Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light - The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta by Mother Teresa Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light - The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta
Book Review: A Beautiful Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is an excellent spiritual classic. It delves into Mother Teresa inner spiritual life and opens up a wealth of treasures. I highly recommend it.Book Review: A Crisis of Faith
Summary: 5 Stars
I was moved by this book. I realize that it was something Mother Teresa did not want the public to see, but I am blessed and saddened by it. I run into so many people who think God is speaking to them...usually about me and what I should be doing, so it is refreshing to find someone as devout as Mother Teresa admit that she lived "the dark night of the soul" all too frequently. The book helped me feel more amazed at her struggle and her work.Book Review: A Deeper Testimony to God's Grace on her
Summary: 5 Stars
Her insightful letters only help us to see even more brighter and clearer that Jesus is the true light of the world. A good read!!!Crossing the Red SeaBook Review: A Light Still Shining
Summary: 4 Stars
I did not have to get very far into this book to feel deeply touched by Mother Teresa's love of people and God. She truly was the loving bride of Jesus that she sought to be. Her writings reveal a passion, "a thirst," for God that I sincerely admire. Yet, in reading this I can understand why she never wanted these writings made public. She felt such anguish as she wrestled with darkness. It seems that she saw it as her malady and I know from experience that it is not easy to share our deepest wounds for fear of them distracting from the real point or having them misunderstood.
All in all, I believe this is a wonderful collection of her writings. However, I could have done without much of the commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk as he strung together her writings. I understand and appreciate that his agenda is to make her as saintly as possible as he is pushing vehemently for her canonization. If I where his bishop, he would deserve overtime pay. However, I am not. I am a person of faith that finds strength in people's journeys of faith. I did not need and at times did not appreciate the spin he was trying to put on her words. I believe her words stood beautifully on their own with no commentary.
Book Review: A Sad Story of a Wasted Life
Summary: 4 Stars
I have been absolutely flummoxed by reading this book.
Until I read it, I thought that Mother Teresa was a noble person who had devoted her life to helping the poor as a result of concern for their lives. What comes out instead is that she was an old-fashioned missionary who was out to get "souls for Jesus" and that the so-called charity was simply a way to worm her way into the lives of the really poor. She waxes eloquently about how the poor children are stained by "sin", which can only mean the medieval idea that they are damned by original sin until they accept Christ. In effect, she didn't see the poor as individual human beings with their own autonomy and spiritual worth, but rather as "soul scalps" to be collected for Jesus. I couldn't help be think that she was setting out to be some sort of weird Catholic vampire who haunted the slums of Calcutta to feed on the poor.
Another thing that was creepy was the extreme masochism of the woman. One of the phrases that sticks in my head is that her nuns should be "victims of love" for Christ. The voice of "Christ" that she related in her letters struck me as being an abusive man. The way he leaned on her and tried to "guilt" her into giving up everything for her vocation was eerily like the sort of thing abusers do to their victims. I couldn't help but think that a poor woman was being obsessed with her maternal instincts and projecting them onto Jesus. I was not impressed with her spiritual advisers, either. The only thing that they seemed concerned about was whether or not her visions and voices supported Catholic orthodoxy---not whether or not they were in fact wholesome for her psyche.
I've spent most of my life studying religious experience and am myself live the life of a religious hermit, so I take these sorts of life experiences very seriously. I am saddened by the way so many religious authorities are saying that this book shows some sort of exemplary life. (The idea that her despair was simply a long "dark night of the soul" is simply absurd. The dark night is meant to be a period of desolation followed by consolation---not some sort of life work. Most mystical traditions would instead suggest that her barren interior life was the fruit of the bizarre theology she had built her life around.)
It is a good book to read, but as a cautionary tale, not as a role model to follow.