Virgin
From a Letter sent to Rev. Joseph Neuner
Memorial of Saint Teresa of Calcutta
In Loreto, Father, I was very happy—I think the happiest nun. Then the call came. Our Lord asked directly; the voice was clear and full of conviction. Again and again he asked in 1946. I knew it was he. Fear and terrible feelings were in me, fear lest I was deceived. But as I have always lived in obedience, I put the whole thing before my spiritual father, hoping the whole time that he would say it was all the devil’s deception, but no. Like the voice, he said: "It is Jesus who is asking you." And then you know how it all worked out. My Superiors sent me to Asansol in 1947 and there, it was as if Our Lord just gave himself to me, to the full. The sweetness and consolation and union of those six months passed but too soon. And then the work started, in December 1948.
Now, Father, since 1949 or 1950 there has been this terrible sense of loss, this untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God—which gives me that pain deep down in my heart. The darkness is such that I really do not see, neither with my mind nor with my reason. The place of God in my soul is blank. There is no God in me. When the pain of longing is so great I just long and long for God; and then it is that I feel he does not want me, he is not there. Heaven, souls… why, these are just words which mean nothing to me. My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls—to go where? Why all this? Where is the soul in my very being? God does not want me. Sometimes I just hear my own heart cry out "My God," and nothing else comes. The torture and pain I can’t explain. From my childhood I have had a most tender love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, but this too has gone. I feel nothing before Jesus, and yet I would not miss Holy Communion for anything.
You see, Father, the contradiction in my life. I long for God—I want to love him, to love him much, to live only for love of him, to love only—and yet there is nothing but pain, longing, and no love. Years back, about seventeen years now, I wanted to give God something very beautiful. I bound myself under pain of mortal sin not to refuse him anything. Since then I have kept this promise, and when sometimes the darkness is very dark and I am on the verge of saying "No" to God, the thought of that promise pulls me up.
I want only God in my life. "The work" is really and solely his. He asked, he told me what to do. He guided every step, directs every movement I take, puts the words in my mouth, makes me teach the Sisters the way. All that and everything in me is he. This is why when the world praises me, it really does not touch me – not even the surface of my soul. About the work I am convinced it is all he.
Before, I could spend hours before our Lord—loving him, talking to him—and now, not even meditation goes properly, nothing but "My God." Even that sometimes does not come. Yet deep down somewhere in my heart that longing for God keeps breaking through the darkness. When outside, in the work or meeting people, there is a presence of somebody living very close, in my very self. I don’t know what this is but very often, even every day, that love in me for God grows more real. I find myself telling Jesus unconsciously most strange tokens of love.
Father, I have opened my heart to you. Teach me to love God, teach me to love him much. I am not learned; I don’t know many things about the things of God. I want to love God as and what he is to me: "My Father."
My heart and soul and body belong only to God—that he has thrown away as unwanted the child of his Love. And to this, Father, I have made that resolution in this retreat: To be at his disposal. Let him do with me whatever he wants, as he wants, for as long as he wants. If my darkness is light to some soul—even if it be nothing to nobody—I am perfectly happy to be God’s flower of the field.
Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen
