Jesus Wept

When Faith and Depression Meet

Barbara C. Crafton, Barbara C. Crafton

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781506454559
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506454566
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Religion

Jesus Wept, Barbara C. Crafton's best-selling and brilliant reflection on faith and depression, is now released in its tenth-anniversary edition, complete with a new foreword by the author, who reflects on the choice she made ten years ago to break the silence and speak openly about her own experience with depression. "I was determined to speak freely about it" she writes. "Many, probably most, of my clergy confreres were - and remain - unwilling to invite such a stigma to take up permanent residence in their resumes. But there are some who know the isolation and despair into which depression can drag a person, and they might benefit from knowing that someone whose whole life has been given to God also knows these things. If that is the case, it's well worth the stigma."

Like all human experience, no two courses of depression and healing are the same. Religious belief can make depression easier, but it can also make it harder. It calls our beliefs about ourselves and about God's presence in our lives into painful question. Barbara Crafton's beautiful and candid book addresses these questions head on, reminding her readers that God does not ordain our suffering but instead meets us in our darkest days to compassionately call us toward the light.

8

Sorrowful Mysteries

A man in the Port Authority approached me with a Bible in one hand and a stack of cards in the other. Good morning, Sister, he said, and handed me one of the cards. I was hurrying for the shuttle to Grand Central, though, so I stuffed it in my purse without looking at it. I forgot all about it until it was time to rummage for my ticket to Westchester and there it was.

Do not end up like Mother Teresa! it said, and there was a picture of her in the familiar habit of her Missionaries of Charity. She looked terrible, thin and anxious, a wraith; she looked like the Spirit of Christmas Past. Come Be My Light, a collection of her private letters, had just been published, and it had made a bit of a splash. Much of what the letters revealed was not a surprise: the story of her determination to begin a new religious order in the slums of Calcutta, her selflessness, her great humility. But the tabloids had fastened on the startling fact that the Saint of Calcutta had had no personal experience of the love of God for the last forty years of her life. Her private sorrow was splashed across their pages as if she had been caught in flagrante. The implication was that she was a hypocrite. This was certainly the belief of militant atheist Christopher Hitchens, the most erudite of Mother Teresa’s detractors: “The Church should have had the elementary decency to let the earth lie lightly on this troubled and miserable lady, and not to invoke her long anguish to recruit the credulous to a blind faith in which she herself long ceased to believe.”^[1]

One thinks of most hypocrites, though, as being a bit more jubilant about their successful scams than Mother Teresa seems to have been about her life.

I just long and long for God — and then it is that I feel — He does not want me — He is not there — God does not want me —

Please pray 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” [Mother Teresa’s term for the founding of her Missionaries of Charity]….

Please pray for me, that it may please God to lift this darkness from my soul for only a few days. For sometimes the agony of desolation is so great and at the same time the longing for the Absent One so deep, that the only prayer which I can still say is — Sacred Heart of Jesus I trust in thee — I will satiate Thy thirst for souls.^[2]

The rest of the card the man in the Port Authority handed me made it clear that it was, in fact, advertising another book — his own — and that it was an anti-Catholic treatise. Mother Teresa’s main problem was that she was Catholic. What would have helped, I discovered upon visiting his Web site, would have been for Mother Teresa to become a member of his church instead. Her inner sorrow seemed proof to him that she was on the wrong theological track. As he put it, Mother Teresa “did not know God.”

As I rode the train and read the card, I leapt to her defense. The woman gives up everything sweet and easy in life to live and work among the poor for forty years and more, and we condemn her because she doesn’t feel the way we imagine she should? Who says that being a person of faith means you can never be sad? Never be sick at heart? As always, I had a hidden agenda: Mother Teresa and I, it seemed, had something in common. The crudely designed card in my hand disparaged her, and I felt disparaged.

The letters in Come Be My Light went back decades. There were excerpts of letters from the earliest years of Mother Teresa’s vocation, in which she wrote excitedly of herself as Jesus’“little spouse,” as giddy with happiness as any new bride. But the intimacy of her walk with God dried up as she went further in her vocation, and vanished altogether as her work of service in the Calcutta slums was established and grew. As she grew more and more famous — lauded as a living saint, consulted as an oracle, an icon of compassionate service revered by popes and presidents the world over — her inner life grew steadily lonelier. Sometimes she would just sit with her spiritual director in silence, unable to speak at all.

She struggled to understand. She wrote to confessor after confessor of her great interior darkness, her constant thirst for the presence of God and God’s equally constant absence.

At first, her interpretation of her plight was that of my friend in the Port Authority: she must be on the wrong track. Mother Teresa was part of a dutiful generation, one that hoped for a fairly immediate relationship between right behavior and a reasonable happiness, and expected to locate the source of most affliction somewhere within the behavior of the sufferer. Did her inner desolation mean that she was trying to do the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place? Was she failing to follow the divine will?

