Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light - The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta by Mother Teresa Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $12.80 You Save: $10.15 (44%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $10.94 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light - The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta
Book Review: A Walking Prayer Among the Poor
Summary: 5 Stars
Brilliant, brilliant editing by Father Kolodiejchuk who painstakingly sifts through bushels and bushels of personal letters written by Mother Teresa to the great clerics of India since 1946. No author to date has better distilled Mother Teresa's essence and interior life than Kolodiejchuk, the current Director of the Mother Teresa Center and the Postulator for her canonization. This book is nothing less than breathtaking and well worth Kolodiejchuk's journey through this Saint's holy, passionate, miraculous, yet excruciatingly painful walk with Jesus. Kolodiejchuk insightfully shapes the life of Mother Teresa as if she were a crucible of gold being fired and shaped by the love of Jesus. First ecstasy, then unrelenting torment, and then her final transformation into this flame of love that the world could not get enough of! Alas, Mother Teresa, you will continue "to light the light of those in darkness on earth."
Today, September 10, is the anniversary of Christ's miraculous call to Mother Teresa in 1946, pleading, "Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor. Come, be My light." "Will thou refuse?" How could Mother Teresa refuse? For in 1942, she had made a personal, secret vow to Jesus, "Ask Jesus not to allow me to refuse Him anything, however small, I [would] rather die -- a "folly of love," according to Kolodiejchuk, that ultimately came to haunt Mother Teresa throughout her painful, yet joyous life.
To unlock the mystery of this book, the reader must first view the relationship of Jesus and Mother Teresa within the framework of Matthew's Gospel 25:45, as alluded to by Kolodiejchuk, where Jesus admonishes, "Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me." The least being the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the naked, the ill, the prisoners -- Mother Teresa's Calvary, a prayer of love walking among the poor. Secondly, the reader must analyze Mother Teresa's love of Jesus, as expressed through the last Words of Jesus on the Cross of Calvary: "[W]hy have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46) and "I thirst" (John 19:28), as well as Psalm 22, the Prayer of an Innocent Person -- the life and blood of Mother Teresa's letters to the bishops and priests of India.
When Mother Teresa made her private vow to Jesus, she ennunciated, "I wanted to give God something very beautiful" and "without reserve," "to drink the chalice to the last drop." Unfortunately, the last drop was Christ's abandonment of Mother Teresa (through His silence) during His mission with her on earth, incarnating within Mother Theresa His words from the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me." (Matt. 27:46) In her early years, at the time Mother Teresa made her vow to drink the chalice to the last drop, she did not fully appreciate the significance of what she had asked from Jesus; however, later in life, she recognized that God had granted her this suffering as a gift, and that is why she kept the faith and continued onward with the poor, despite feeling totally abandoned by God. Mother Teresa truly walked the plight of Calvary, completely obedient, as she ministered to the lepers of Calcutta. Ironically, it is this feeling of total abandonment by God that enabled Mother Teresa to empathize with the poorest of the poor, and that is why God chose her to be his light. Had Mother Teresa not requested to be abandoned by her lover, God, she would have never comprehended the absolute suffering of the poor.
After finishing the book "Come Be My Light," I recognized that Christ was actually living inside Mother Teresa. Her very steps were those of Christ. I do not believe Mother Teresa suspected that she had been consumed by the love of Jesus. In essence, she was oblivous to her personification of God's thirst. The testament to this miracle occurs when a priest in Rome, having never met Mother Teresa, heard a strange voice coming from a crucifix, commanding him to relay the following message to Mother Teresa: "Tell Mother Teresa: I thirst." Upon her receiving a letter from this priest about his uncanny experience, Mother Teresa grapsed the significance of these words (the last words of Jesus on the cross in the Gospel of John). These Words were the secret Words that had tormented Mother Teresa for over 40 years, coming from a messenger to confirm the miracle of her purpose: to quench God's inifinite thirst to love and be loved.
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: The Life of a Mystic
Summary: 5 Stars
If you've listened to the media reports about this book, you would be led to believe that Mother Teresa was an aetheist, who continued doing good works in God's name, nonetheless. Yet after picking the book up and actually reading it, nothing could be further from the truth. What this book does do, is give us an even greater insight into the inspiration--the "call within a call," that Mother Teresa experienced early in her mid-30's which ultimately led her to leaving a religious community, that ran a private school, to form a new religious community made up of Indian sisters whose mission it would be to serve the poor in a radical fashion.
