Jesus comments on Mother Teresa’s “interior darkness”

Part 1

Kim: Jesus, I have had several people ask about the new book, Come Be My Light, that talks about the “interior darkness” that affected Mother Teresa for almost 50 years. People seem to be shocked that a person who is universally recognized as such a great humanitarian and such a devoutly religious person could have had to struggle with feeling empty, doubting God’s existence and feeling abandoned by God and by you.

It seems difficult for people to grasp how a person of her stature could be afflicted by doubt. Here are some of the questions people have:

• Is such a lengthy dark night experience "normal" on the road to Christhood?  That is, is this something that can be anticipated by most sincere spiritual seekers on the path? 

• Is such a prolonged period of suffering really necessary or is it perhaps her ego that influenced the dark night experience? 

• Could it be she volunteered to have this experience to demonstrate how one could still practice the presence of God in one’s daily life despite the feelings of spiritual emptiness?

• Could it be that the Catholic doctrines of separation from God and guilt influenced this as well? 
  Is it in part karmic?”
  

I know you wanted to comment on this, so I have read the book and simply want to give you the opportunity to comment.

Jesus: I will comment on the issue, but I want to approach it differently than a normal question. I first want you, Kim, to describe what you think about the issue.

Kim: Where do you want me to start?

Jesus: Begin by describing your experience of reading the book.

Kim: Well, I feel I should begin by saying that prior to reading the book, I knew relatively little about Mother Teresa. This doesn’t imply any kind of judgment on my part, I had simply never been intuitively prompted to look into her life. I obviously knew about here great humanitarian achievements and both admired and respected her for that. I have later learned that some detractors seek to cast doubt upon her work and her organization, but I think the Nobel Prize committee is very thorough in researching the people they award the Peace Prize, so it seems to me her work and organization are genuine.

I knew Mother Teresa was a very orthodox Catholic, and for that reason – being that I didn’t grow up in a Catholic culture – I didn’t see her as a particularly spiritual person but as a religious person. To me the difference is that a religious person stays within a particular religion and its doctrines, whereas a spiritual person seeks truth wherever it can be found. I did, however, know that she received the call to start her mission as the result of an inner vision, a locution as it is called, and that didn’t actually sound like an orthodox Catholic since my understanding is that only the Pope is supposed to communicate with God.

So when I heard about the book and her struggles, I wasn’t shocked. I actually thought it was a good sign that perhaps Mother Teresa was more spiritual than I had thought. It sounded like she was much more of a mystic, and to me a mystic is a person who approaches spirituality in a universal way—the meaning of “Catholic” actually being “universal.” So I started reading the book with a sense of positive expectation, hoping it would reveal something about the psychology of spiritual growth. I guess that expectation was fulfilled, although certainly not in the way I had expected.

Normally, I love reading spiritual books and plough right through them. But this book was one of the most difficult books I have ever read. I literally had to force myself to read it, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I knew you wanted to comment on it, I wouldn’t have finished it.

There are several reasons why I found the book difficult to read. One simple one is that the book is extremely repetitive. It contains Mother Teresa’s letters to her confessors, but the problem she had basically remained the same for the entire time, so it is the same questions and statements over and over again. Mother Teresa’s understanding of her problem did not seem to change or be expanded for five decades, and that is almost mind-boggling to me. At the same time, her various confessors were unable to help her, except for one priest who helped her to “love the darkness” and accept that she could do nothing to rise above it.

Another factor is that I thought the book would simply give Mother Teresa’s writings. However, the book was compiled and edited – who knows how much – by a Father Kolodiejchuk who is in charge of her beatification. And it quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t a spiritual book, but a Catholic book. It is not enough to let Mother Teresa’s writings stand on their own, the Father has to introduce every letter, and afterwards he has to analyze it and put it in its "proper" context.

It is quite obvious that the book is carefully crafted to present Mother Teresa’s struggle in the “proper” Catholic context so that the reader will – hopefully – make the proper Catholic conclusion, including seeing Mother Teresa as an even greater saint for having had this interior struggle and still done everything she did for the poor. So the Father’s writings are somewhat repetitive and contradictory, where he has to present every remark she makes as a sign of her sainthood—which gets a bit hollow for a non-Catholic.

However, what really made the book difficult – even painful – to read is that it quickly became obvious to me that Mother Teresa was not the mystic I had hoped for. Instead, she is an extreme example of the kind of people I have been very aware of since childhood, partly because my father was a prime example. These are people who are suffering – spiritually, psychologically – but the suffering is all internal, and it is caused by an inner condition, namely that these people are stuck in a certain world view. And because they cannot – will not – see beyond it, they cannot escape the suffering.

I mean, I have great compassion for these people, and I wish there was a way to help them. As I read the book, I felt great compassion for Mother Teresa. Here is a person who has obviously dedicated her life to God and Jesus – as she sees them – and who is – from a normal perspective – completely selfless in serving the poor. So I really wish she could have gone through life without feeling empty and left by God and you, but instead she suffers for 50 years in a way that seems so intense you just wish she could get over it.

To me this was especially painful because according to my life experience her problem would have been relatively easy to solve. Her suffering was all interior, it was all psychological, whereby I mean that it was all caused by a condition in her mind, and that condition was a specific image of God. This image was partly a result of her upbringing in the Catholic church but also partly due to some ideas that she herself had either defined or accepted from somewhere I think is beyond mainstream Catholic doctrine.

So from my perspective, the situation is quite simple. After having struggled with his problem for some time, the natural reaction would be to say, “I haven’t overcome this with the approach I have taken so far, so let me take a different approach!” I mean, she seems to have sincerely longed to overcome the condition, and if she had not overcome it by telling her Catholic confessors, my approach would have been to recognize that I lacked an understanding of the problem. So I would have sought out that understanding, even if that meant going beyond the mental box of the Catholic church.

Yet Mother Teresa cannot even conceive of doing so, and as a result her condition only deepens. She even reasons herself into thinking that you, Jesus, want here to suffer like this and that by suffering she is fulfilling your thirst for the salvation of souls, almost making it sound like she believes that by her suffering she is “buying” souls for God. At one point a priest makes her accept that she can never overcome her suffering, so she might as well love it, which seems to comfort her but also makes her give up on all attempts to overcome the condition.

To me this is simply nothing but mind-boggling and it is an approach to life that is completely and utterly alien to me. I mean, in your latest dictation, Jesus, you asked how long it would take for people to remove a pebble from their shoe instead of continuing to walks with the pain. To me this is obvious, but apparently not to Mother Teresa.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to put her down. I understand that she is a different type of person than I am, and thus what is easy for me was not easy – or even possible – for her. There are no doubt things she did that I would have found it difficult to do. Nevertheless, you wanted me to describe my experience of reading the book, and this is what I experienced. I literally wanted to shake Mother Teresa and say, “Just try something new instead of continuing to repeat what Einstein called the insanity of doing the same thing while expecting different results!”

So in summary, I was hoping that the book would be of assistance to spiritual seekers by showing how one could overcome this condition of doubt, interior darkness and emptiness, which I know afflicts many sincere people. Yet instead, the book ends without any form of resolution—unless you consider it a resolution that Mother Teresa learned to love the darkness and still carried on her humanitarian work while remaining faithful to the Catholic church which, in my observation, was partly the cause of her condition.

So I think spiritual seekers who read this book and don’t have the teachings of the Ascended Host will feel like they are actually more confused or doubtful than they were before they read it. Unless they can blindly accept the Catholic church as the only road to salvation and thus endure any kind of suffering because they believe it will all be better in heaven—which seems to have been Mother Teresa’s approach.

In other words, what disappointed me the most was that the book has absolutely no resolution whatsoever. Again, unless you consider it a resolution that people should blindly accept the Church and trust that their suffering will buy them a better salvation. And to me, that is actually the hidden message in the book.

It is like the editor is saying, “I know a lot of you Catholics out there have your doubts about the Church and its image of God, but look at this great humanitarian and consider how much more she did than you can ever do. And then look how much she suffered from her interior afflictions. Yet if she could go through such intense suffering without ever questioning the Church, trusting that everything would be better once she got to heaven, then shouldn’t you be able to accept the Church and its doctrines without question?”

I mean, I know I am getting carried away, but am I completely off track, Jesus?

Jesus: No, you have correctly identified one of the hidden messages in the book, a message that has been conveyed by the Church since it began to use the concepts of saints. There are also positive messages from the concept of saints, but this is one of the negative ones in that it pacifies people and directly discourages them from pursuing their personal Christhood.

The fact is that for decades, Catholic Church leaders have used Mother Teresa as a propaganda tool, even in terms of gaining back some of the credibility through her that they lost through the sexual abuse by male priests. This is somewhat of an abuse of Mother Teresa, for seeking to promote the church through the example of a women while being unwilling to give women equal status in the church is hypocrisy.

As you also illustrate, an inescapable part of Christhood is that you are willing to question everything, which includes outer doctrines but also your own inner beliefs and approach to life. If you are not willing to question, how can you ever identify the beam in your own eye? And if you don’t identify it, how can you possibly remove it?

You are also correct that what seems easy for you was impossible for Mother Teresa, but you are not correct in saying that it is because she is a different kind of person than you are. What I mean here is that there is no fundamental difference between one person and another in that all have the potential to overcome their mental box and move closer to Christhood—which is a condition where you have left behind ALL mental boxes.

So all have the potential to shift their approach to life and adopt an approach that leads to growth rather than stillstand—the stillstand that will inevitably cause inner suffering because you are fighting against the River of Life itself. And in order to do that, you have to constantly resist the forward movement, the self-transcendence, that IS life. This causes constant strain that you experience as suffering of various kinds.

Kim, I now want you to comment on what you see as the inner or underlying cause of Mother Teresa’s condition.

Kim: Well, that was something I simply couldn’t understand as I read the first part of the book, but towards the end, I think I saw it more clearly—which shows the value of reading the whole thing even though it was difficult.

Jesus: Stop feeling sorry for yourself; it is part of your job to read things like this.

Kim: Jesus, are you telling me to love my suffering :)?

Jesus: No, I am telling you to change your approach so you don’t suffer. I appreciate that you are being humorous here, but the fact is that YOU made it difficult for yourself to read the book because you have an attachment to helping the kind of people who are stuck in the mindset you clearly see. And when you feel you can’t help them, you want to withdraw instead of feeling the pain of seeing them stuck.

So what you need to do personally, Kim, is to overcome any attachment to helping such people. It helps neither them nor you that you feel pain from seeing them stuck when – in reality – they are stuck because they are exercising their free will their way. You are not stuck because you are exercising your free will your way, which means you need to respect both their choices and your own choices so you feel no attachment and no pain because others make choices that cause them pain. God has given them free will, and if they make the kind of choices that get them stuck, why should you feel frustrated about that—unless you somehow feel responsible for them, which is inconsistent with your understanding of and respect for free will.

Do you see what I am saying here? You are in a position as a spiritual teacher, and as such it is essential for you NOT to feel attached to “saving” people. Your job is to bring forth spiritual teachings and make them as easy to understand as possible—and then you leave it up to people what they do with it. If you have a desire to “shake” people awake, you are not content to let the law of free will work itself out one way or another.

And that is the same kind of mindset that you – correctly – identified in Mother Teresa. In her case it took the form of the belief that her suffering could “buy” souls for me, but in your case it has taken the form of wanting to awaken people who are stuck. In any case, it is basing your own peace of mind on the reactions of other people – thinking you have to save them even if they won’t change – which is unnecessary and counter-productive for any spiritual seeker.

Many others among the top ten percent of the most spiritually aware people are blinded by other aspects of this mentality, and I am using Mother Teresa’s example partly to make all of you aware that this subtle consciousness simply has to go! I want all of you to be free to BE who you are, and you cannot be who you are if you are in any way attached to saving other people. For you will then believe that you have to adapt yourself to them instead of being who you are!

The ONLY road to salvation is for each person to be the unique individual that he or she was created to be. Thus, you must BE and let be. In fact, ONLY by being yourself can you help other people, for it is in daring to express your spiritual identity in the material realm that you can inspire others – through example not talk – to be who they are! I know I talked a lot during my mission, but I also walked my talk by being who I AM. I want all of YOU to be who YOU are.

Kim, now go back to my question.