In the spirit of holy obedience, she trusted the authority of her spiritual directors — she would give up the work in a moment, she said repeatedly, if they directed her to do so. And she trusted the indelible early experiences of her calling, experiences which had been full in equal measure of the palpable sense of both God’s love and God’s demand. She remembered that these had indeed happened, that they had been as real as anything else in the universe, too real to deny. She remembered the moment at which her calling to go into the slums and serve the poorest of the poor occurred: it was on September 10, 1946, while she rode the train from Calcutta to Darjeeling. It is still celebrated by the Missionaries of Charity as “Inspiration Day.” “It was on this day in 1946 in the train to Darjeeling that God gave me the ‘ call within a call’[that is, a call to further specific service; Mother Teresa was already a Loreto nun at that time] to satiate the thirst of Jesus by serving Him in the poorest of the poor.”^[3]

Jesus had asked her to satiate what she called his “thirst for souls” by carrying him into the slums in which the poorest of the Indian poor lived: Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor. Come, be my light.^[4] The rest of the train ride had been an extended and dreamlike mystical conversation between Mother Teresa and Jesus: Wilt thou refuse? he had asked her, a question she never forgot, one with which she challenged herself for the remainder of her life. Wilt thou refuse? he had asked. It had been as plain as day.

No, she would not refuse. And she never did. Her subsequent struggle to bring her response to this call into being was a hard one. A nun lives under a vow of obedience, and this new work would require permission from religious superiors, bishops, and, ultimately, from the Pope himself. There were frustrating exchanges of letters, months of waiting for each answer, years of answering powerful people’s doubts about the validity of the call, about its feasibility, hard questions about her own motives in taking it up. In spiritual direction she explained and re-explained the call, gradually convincing the men who would assist the hierarchy in evaluating it that it was a true one. Nobody was more suspicious of her own ego than Mother Teresa herself: her fear of her own aggrandizement bordered on panic: “Pray for light that I may see and courage to do away with anything of self in the work. I must disappear completely — if I want God to have the whole.”^[5] Once the work in the slums began, the sisters’ work was herculean. Mother Teresa persevered in spiritual direction with several priests and bishops, often finding it difficult to travel to them. The spiritual aridity within her took root in this period of her life, at the very time when she was actually beginning the task to which she had devoted so much planning and prayer, and it never lifted. Her darkness did not stop her: doggedly, she continued building her order and expanding their work among the poorest of the poor; over the remaining four decades of her life and the ten years since then, the Missionary Sisters of Charity grew from thirteen sisters in Calcutta in 1952 to more than 4,500 serving 517 missions in 133 countries worldwide today. In 1979, Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace prize. But she died in 1998, never again having felt the delight of God’s presence that had animated her as a young nun.

Gradually, she came to believe that her interior darkness was part of her vocation, an almost compensatory substituting project of giving her own joy away that Christ’s joy might be increased. “Pray for me,” she wrote, “for everything within me is icy cold. It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness. As long as Our Lord has all the pleasure — I really do not count.”^[6]

She regarded it as a curious sort of gift to other people; she endured darkness in order that they might enjoy light: “If I ever become a saint, it will surely be one of ‘ darkness.’I will continually be absent from Heaven — to light the light of those in darkness on earth.”^[7]

I don’t think “depression” was part of Mother Teresa’s vocabulary: her generation in the religious life regarded feelings as a luxury at best and a considerable danger at worst. Above all else, they sought to be creatures of will, and then strove to subordinate that will to the divine will. The idea that a disease of her brain’s chemistry — exacerbated, surely, by simple exhaustion — might have something to do with her brokenness would have seemed to her an unworthy refusal to accept responsibility for herself.

What would we prescribe for Mother Teresa, we armchair psychologists who didn’t know her? Probably that she ought to ease up on herself. And get some professional help. We probably wouldn’t have recommended the doggedness with which she persevered, both in her work and in her unrequited prayer for God’s presence. Of course, if she’d taken our advice, she would not have accomplished all she did. At conferences about wellness, in our therapists’ offices, we assure each other confidently that only a balanced life produces good fruit. But nobody could call Mother Teresa’s life balanced, and it produced a lot. Hmm.

I often took Mother Teresa as an example for myself as a parish priest. If this tiny woman could push and push herself, could accomplish so much, I’d say to myself when I was tired, then surely so could I. She lives in Calcutta, for heaven’s sake — I’m in New York City, where clean water flows from every tap, where there is much more than enough of everything.

I remember reading in a magazine about an American who, on a visit to Calcutta, requested to meet her. Might he call on her? No, she said, I’ll come to you, and at precisely the agreed-upon time, the famous little figure in her white sari appeared at his door. Such humility, I thought. I should be like that. I should go to the people who want to see me, like Mother Teresa.

In those days, I didn’t know about her spiritual starvation — like everybody except Christopher Hitchens, I assumed that a rich lode of God’s presence fed her constantly, fueling her tremendous output of work. Now I read through her letters and see that she was more like me than I imagined, that she knew emptiness, as I know emptiness. Now I see that I am like Mother Teresa, only not in the way I wanted to be like her. I won’t become a living saint, like she did. If I am like her, it will be in my brokenness, not in my achievement.

The umbrage we take at depression in people of faith lies in a mistaken idea of what faith is for: we imagine that a closer walk with God will make us consistently happy. We’re so committed to this idea that some of us take sorrow on the part of religious people as evidence of their hypocrisy. Here is Christopher Hitchens again: “She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.”^[8]

Well, of course Hitchens thinks that: he has no use for any religious leader. But why a Christian would equate the presence of pain with absence of faith I don’t know, since so many of us wear little...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More praise for Jesus Wept
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition
• Prologue: What We’re Talking About
• Jesus Wept
• A Learning Experience
• I Just Don’t Feel Anything
• Trouble in Paradise
• Charged With the Care of Souls
• The Defendant as Prosecutor
• This Is My Last Hope
• Sorrowful Mysteries
• The Dark Night
• Words Fail Me
• Wanting to Die
• The Family Disease
• Notes
• Further Reading
• The Author