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Mother Teresa had many mystical experiences with God, especially conversations with Jesus in her early days as a Sister of Loretto and during the early establishment of the Missionaries. Like other mystics have reported across the ages, her mystical desserts began to disappear as she was called into higher levels of spiritual maturity and higher levels of service to God and man. In the words of Joy Dawson, these experiences "forever ruin us for the ordinary." Mother Teresa longed often to "feel" his presence as she had before.

We have a hard time in the West (and maybe especially in the Protestant West) getting our heads around these spiritual realities. This is because somewhere in the early Middle Ages, the mystics were no longer invited into the universities, the seminaries, or to be advisers in governments, businesses, hospitals, and other institutions. The mystics were sent back to the monasteries and other ministries. Their wisdom is all but lost in the public conversation, and as a result we also live most by naturalism and by our feelings—we grope along by sight and feel.

Even Christians in the West may tend to analyze Mother Teresa as depressed and wonder if she might not have been better off if she had just been given some Prozac. Having lost an understanding of these deep workings of God in our souls and spirits, we too have often adopted the basic tenets of secular psychology, sandwiched between a beginning and ending prayer. But for Mother Teresa (as for the mystics) there is not a trace of secular psychology (or atheism) in her writings; it simply occupied no part of her being.

Jesus tells us there is only one test of discipleship—fruit. Father Scolozzi writes,

I learned that her invitation simply led to more questions, until finally I reached the ultimate ones. I had to face the agony of losing and finding myself in total surrender to the One who knows why we must be buried in the death of his Son before we can rise to a newness of life. I began to realize that no one can effectively serve God's poor without first breaking out of the prison of his own ego. Mother told me it takes a lot of humiliation to produce just a little bit of humility.

Father Neuner sent a copy of The Collected Works of John of the Cross to Mother. At the end of a long letter to Father Neuner praising the book ("How wonderfully he writes about God"), she wrote, "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." Later she told him she had come "to love the darkness." She had come to accept that she was sharing in Christ's sufferings.

Reading the private writings of Mother Teresa to her confessors reveals the transformations of a saint and the formation of a worldwide ministry. Here we have the stark reality of a mystic's hunger and thirst for God, a poor man's John of the Cross; the ecstasy, the pain, the triumph, and the feelings of failure are offered in the raw.

Despite her feelings of emptiness, Mother Teresa was full of the light of Christ and she led those of us who came to her to hunger and thirst for more of him.

Mary Poplin is a professor at Claremont Graduate University. She spent two months in the spring of 1996 working with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. This article is excerpted from her forthcoming book, Finding Calcutta, to be published in 2008 by InterVarsity Press.

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September (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51