Dr Gëzim Alpion, who is based in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, writes how Mother Teresa's inability to come to terms with her father's poisoning by Slavic nationalists when she was nine in 1919, her brother's association with Benito Mussolini's Fascist army, and her concern about the safety of her mother and sister in communist Albania post 1945 explain why she never spoke about her private life and family.

Alpion suggests Mother Teresa's ‘dark night of the soul' determined all her decisions, including entering the religious life, choosing India as her destination, leaving the Loreto order, setting up her Missionaries of Charity congregation, and expanding her work outside of India from 1967 onwards.

To illustrate the last point, Alpion claims that her projects in Australia in 1969 began as another desperate attempt to get rid of her spiritual desolation at a time when she was realising that this was an incurable condition.

Dr Gëzim Alpion says: "Mother Teresa entered the religious life and chose India as her destination not simply or primarily to serve the poor but in the hope that, through them, she would discover the elusive God as well as to get rid of her dark night of the soul.

Her devotion to the poor was unwavering and genuine to the end.

The poor, the members of her religious congregation, and her volunteers, however, were ‘tools' that she employed to cleanse her own ‘dark night of the soul'."

"Contrary to the claims made by her hagiographers, Mother Teresa's spiritual aridity did not begin in the wake of the foundation of her congregation in 1950 but during 1919 to 1922 by which time she lost her father and eight close relatives.

The ever presence of death in her early years had a lifelong traumatic impact on her spirituality and relationship with family members, her nation and especially vulnerable people. Mother Teresa was never cured of her doubts about God; nonetheless, she always held sacred the dignity of every human being."

Some of these findings are included in Alpion's latest study titled ‘Why are modern celebrity icons absent in celebrity studies?', which has just been published in Celebrity Studies Journal (Routledge). Alpion finds the sidelining of spiritual personalities in celebrity studies a bizarre situation given that the proliferation and ubiquity of celebrity culture have led some scholars to approach this modern phenomenon as a form of religion as well as because, like everything else, religion has been affected by celebrity culture.

In this study Alpion announces for the first time the existence of a hitherto unknown member of Mother Teresa's family in Australia, a first cousin who was adopted by the nun's mother as an orphan at the age of six, something he initially discovered during a visit to Melbourne in 2011.

Since then Alpion has been using the information from this and other new sources to write the study, provisionally titled Rooting Mother Teresa: The Saint and Her Nation, a monograph which will be published by the end of 2019. Next year, Alpion will complete a book about Mother Teresa's forgotten sister in Australia.

In his acclaimed 2007 monograph Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? Alpion argued for the first time that her spirituality and ministry should be explored in the context of the lifelong impact of her ethnic and familial background, a theme that is central to his aforementioned work in progress.

Mother Teresa, also known in the Roman Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was the Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary, born in Skopje (now the capital of Macedonia) in 1910, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. After living in Macedonia for eighteen years she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life until she died in 1997.

Sources

• First published in Matters India
• Republished with permission.
• Image: Franciscian Media

But the priest charged with overseeing her path to sainthood said that for him, one thing stands out above all the rest: her experience of spiritual darkness and what she described as feeling totally abandoned by God for the majority of her life.

"The single most heroic thing is exactly her darkness. That pure living, that pure, naked faith," Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator for Mother Teresa's canonization cause, told CNA in an interview.

Fr. Kolodiejchuk is a priest of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers, founded by Mother Teresa in 1989.

By undergoing the depth and duration of the desolation she experienced and doing everything that she did for others in spite of it, "that's really very heroic," he said.

Pope Francis recently approved the second and last miracle needed in order to declare Mother Teresa a saint, and has set the date of her canonization for Sept. 4, 2016 - the day before her feast day.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu Aug. 26, 1910 in Skopje, in what is now Macedonia, Mother Teresa joined the Sisters of Loretto at the age of 17, but later left after she felt what she called "an order" from God to leave the convent and to live among the poor.

She went on to found several communities of both active and contemplative Missionaries of Charity, which include religious sisters, brothers, and priests.

The first community of active sisters was founded in 1950. An order of active brothers was founded nearly 20 years later in 1968. Then two contemplative orders came, one of women (in 1976) and one of men (in 1979). Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: Fox 11

After hearing the "call within a call", Teresa only heard the voice of God once more before her death. She experienced what St John of the Cross described as the "dark night of the soul". She wrote frequently about loneliness, not hearing from God, fear of hypocrisy and doubts.

In one of the letters published after her death, she wrote: "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 men - when the pain of longing is so great - I just long and long for God... The torture and pain I can't explain."

It is tempting to ignore this side of Mother Teresa, focusing instead on her selfless service of the poor and the joy with which it seemed she lived.

But to do so would be a mistake.

We naturally shy away from the harsher realities of following Jesus, not wanting to examine them too closely, unless we - ourselves - get infected. We want the Christianity that brings joy and laughter, not emptiness and pain. Yet, to refuse to engage with the reality that we will have times of being in the wilderness is dangerous.

Why?

There will be times of wilderness, whether we like it or not. We have all been there, or will be there, when we pray to God, earnestly seeking to hear from him and we get nothing. The heavens are silent.

These times might not last 50 years, but they are an inevitable part of the Christian journey.

The Bible tells the story of a man name Job, who was well acquainted with this silence. In his pain, he cried out to God, yet these cries were answered with a deafening silence for 37 chapters. But the story does not end there. He chose to hope in the Lord, despite the circumstances, and the Lord was faithful. Continue reading

• Florence Taylor is a Junior Staff Writer for Christian Today.