(Reading time is approximately 25 min
Hello all
So I was searching through my 196 poems trying to figure out which one next?
Neurotic Angel, of course, was demanding that I find a happy one.
“Gees you need to lighten the mood a bit! If you are not careful you are going to lose half of those 8 regular followers that actually read your posts!” (Yes I see you, whoever you are:-)
But unfortunately, the first year of my poetry writing wasn’t very perky. So in an attempt to be authentic to ‘my process’ and ‘my healing’ Neurotic Angel has been asked, (very gently), to step aside.
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It has been insinuated to me in past that I am at times a little “too much”
I know! I know!
MWA?
Hard to believe right?
Too much emotion
Too much ‘out there‘
Too emotionally honest with stuff that I really should be keeping to myself.
And maybe I am.
(for some people;-)
As I have gotten stronger in myself, I have started to accept that that’s ok.
In 2019 I had an interview with a potential modelling agent
(Who shall remain nameless).
In attempting to woo me to sign up with his agency, JAMES said something like this:
“You certainly don’t want your modelling career to be like your blog, it’s all over the place….
nobody knows WHAT they are coming here for!”
Needless to say, I did not sign up with his agency.
(Kindness is never overrated!)
Honestly, it felt like a defining moment in my life. It was one of the first times, I didn’t feel hurt or disparaged by someone’s negative ‘less than favourable’ comments about my writing.
It was like my internal mother grabbed hold of me tightly and said with a roar:
“Thank you for feedback, but we are very proud of Gayle!”
I made no attempt to justify myself to him.
It almost felt like things solidified in my head
I write for myself, because I love it.
I write because I’m passionate about sharing ideas.
I write so that when I turn 108 my whole life will be documented!
(How cool will that be!)
But I think, most importantly, at the heart of all my writing and the reason I share so openly about my life is this deep knowing…
I’m not alone.
Life is messy.
We all have pain.
And yet, we all spend a huge part of our life trying to keep it hidden.
We spend an insurmountable amount of time and energy making sure that the world knows we are just….
f.i.n.e.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard about the ‘Dark Letters’ of Mother Teresa that she had written over most of her adult life, over a span of 66 years. Here was a woman who had devoted her entire life to her faith, to helping the sick and dying people of Calcutta. A woman who became a worldwide role model for compassion and love for others but so sadly seemed to have absolutely none for herself. Mother Teresa had this whole secret part of her that felt absolutely tormented by her faith, and like Christ had abandoned her.
These are some of the quotes from the collection of letters she wrote to colleagues and superiors (1)
“Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’”
(Written in 1953)
“Such deep longing for God — and … repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no zeal. (Saving) souls hold no attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.”
(Written in 1956)
“What do I labour for? If there be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then Jesus — You also are not true.”
(Written in her journal 1959)
“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,”
(Written in September 1979.)
The place of God in my soul is blank, there is no God in me. When the pain of longing in me is so great I just long and long for God and then it is that I feel, that he does not want me. He is not there.
When I first read all of those, my initial feeling was one of ….
(I kinda don’t feel so alone now.)
Far from the image that she portrayed of being so connected and at one with God, Mother Teresa was just a normal person carrying a shit load of pain and struggling with a very tragic case of the imposter syndrome.
More than anything I felt so incredibly sad for her.
(Overwhelmingly so.)
Imagine spending your whole life trying to hide away those ‘unlovable, unworthy parts’.
Perpetually cheery in public, but living in this deep state of spiritual pain.
She must have been truly and utterly exhausted.
She herself spoke of the hypocrisy that she felt her life was and worried continuously that she was engaged in verbal deception. She remarked to one advisor:
“I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God–tender, personal love,”
“If you were there, you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.’
“The smile,”
she writes, is
“a mask”
or
“a cloak that covers everything.”(2)
Sadly, even Mother Teresa’s closest companions in the Missionaries of Charity were bewildered when all this finally came out. None of them had ever heard her make any reference to this ‘tortured darkness’. Except for an awry reference that she made four years before she died where by she warned her sisters that “the Devil” is continuously on the prowl in order to “make you feel it is impossible that Jesus really loves you, is really cleaving to you. This is a danger for all of us.”(2)
How could they have ever guessed that this remark was revealing a deep, personal fear and belief that she lived with every single day?
After all the ‘inner parts‘ work I have done over the last 2 years, I don’t for a minute think Mother Teresa was faking all the joy, love and compassion that she radiated so naturally to everybody that she met. That part of her was 100% authentic, but what intrigued me more was this dark, lost, sad little child part that never found its way to the light.
Mother Teresa, by all her accounts, describes her childhood and early family life as happy and joyful.
Ummmmm really?
(The Sceptic in me was super sceptical!)
How could someone who claimed to have such a ‘joyful’ childhood struggle with so much internal turmoil and deep sadness?
There had to be more to her story.
So gripped by a somewhat morbid fascination I found myself getting a little obsessive
(as I do!)
and inevitably got sucked down the “Mother Teresa” rabbit hole, for a brief while.
This in itself was an eye-opening experience.
I seriously had no idea how much vitriol and hatred there was, out there, for this poor woman. (But that’s a whole new rabbit hole that I don’t really have much interest in.)
(Let it be known I have no interest in judging Mother Teresa, all I want to do is understand her.)
I eventually ended up finding numerous articles written by a man called Gezim Alpion.
Alpion is an Albanian-born academic who works at the University of Birmingham who devoted 20 years of research into Mother Teresa’s early personal experiences. Alpion is regarded as the most authoritative English-language author on Mother Teresa and he has written two books about her life so far
Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? and Mother Teresa: The Saint and Her Nation.
FYI Disclaimer: I haven’t read either of the books!
(Unfortunately, my rabbit holes don’t go THAT deep!!)
What makes Alpions work different from others is that he has studied her life as a sociologist and tends to focus more on her Albanian identity.
In a newspaper article written for Telegraph India, he said “From the very beginning I paid attention to her roots. I went to her childhood and I saw to my horror that no one who had written about Mother Teresa had bothered to study the first 18 years she spent in Skopje in Macedonia, where she was born because this was not considered important.” (3)
“I discovered that Mother Teresa, born in 1910 as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu had lost her father at the age of nine — and she had adored him. With his death, she was shocked because there was such a void in her life.” ” Nikollë Bojaxhiuwas was killed because he was an Albanian patriot”
‘His final hours were agonizing and traumatized the whole family, including 9-year-old Anjezë.’
As well as that Albion goes on to describe how
Anjezë ’s maternal great-grandfather, Pjetër Bardhi, was murdered in a blood feud.
His son, (Anjezë ’s grandfather), Ndue, avenged him and was murdered in his turn.
Ndue’s son Gjon, (Anjezë ’s uncle), was another victim of the blood feud.’
The Spanish Flu of 1919 -1920 claimed the lives of numerous family members.
Her mother’s brother Mark, a prosperous businessman, had four children.
First, one of the sons died of the Spanish flu, and then the heartbroken father died.
This flu also took another daughter, her husband, and yet another daughter.
Finally, Anjezë‘s grandmother died. (3)
I mean fucking hell!
This poor little girl went through more trauma, loss and grief in her childhood than is even imaginable.
On top of this, it is also worth remembering that by the time Anjezë left her home at 18 she had also lived in the backdrop of 3 wars engulfing her homeland. The first and second Balkan wars of 1913 (She was two years old) and the onset of World War 1 when she was only four years old.
After her father’s death, Anjezë’s became very close to her mother, Dranafile Bojaxhiu, who was a devout Catholic and who instilled a deep devotion to the church and charity in her young daughter. I have read in a couple of articles that quoted her mother saying:
”My child, never eat a single mouthful unless you are sharing it with others.”(4)
What the fuck?
Seriously?
I can appreciate the sentiment behind it, and please don’t get me wrong I am not against charity but where is the line drawn between looking after other people’s needs and your own needs?
Imagine being a young child growing up NEVER feeling like you can even eat a meal without worrying about other people.
Imagine growing up feeling like your sole responsibility/purpose in this world is to continually be conscious of how you can alleviate OTHER people’s suffering.
Perhaps, in hindsight, reading this hit a nerve in me because I too was brought up Christian and (‘parts of me’) spent the first 35 years of my life desperately trying to be the ‘good’ girl, who always did the right thing. Those words “What would Jesus do? ” Somehow seemed to be etched into my soul.
Even after I moved away from my Christian roots I still felt plagued by this conviction that looking after other people’s needs and happiness was somehow my responsibility.
It’s taken 12 years for me to get to this point in my life where I can finally say:
Incidentally, I feel like the turning point for me came in 2010 when I spent 6 weeks travelling through India.
(No, I didn’t get to stay in an Ashram and meet the Hindu Guru I had secretly fantasised about!
That enlightened soul who would somehow mystically illuminate my path with the clarity and peacefulness I was soooooooo desperately seeking.)
But I did learn one simple life lesson:
I wrote about my experiences in a post called “Make the voices stop” which was one of the first times that I became consciously aware of the war that my inner parts were raging inside my head.
So now back to little Anjezë who at the tender age of 12 started to feel called to become a missionary. She was greatly influenced by a Jesuit priest who often told her stories about his missionary work in India. No doubt this call ‘away’ from the trauma and conflict of her homeland would have been very appealing to a young Anjezë who’s early life had already been so marred by suffering. Alpion explains how her ‘calling’ so clearly emanated from bereavement.
“In the wake of her father’s unexpected demise in 1919, when she was nine years old, and the deaths of eight close relatives the following year from the Spanish flu (1918-1920), Teresa grew increasingly attached to Jesus who became an omniscient surrogate paternal authority to her.” (5)
Perhaps Anjezë came to the conclusion that the only way she could escape from this endless chain of hatred and violence lay in acts of love and devotion toward others.
So in 1928 at the age of 18 Anjezë joined a Roman Catholic order, the Sisters of Our lady of Loreto, a group of nuns who worked out of Ireland and did mission work in India. Father Brian Kolodiejchuk was the author of ‘Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The revealing private writings of the Nobel Peace Prize winner‘ which chronicled her spiritual journey and revealed all the secrets she shared only with her closest confidants.
He describes in this recording how painful this initial decision to leave her home was for her.(6)
In the recording, he talks about when young Anjezë told her mother that she wanted to be a missionary and what a truly big shock it was for her mother who had already lost her husband. She spoke about how her mother ‘went off‘ and shut herself in her bedroom for 24 hours.
This in itself is very telling as to how emotional conflict and upsets might have been handled growing up in Anjezë family. One can only imagine the rejection, isolation, and abandonment Anjezë must have felt while waiting for her mother to re-emerge.
When she finally did come out of her room she said to Anjezë,
“OK…, put your hand in the hand of Jesus and never look back.”
The young teenager was so bereft by the pain and sacrifice she felt she had caused her family that she took her mum at her word and she had no contact, whatsoever with her family for 10 years.
She knew nothing about them, and they knew nothing about her.
Silence for a decade.
Kolodiejchuk commented on how Mother Teresa used to say.
“You know, God doesn’t have to judge me!
My mother will judge me, because I made her suffer so much.”
“So if I am not faithful to my vocation, my mother will judge me.”
Mmmmmmmmm….
Im not sure that sounds like someone who grew up feeling validated, supported and with the right to choose what was best for her own life.
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(Please know, I am by no means judging her mother who was only 21 years old when Anjezë, her third child, was born. I have learnt a lot about relational trauma these last two years which is passed on through generations. I have no doubt if we were to go back to little Dranafile Bojaxhiu childhood and ‘made space’ for her….we might find another young girl who simply could not get her own emotional needs met.
Without conscious reflection and awareness of where we came from, its human nature to simply pass on what we have learnt.
Doing things differently is almost not even an option for so many people.)
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So back to my story of little Anjezë…..
who then…….. (heart breakingly) ….. never got to see her mother or sister again…
……EVER!
Yes, there might have been political reasons behind this as is mentioned in the recording but just take a moment to think for a minute about what it must have felt like for her to be totally isolated from the family that she loved for the entirety of her remaining life.
And then to carry that guilt and shame around, that she, alone, had somehow caused all this suffering for her family.
It’s truly heartbreaking.
Fast forward 17 years Sister Teresa, who was now 36 years old, experienced a ‘second calling’ from God, in September 1946 , that would ultimately change her life. She had been working as a teacher in Calcutta with the Loreto sisters for all of this time. Her superiors had been concerned about her health due to the fact that she was literally working herself to the bone and they ordered her to go and ‘relax’ at her annual retreat in Darjeeling. She was riding on a train from Calcutta to the Himalayan foothills when she heard the voice of Christ telling her to go and work in the slums of Calcutta aiding the city’s poorest and sickest people.(7)
When Mother Teresa was trying to convince the local archbishop, Ferdinand Périer of the validity of her calling she ended one of her many letters to him by emphatically reiterating the words that Christ had spoken to her.
“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?” (2)
(I shudder to believe in a God that would ever use such shaming, harsh and unkind words when speaking to someone he loves….
…..just saying)
Impressed not only by her extreme tenacity but also by her profound ‘personal bond’ to Christ Sister Teresa was granted permission to leave her teaching and to go to Calcutta.
In the first half of 1948, she took a basic medical course before launching herself alone onto the streets of Calcutta. She wrote,
“My soul at present is in perfect peace and joy.”(2)
But within two months, shortly after her major triumph of locating a space for her Charity Headquarters, things suddenly changed. Kolodiejchuk found that her letters subsequent to that time where filled with angst and heartache. Mother Teresa was left with this feeling that the Christ that she had felt so close to for the majority of her life, who had sent her on this mission to Culcutta in the first place had suddenly abandoned her.
“What tortures of loneliness,”
she wrote.
“I wonder how long will my heart suffer this?”(2)
While this might have been an understandable initial response to all the death, poverty and disease she was witnessing every single day, this feeling of loneliness, loss and abandonment continued to torment her. A year and a half later her society was growing so rapidly with scores of young women feeling called to join her order that she had to move to bigger headquarters. It seemed as if the more success Mother Teresa experienced the worse she felt.
“The more I want him–the less I am wanted,”
she wrote in 1955. A year later she sounded desolate:
“Such deep longing for God–and … repulsed–empty–no faith–no love–no zeal.
Tell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my 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? (2)
In October 1958 when Pope Pius XII died Mother Teresa prayed to the deceased Pope for proof that God was pleased with the Society. She writes and rejoices about how the strange suffering that she had experienced for the last 10 years suddenly lifted, how the long darkness had finally disappeared. Unfortunately, five weeks later she reported being “in the tunnel” once more. This experience of grief and abandonment that she experienced persisted for five decades until her death in 1997 at the age of 87.
Many of Mother Teresa confidants reported that she had found a way to accept this perceived absence of Christ in her life. She believed that this suffering she experienced was a necessary aspect of her heroic vocation. In feeling this loss and separation from God she was more able to relate and have compassion for those sick and dying peoples that too felt lost, alone and unloved by God.
Had Jesus himself not felt alone and like God had forsaken him on the cross?
Was Christ’s absence simply a gift that enabled her to do great work?
(Or was that simply the justification she needed to help her get through the day?)
What was this abyss of perpetual loneliness and sadness?
Was it simply a spiritual ‘dark night of the soul’ that so many people believed it to be or was this the nightmarish inner world of a scared and lonely inner child trying to come to terms with her own childhood trauma?
Like so many people, had Anjezë youth been driven by this desire to find meaning and purpose in that hope that when she did she would feel valued, loved….enough?
Was it any surprise that no sooner than she finally found her true calling, her true mission that she was inexplicably plunged into this world of darkness?
That she now had to sit with these feelings of still never feeling good enough?
In Mother Teresa’s desperate attempt to eradicate all the suffering in the world, was she unable to find that safe space to acknowledge her own trauma and to heal her own grief and suffering?
It is well known that Mother Teresa requested that her superiors and spiritual counsels, destroy all her letters once they had been read. She so sadly never wanted the world to be privy to any of her pain and suffering of which she was so deeply ashamed. It’s as if by pretending it didn’t exist she thought she was protecting us from the one thing that simply made her human, the one thing that would make her just like us.
Is it any wonder so many people kept her letters?
Perhaps they too felt a little less alone after reading them.
So I realise I haven’t actually published a poem yet! It is coming soon!:-)
But I have been wanting to write about Mother Teresa for a good two years now because something about her story moved me in such a profound way. It’s hard to explain how making space for little Anjezë and all her emotional pain almost gave me permission to start writing about and acknowledging my own.
I was hit by this realisation that I didn’t want to get to the ripe old age of 108
(I am gonna make it you know!)
and still feel bogged down by it. But I think, more than anything, what her story triggered in me was a deep sense of gratitude. Gratitude that I have been lucky enough to find such an amazing therapist who has supported and encouraged me to look at and sift through my own story. To help me understand that my anxiety wasn’t something that just happened over night, in a vacume. It was a slow accumalive build up until my body just said
“Enough! Now YOU need look at this!”
I am so incredibly grateful that I finally chose to listen.
(1) Trotter, D., 2022. Letters reveal Mother Teresa’s doubt about faith. [online] Reuters. Available at: <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-teresa-letters-idUSN2435506020070824> [Accessed 27 July 2022]
(2) van Biema, D. (2022). Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith. Retrieved 6 August 2022, from https://time.com/4126238/mother-teresas-crisis-of-faith/
(3) Roy, A. (2022). Trauma of losing her father that led Mother to Calcutta. Retrieved 6 August 2022, from https://www.telegraphindia.com/my-kolkata/people/trauma-of-losing-her-father-that-led-mother-to-calcutta/cid/1684199
(4) Mother Teresa Facts and Biography. (2022). Retrieved 6 August 2022, from https://study.com/learn/lesson/mother-teresa-facts-biography.html
https://www.franciscanmedia.org/franciscan-spirit-blog/mother-teresa-a-saint-who-conquered-darkness
(5) Alpion, G. (2022). What makes St Teresa of Calcutta an un-convent-ional subject?. Retrieved 6 August 2022, from https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/perspective/mother-teresa.aspx#:~:text=Her%20calling%20emanated%20from%20bereavement,surrogate%20paternal%20authority%20to%20
(6) Did Mother Teresa suffer never meeting her mother again?. (2022). Retrieved 6 August 2022, from http://www.archivioradiovaticana.va/storico/2017/09/09/did_mother_teresa_suffer_never_meeting_her_mother_again%E2%80%8E/en-1335561
(7) Mother Teresa. (2022). Retrieved 8 August 2022, from https://leverageedu.com/blog/mother-teresa/