[Mother] Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned.

[Archbishop] Périer may have missed the note of desperation. "God guides you, dear Mother. You are not so much in the dark as you think. You have exterior facts enough to see that God blesses your work. Feelings are not required and often may be misleading." And yet feelings--or rather, their lack--became her life's secret torment. How can you assume the lover's ardor when he no longer grants you his voice, his touch, his very presence?

I Thirst and You Did it to Me: Remember always to connect the two, the means with the aim. What God has joined together let no one split apart...Our Charism is to satiate the thirst of Jesus for love and souls--by working at the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor.

As Papal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa explained in a homily: "You-did-it-to-me": Mother Teresa pronounced these words distinctly on the fingers of one hand and said it was "the Gospel of the five fingers." For Mother Teresa, Jesus who is present in the Eucharist, is present in a different way but equally real, "in the distressing disguise of the poor."

Mother Teresa had been blessed early in her vocation with the gift of mysticism--visions of Christ--what Time’s Van Biema calls “her spiritual topper.” Even though a thousand years is like a day with God, to Mother, those 50 years without intimacy with him must have been a great cross to bear, a dark night indeed. But in that she was able to see him in the eyes of the poor and receive his grace daily in the Eucharist, she was never really bereft of his presence; she simply couldn’t have carried out her mission were it otherwise.

Although it can sometimes be a great blessing, no one desires the dark night; indeed, in the last line of the Lord’s Prayer we plead every day that it not be visited upon us. But as is often pointed out, Jesus Christ had his own dark night on the Cross, where he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This of course, is his quotation of the opening line of Psalm 22, written by his human ancestor David, a man to whom the dark night was no stranger. But to cry out to God, as did David and Mother Teresa, is to acknowledge his saving power, in the manner of the Psalm’s conclusion:

And I will live for the Lord; my descendants will serve you. The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have brought.