Kim: Jesus, thank you for this revelation, your Living Truth has made me free to see and surrender this. I will be very alert to any re-occurrence of this consciousness in my being!

What I see about the underlying cause of Mother Teresa’s condition is that she thought she had surrendered completely to God, but in reality she had not. Or I might say that she had surrendered to God as she saw him. She had surrendered to her image of God, but the real God is beyond ANY image, so we have to continually surrender. We must be in a state of perpetual surrender as long as we are on Earth, so that we eventually surrender EVERY subtle aspect of our image of God and our sense of separation from God.

Obviously, as you just pointed out, there was something I had not surrendered, yet that was simply because I had not seen it. This actually happens on an almost daily basis—that I see something in my psychology or world view that I need to let go of because it keeps me separated from God. So it has become a way of life for me to be continually on the look-out for what I need to surrender next. Obviously, in order to see what we need to surrender, we need to be constantly expanding our understanding, which, of course, is were it is invaluable to have a teacher who is beyond duality. I think this is a big part of Mother Teresa’s problem.

It seems to me that she was not actually looking for a higher understanding with the open mind of a child because she could not even conceive of looking beyond Catholic doctrines. Her only chance of understanding her condition was to ask her spiritual advisors, and they, of course, would not look beyond doctrine either, so it became a catch-22 for her. There was nothing in Catholic doctrine that could help her understand her condition, and thus she could not overcome it. As a result she endured the most intense suffering for 50 years, while it could all have been alleviated by a turn of the dial of consciousness.

That is why I say that Mother Teresa was not actually a mystic. I see a mystic as a person who has a truly universal approach to God and spirituality, meaning that if we don’t find understanding in a particular religion, we look beyond it. I think it is a misnomer to talk about Catholic mystics, such as Saint John of the Cross. I think all true mystics – while sometimes placing themselves in the context of a particular religion – look far beyond the outer religion. They apply what you called the “key of Knowledge” and they worship God in “Spirit and in Truth.” And because Mother Teresa could not make that leap, she remained stuck.

I think her condition actually began when she – at the age of 32 – made a private vow, “I made a vow to God, binding under [pain of] mortal sin, to give God anything He may ask, ‘Not to refuse Him anything.’” In her letters she talks many times about surrendering herself fully to God and giving her all to Jesus. Based on this, I believe she thought she had actually surrendered herself fully to God, which she also says several times.

Yet there are also a number of instances where she describes how difficult for her it is to do something. For example, in the early part of her ministry, she is asked to travel to the U.S to speak in three cities. She obviously doesn’t want to go, yet she feels that God wants her to go. Despite the fact that she feels God wants her to do this, and the fact that she had vowed not to refuse God anything, she still resists going and says it was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Likewise, she says several times that God wanted her to speak to her confessors about her darkness, yet is is very hard for her to do so, even to the point where she is often unable to say anything—which I believe is a subconscious reaction of simply not wanting to speak.

So to me it seems that if she had fully surrendered to God, it should not have been hard for her to do what she believed God wanted her to do. She should simply have been flowing wherever her mission took her, being happy to fulfill God’s desires. Instead, she seems to resist many aspects of her mission, especially anything to do with appearing in public. She seems to continually struggle with doing what she feels God wants her to do, and she even asks her confessors to pray for her that Jesus will not allow her to refuse him anything—which indicates that she wants you to make decisions for her instead of taking responsibility for her own choices.

The fact that she struggled so much shows me that she had not actually surrendered to God—or at least that there was something she had not surrendered. It seems to me that while she had said that she surrendered herself to God, she was still holding on to certain mental images and expectations for how her life and mission should unfold. She was in a very subtle way putting an image upon what it meant to live a life for God, and when her expectations were not fulfilled, she had an inner conflict about doing what she felt God wanted her to do.

I know from my own life that whenever I struggle or find something difficult, it is because there is something I have not surrendered. And once I see what I need to surrender and let it go, the difficulty simply disappears and everything falls into place—both inside and outside of me.

So I believe firmly that the cause of all suffering is a lack of surrender, which leads me to conclude that Mother Teresa had not fully surrendered to God. And this is the real cause of her suffering.

One example of this is that after she received the call to her mission, she had to get the permission of her superiors. She was obviously very anxious to get started on her mission, but her superiors put her through – and wisely so, I think – quite a test of patience and surrender. Yet my point is that on one hand she was convinced that this was God’s call yet on the other she was equally convinced that the church was God’s church. She even declares that if her superiors in the church tells her to do so, she is willing to give up the call.

Yet regardless, she keeps sending them letters trying to convince them to approve her mission, and in some of these letters, she is – in my opinion – outright manipulative in trying to get them to do what she thinks God wants them to do. Again, this to me shows a conflict in her:

• If she really had surrendered herself completely to God and if she really was convinced that this was God’s call, why would she need the permission of her superiors? If the Church had not approved her mission, she could have started her mission outside the Church. In fact, I would argue that part of the path to Christhood is whether we will follow our inner directions or an outer rule (providing that we really know that our directions are genuine and not ego-based).

• On the other hand, if she really was convinced that the Church is God’s church and that her superiors represent the Lord to her (as she says), then why was she not at peace about letting them make the final decision? Why did she feel a need to push so hard to get her vision fulfilled instead of trusting that the Church would come up with what was really God’s will and do so on God’s timetable?

After reading these things, it started to occur to me that Mother Teresa seems to be a rather conflicted personality, and it is almost as if there were two persons here. Throughout the book she talks about her interior emptiness and feeling left behind and unwanted by God. For example, she says, “If only you knew what goes on within my heart. Sometimes the pain is so great that I feel as if everything will break.” Yet at another point she says, “In spite of everything that has happened these last years, there has always been perfect peace and joy in my heart.” This doesn’t sound like the same person.

So my conclusion is that there are two options I see:

• Mother Teresa was the most deeply conflicted and divided person I have yet come across. She suffered from multiple personality disorder, Schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. She was literally two different and opposite – even warring – personalities in the same body. This would make her a deeply divided soul, possibly a soul that had rebelled against God a very long time ago.

• Mother Teresa is a very mature being who volunteered to take on the fallen state of consciousness in order to help resolve it and make it easier for others to rise above it. In other words, she took on a certain state of consciousness and in doing so her outer personality was affected by it, which is what created her inner conflict and suffering. I have to say though, that if this is the case, she doesn’t seem to have overcome what she took on but remained burdened by it to her death.

In the first instance, the conflict would go to the core of her being, in the second it would be a covering and underneath it is her real being. I obviously can’t resolve which one is correct, so I am hoping you will comment on this.

Jesus: Which option do you see as most likely?

Kim: I would have to say the second one because I do sense her deep sincerity. I also see that she was willing to sacrifice everything on the outer to serve God and I don’t think a deeply divided being would have been willing to make the outer sacrifices she made or would have so obviously been fighting to stay humble despite her many public accolades.

Jesus: You are correct in that Mother Teresa is a mature lifestream that did volunteer to take on a certain state of consciousness. That is why – as I have stated before – she will not have to return to embodiment. However, she will have to go through some healing in order to free herself from the effects of the consciousness she took on. She also needs healing from her interior darkness, a condition that left scars in her being.

In fact, one of my reasons for wanting to discuss her darkness is to give those who have a reverence for Mother Teresa an opportunity to understand what she took on, so that they might realize that they have also taken on this consciousness and that Mother Teresa would love to see them actually overcome it so the planet can move forward. Her desire was to help the planet move forward and overcome this consciousness, so spiritual people could be free of the dark cloud that has been hanging over this planet for far too long.

I know that for people who are new to the teachings on this website, this might require some contemplation because it is very easy to look at Mother Teresa in her Catholic context. Yet in her higher being she simply took on this outer clothing out of a universal desire to transform this state of consciousness – this particular approach to God – from within.

Thus, in her higher being Mother Teresa is NOT a Catholic as all of us in the spiritual realm have transcended the labels you find on Earth. As I have said before, you only get to heaven by transcending the graven images and mental boxes that seem so important to human beings. If you have earthly attachments, they will pull you back to Earth and you cannot permanently leave this planet behind—as you do when you ascend.

Read Part 2.

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Copyright © 2007 by Kim Michaels