“There is such terrible darkness within me as if everything is dead. It has been like this more or less since the beginning of the work.” Imagine yourself feeling like you had been called of God to do a Holy Work only to be filled with darkness from the effort. The person quoted above is shockingly Mother Teresa from a recently published book that, against her wishes, exposes her private letters.
Ironically, I have often posed the following question in my workshops, “Did Mother Teresa minister to the poor in India because she was called or because she was trying to prove to her father or mother that she was good enough?”
This new book answers my rhetorical question – she was called and then ego needs took over and it became about whether or not she was good enough. She recounts in her letters that after Pope Pius XII died, she prayed to him for proof that God was pleased with her work. In short she wanted approval.
Those of you familiar with my Lion/Unicorn model of relationships you can indentify Mother Teresa right away. She is a Lion. While Unicorns are seeking safety, Lions seek approval. Where does this come from? When we are children, we all have unmet emotional needs. Unicorns need more safety than they seem to get, while Lions need more approval from parental interaction than they perceive they get. When we grow up, the burden of supplying these emotional needs is transferred to our spouse, pastor, therapist, God, or whoever meets the frame of reference of that parent in our lives. This is a trick of the limbic system in the brain, the monkey brain. It cannot tell the difference between Dad or God or Mom or one's wife. So the burden of emotional fulfillment gets put on someone in our lives who represents that early parental relationship.
So for Mother Teresa, what started as a “call of God” turned into the effort of her ego-mind to fulfill her unmet emotional need for approval. This twist of purpose was without a doubt the source of her experience of internal darkness. Her work was hijacked by her limbic system – that ego-mind. And as we know from scripture, that work is like dirty rags in the side of the Lord. Ironically, the very Lord she sought to serve became the parent from which she also sought approval thereby negating the fulfillment of doing the work with pure motives and innocent perception.
The author of this tell all book argues that the “depth of Mother Teresa’s spiritual suffering increases her saintliness.” No, in fact it increased her unconsciousness. The revelations in Mother Teresa’s letters show that the “wages of sin is death.” In other words, when we don’t get it and allow ego motives to pollute our lives, spiritual death is the result, and darkness ensues.
The lesson of the life of Mother Teresa is that good works don’t make us a saint – awareness does. She was unaware of her ego motives. They took over the work, and suffering resulted. The story of Mother Teresa therefore becomes a cautionary tale and another example of how the “no pain- no gain” philosophy at the center of religion is a blind alley that leads to spiritual death.
Only by becoming aware of the tricks of the ego-mind can we truly inherit the life laid out before us and do the work we are meant to do. It is a life free of hidden motives and agendas, free of the need to prove ourselves worthy.
