Up the Down Staircase and Mother Teresa

I met Mother Teresa in 1973 in Yemen where we lived and taught and was impressed then by the simple beauty of her spirit. I was her driver for a number of days while she visited the mission in that country. In the latest edition of TIMES Magazine (Sept. 3, 2007), the now famous “saint” is the cover story,” The Secret Life of Mother Teresa,” telling of her hidden life of inner darkness and despair. Mother Teresa apparently walked “up the down staircase” in two directions at once. In the outer world she was becoming famous as a modern-day 20th century saint. In her inner world she struggled to the end of her life with a sense of the absence of the divine Presence of Christ except for a brief five week period.

What are we to make of her experience? No one can ever adequately (judge) assess another’s inner experience, but we can perhaps learn something crucial for our own by deeply listening to what they experienced. In her seminal work Comfortable With Uncertainty Pema Chödrön speaks eloquently of the same experience and points to the invitation we are given in spiritual experience to step down into the dark experience of humanity so that we might taste deeply of all that human beings know of that depth. The way down into that immanent darkness is somehow the way “up” into transcendence. This is the paradox of kenosiswhich St. Paul describes in his letter to the Philippians. Yeshua takes the same pathway of “abandonment,” and yet in the end such a pathway becomes the means for experiencing transcendent reality. Inevitably this is the “sign of the cross” which stands at the heart of all Christian understanding. We are asked to walk this path, much to the objection of our egoic sense of what is right.