We had an interesting encounter on the 11th of September. We had with us Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the current Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity and the postulator of the canonization of St Theresa of Calcutta.
Fr. Brian is also the author of the book Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, where he sheds light to the “night of the soul” that Mother Theresa witnessed until the end of her days.
During the encounter, Fr. Brian placed emphasis particularly on this aspect of the holiness of Mother Theresa, explaining it as an apostolic and missionary obscurity. In a way, she understood deeply that the greatest poverty of man is not that of the material needs but the feeling of being unloved, abandoned and alone. Hence, she experienced this in her relationship with Christ: an aridity that paradoxically united her to Christ and the poor. To Christ because she shared with Him the experience of the solitude in the garden of Gethsemane and of the abandonment from the part of the Father on the cross, when Christ exclaims: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And with the poor because she became like them not only in their state of life, but in the sharing of their sense of abandonment, of solitude, and of the absence of love.