Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910, in what is now considered North Macedonia. At the age of 18, she joined an Irish Catholic order in India and took her vows to become a nun in 1931. Agnes would teach for 17 years in a Catholic school before feeling like there was more for her to do. She received permission to start a new order, the Missionaries of Charity. Upon taking her vows, she also took on a new name: Sister Teresa which, very soon, became the more recognizable name, Mother Teresa.
Her work with the poorest of the poor and those suffering and dying is well known and documented. She continued this work until her death, September 5, 1997, at the age of 87. Eight years after her death, she is Beatified. Nearly 20 years after her death, she is Canonized, becoming officially St. Teresa of Calcutta.
To receive Beatification, it must be “proven” that you’ve worked a miracle. Canonization requires two proven miracles. Both alleged miracles were of a healing nature. “Cases of reported curative miracles are examined by the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints and a committee of medical specialists. If it can be shown the recovery fell outside the laws of nature with no scientific explanation, the prospective saint’s intercession with God is considered to have brought about a cure. As the last step, the Pope gives his approval that a miracle occurred.”1
While the church recognized her as a saint, she spent the last half of her life dealing with a spiritual emptiness and she was void of an intimate relationship with God. This is by her own admission, written with her own hand in letters to her superiors and confessors, preserved by the Vatican. She wrote, “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,–Listen and do not hear–the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me–that I let Him have [a] free hand.”2
TIME writes, “The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever… Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.” Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. “I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God–tender, personal love,” she remarks to an adviser. “If you were [there], you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.’” Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa’s doubts: “I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that
tormented.”3
This devotional is not intended to disparage Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. I feel saddened to think that she went through everything she did without the hope of Jesus Christ securing her to Him. This is by her own admission. The answer, though, goes all the way back to an understanding of what it means to be a saint.
Saint in the Bible is the Greek word hagios. The word is most often translated as a form of holy. It means to be consecrated to God, set apart, holy, sacred.
A “saint” in Scripture is made a saint by God, not a denomination examining your life and looking for a couple of miracles (that’s a point for another devotional). 1 Corinthians 1:1-2 says, “Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, (2) Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.” The moment we trust Jesus as Savior, we are set apart to God as that which has been made holy by the blood of Jesus.
The saints in Scripture are viewed as being saints while living, not waiting until they are dead. Ephesians 4:11-12 gives an example of this. “And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; (12) For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” The perfecting of the saints takes place while they are living. In the Revelation, saints are mentioned 13x and the reference to them infers that they were saints while living, therefore, they are still viewed as saints in Heaven.
Something else very special is given to the saints: assurance. Today, dear saint of God, rejoice in the peace and assurance God has granted you. This is something the lost individual cannot know. They cannot work for it. They cannot sacrifice enough and find it. It is a gift granted by our Savior.
Ephesians 3:17-19 gives us this truth. “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, (18) May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; (19) And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”
1https://www.biography.com/religious-figures/mother-teresa-miracles-saint
2https://time.com/4126238/mother-teresas-crisis-of-faith/
3Ibid.
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