BBC Radio 4 2016-09-02

When I was a student, one of my tutors who was not religious at all had some words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta on his wall. They were these: “The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unloved, unwanted and uncared for”.

That her words were on a poster signified how famous she was across the globe. This weekend she will be accorded the honour of being canonised as a saint by the Catholic Church. This is the Church’s way of acknowledging someone as a holy person, now dead, who is with God in heaven for eternity.

Mother Teresa became a celebrity after BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the work she did with the poor and the dying in India. She was not without controversy; people such as Christopher Hitchens criticised her work, including that she didn’t do enough for the dying.

But this very public woman had another, hidden aspect to her life. It turns out she understood what she said people in the west endured: she felt unloved herself. Letters to her spiritual adviser published after her death show she suffered for years what is called a dark night of the soul. She felt abandoned, like Christ on the cross, when he cried out to God: why have you forsaken me?

St Therese of Liseux, a nineteenth century French nun, wrote of her dark night of the soul too. Interestingly, Therese’ focus was on doubting Christian faith at a time when it was first being challenged by the early stirrings of atheism.

Mother Teresa’s trial was about loneliness and a sense of being unloved – a very contemporary experience, as her comments about the West suggested. She first became a nun with a teaching order but she believed Christ asked her over and over again if she would refuse what he wanted from her. And what he wanted, she discerned, was that she leave her comfortable life as a teacher to set up her own order to care for those abandoned in the gutters of Calcutta.

That she continued this work when she endured years of feeling separated from God seems remarkable to me. But her comfort was the people around her. One bishop taken into her confidence about her spiritual loneliness was with her when a young boy flung his arms around her. The bishop said to her: “That’s God’s presence too”. Mother Teresa coped with her loneliness by loving the unloved and lonely, in effect forming a chain of consolation – an example this saint offers to counter what she called the greatest disease, that of loneliness, today.