Who called Mother Teresa?
God.
The voice that would be silent later in her life, (what the media reports), spoke to her over the course of a year. Beginning on September 10th 1946 she began to hear the voice of Jesus giving her explicit directions on forming a community of sisters made up of women from India who He wanted to serve the poor in His name. He named this new community the Missionaries of Charity.
The "voice" of Jesus pleaded with her over and over throughout this year "Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor, Come, be My light," from whence the title of the book comes. One could even say that this book is titled by Jesus Himself.
This mission entrusted to her was deeply related to a vision, one presumes of Jesus on the Cross crying out "I thirst" and the entire spirituality of Mother Teresa is immersed in this event. Recognizing Jesus in the faces of the outcasts (similiar to the crucified Christ) and her union with the crucified Jesus also explains the later absence of feeling and tangible presence of God similar to what Jesus experienced on the cross "My God, my God, why has thou abandoned me."
Mother Teresa's later experiences, like many mystics before her, can only be understood by reading the works of those who have written about the Spiritual path, most notably in this country Father Benedict Groeschel in his Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development (Spiritual Passages, Paper)and his recently released popular presentation Questions and Answers About Your Journey to God, even though both of these books are accessible to Catholics and non-Catholics, some Protestants might find the work of Evelyn Underhill, a Protestant herself,Mysticism more to their liking.
This book provides a rare peak into the life of a modern saint. From the early supernatural phenomena to the popular acclaim in later life, Come Be My Light can help everyone to be a better follower of Christ.
I am the author of The How-To Book of the Mass: Everything You Need to Know but No One Ever Taught You, The Church's Most Powerful NovenasandA Pocket Guide to Confession
Book Review: When spiritual doubts darken the mind
Summary: 4 Stars
Reading this book, especially some of the letters Sister Teresa wrote to Archbishop Perier and the Rev. Joseph Neuner and Bishop William Curlin, is a truly shocking experience. (Perier was the Archbishop who secured for Sister Teresa permission to start her own Order, Missionaries of Charity.) The letters ring like the dissonant sounds of a leaden bell, now heard around the world.
The reason we are now able to read about Sister Teresa's (she was called Mother Teresa much later) innermost thoughts and feelings about Christ, and her attempts to communion with Christ, is that she was literally tongue-tied and unable to speak to her confessor about the spiritual darkness and mental anguish she felt at times. So she was advised to confess her thoughts in writing. She wrote down her thoughts in the form of letters. She wished and hoped that the letters would be eventually destroyed someday. But her request to the Rev. Picachy that her letters be destroyed was denied, and the Church ordered that the letters be preserved.
"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'," she wrote to the Rev. Perier in March 1953. She writes to him about the smile she often had on her face, "The smile is a mask or a cloak that covers everything."
How can a reader digest these painful lines? "When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven -- there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. -- I am told God loves me -- and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." And also the famous quote, by now displayed in thousands of articles about the book round the globe: "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 .." She does not feel God's presence either in her heart or in the Eucharist, but finds only profound darkness.
Reading this book raises some interesting questions: Were there two Mother Teresas? One who always smiled in public and the other who was tormented by anguish and spiritual doubts? One Teresa doubting the existence of God and heaven, and the other speaking of God's abundant and unbounded love the very next day? And, finally, this interesting question: Now that the book is published, would it interfere in any way the process of canonization of Mother Teresa into Saint Teresa?
This is an engrossing, highly readable, but truly baffling book.
Book Review: The words of a living saint
Summary: 5 Stars
Released on the 10-year anniversary of the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta's death, this book paints a new picture of the harrowing nun. "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light" includes insightful letters, writings and the wit and wisdom of Mother Teresa. She was loved the world over for her selflessness and ability to help the "poorest of the poor." But, for the first time her faith and belief system is questioned. Not by an author or an unscrupulous editor looking to cash in on the Sister's good name. But by the Blessed Teresa, herself. I recommend this book to anyone that has a fascination wish this fascinating lady. Mother Teresa, you are much loved and missed.