it will be a monumental fiasco, because in today's society we have relegated God to a feeling, something warm here in our hearts that happens from time to time. A personality like her now confesses that for most of her religious life she felt just a terrible and frightening emptiness.

We all know, I think what is like feeling empty, or in the dark, or profoundly lonely. have you ever been in a party full of people, music and food and at the same time feeling incredibly and astonishingly alone?. Have you ever in your life, consider your mistakes and find your life meaningless and without a purpose. That is what people in profound depression claim to feel. For some is just too much. Life without a purpose or meaning for some can lead them to self-destruction. When confronted with pain and suffering of untold proportions, we doubt if there is a good loving God watching over us.

Today's gospel speaks about rejection of Jesus of those who did not aim at the narrow door, the evil doers that will be shoot out of the party of his company, the left out. This is a word of judgement. We want to think that God is nice, I said last Sunday that we in America had confused Nice with Love. We would like, as Ben Franklin did when took all miracles out, edit out all the words of judgement of the Gospel. To take away all the grittiness of the Gospel and turn it into a smooth surface, like God was a lovely Golden Retriever sitting on our lap slobbering when we call Him and away when we shoo Him. God at our beck and call.

Last Sunday we heard Jesus promising not peace but sword, this Sunday we hear him speaking of exclusion. We all know what our narrow door should look like since we have chosen at one time or another chosen to stay way from it and chosen the wide door of sin and falling away from God. There is a bridge built in the middle of a field in Sicily that unites nothing, it just stands there in the middle of a field, no river or road underneath, not two parts in need of union, it is just there, a monument to unscrupulous use of public money. It is called the bridge to nowhere. That is the alternative door to the narrow door, the door to no where, the monument to the pilfering and wasting of our personal lives. This incredible gift that we call life gone down the proverbial drain.

yet even when we feel we have chosen the narrow door, we have been in the straight path, we have turned our lives around, yet the we feel that God ignores us, that Jesus does not respond to us, that feel nothing in out hearts, no warming feeling, no tear, no conviction, no faith. In many ways that was what Mother Teresa confessed to feel in these private letters that now are made public for most of her life as a religious, as care giver of the dying and the poor, for him she took considerable offense in a country like India where Christians are small minority. The recognition she received was no always universal, specially at the beginning she was antagonized by the Indians themselves, whose traditional dress she adopted as the uniform of her order, it is said that a high caste Indian once saw her begging for money for her "place of death" and spat on while he abused her and she quietly clean herself up and looking at him attentively said, that was for me but do you have something to give for my poor? meanwhile she agitated her collection tin.

This woman, holy by all accounts, felt always rejected by Jesus, left out of the party of his presence, tortured in her very self by doubts, lacerated by the seemingly silence to her prayers. How come then this small woman of wrinkle face was able to live for fifty whole years getting up at 4:30 am in the morning, spending countless hours praying on her knees, serving the dregs of humanity? The poor of the poor was her mission, the dying who had no one to help them to die with dignity. That was the center of her ministry in Indian Calcutta. She could expect absolutely nothing from these people, who often had no family to look after them in the first place. Nor, she said she got anything form Jesus himself in her life time. No words of encouragement, except when she said, Jesus called her to India to be his light in 1948. After that no other word.

John of the Cross, we mentioned before wrote about this stage in the spiritual progress of any person, when the prayers become just empty words, when the heart does loves no one, when the soul gasps for air of the spirit, when our spirit is permanently hungry for the divine presence, when our intellect is full with questions and no answers. He called it aptly the "Dark Night of the Soul". That spiritual journey where it is eternally 3 am. Arid time, wasted sleep, forecast of a confusing day ahead. 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.

A Fr. Larry chaplain at a federal jail receives a group of high schoolers, perhaps brought there for some preventive work, and the young people ask Fr. Larry how many inmates you have turned around? He responds, well it has been 15 years that will be about 6, 000 inmates I have been in contact with, about six I think! Next question. Why you do this? because Jesus told me to, next question.

Why we do the things we do? what sustain each one of us when there is so little to go on. Mother Theresa had nothing to go on except her duty to others even when that duty was not pleasurable or she did not felt motivated. She walked for a dark valley for many many years and yet she continue walking, she could not talk about what she felt with honesty but she knew that her experience or lack of it, will not stop her in serving others, her emotions will not be a deterrent.

She was like Peter in his single mindedness and like him had moments, in her case that lasted a lifetime. She was in forefront of the most terrible poverty, she served the poor of the poor, and she served among these the ones that were dying. What is surprising that she did not had a nervous breakdown yet she continue in her march often questioning herself about where was she going and more importantly what was the purpose of her going.

Her persona, small as it was, has just got bigger for me, even bigger than it was when she died because i can see myself in her struggle. Because sainthood has become available to you and to me and to all of us.

She was no hero, she was a saint, no hero that needed airbrushing dirty facts, but with all the grit of truth in her, no exceptional, but common, one of us, gone to God's heart for ever.

A saint that shows its darkness and emptiness, allowing us through them to see God with clarity, they become like a clean and empty glass. Arid and empty for the love of God, not depending on their feelings or emotions, but depending completely in the Beloved. I thought reading the Time article that she seems always even in her emptiness and darkness to be in relation with other person, one that she could not see or feel, but one that sustained her through her darkness. She has left the games of the mind, the games of the ego, to rely totally and absolutely in God. Teresa was sustained not by emotions born from within but the a Divine presence borne from without, that was her learning that in sometimes in the absence of God and goodness, one must trust one way or the other, stumbling with the big question in the way, capital HE will bring us home again and again.

Loreena McKennit, who I saw playing her harp in the Saint Lawrence market in Toronto a grey dark day of winter, and now internationally acclaimed singer and composer, reflecting of the John of the Cross's "The Dark Night of the Soul" composed this song where these words come.

Upon a darkened night
the flame of love was burning in my breast
And by a lantern bright
I fled my house while all in quiet rest

Shrouded by the night
and by the secret stair I quickly fled
The veil concealed my eyes
while all within lay quiet as the dead

Chorus
Oh night thou was my guide
oh night more loving than the rising sun
Oh night that joined the lover
to the beloved one
transforming each of them into the other.