The Dark Night of St. Teresa of Calcutta & St. Therese of Lisieux | Carol Zaleski
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2018
⏱️ 40 minutes
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Summary
This lecture was offered on October 9th, 2018 at the University of Oklahoma.
“If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven — to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” With these words, Mother Teresa—now Saint Teresa of Calcutta—summed up the decades long trial of faith that marked her inner life from the early years of the Missionaries of Charity until her death in 1997. A similar trial was endured by her namesake, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and it bore fruit in a similar resolve. What can we learn about faith, doubt, perseverance, and holiness from the “dark night” experience of the two Teresas?
Speaker Bio
Carol Zaleski is the Professor of World Religions at Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts, where she has been teaching philosophy of religion, world religions, religion and literature, and Catholic thought since 1989. She is the author of Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of NearDeath Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford University Press) and The Life of the World to Come: NearDeath Experience and Christian Hope (Oxford University Press); and she is coauthor with Philip Zaleski of Prayer: A History (Houghton Mifflin), The Book of Heaven (Oxford University Press), and The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tonight, the subject is the Dark Night Experience and its implications for Christian life, for contemporary life, |
| 0:08.0 | so not just about the two Teresa's that are identified on your handout, but about the implications of what they went through for us today. |
| 0:19.0 | Still, the two Teresa that are identified on your handout |
| 0:22.6 | have the starring role. |
| 0:24.6 | So first on stage is going to be Mother Teresa, |
| 0:27.6 | now St. Teresa of Kolkata, or Calcutta, |
| 0:30.6 | if you know the older version of the name of the city, |
| 0:34.6 | founder of the Missionaries of Charity. And next up will be her namesake, St. Therese of Liseur, |
| 0:42.3 | or more fully St. Teresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, |
| 0:47.3 | the Discalce Carmelite who died at the age of 24 in 1897. |
| 0:52.3 | So I'm going to be focusing on the extraordinary connections between these two |
| 0:57.6 | things and the dark night experience that they both endured. Let me talk a little bit about |
| 1:04.2 | historic interpretations of this experience as well as more recent ones. And then at the end, include with some thoughts about |
| 1:13.6 | the dark night through which we as a society seem to be passing at the present moment. |
| 1:20.6 | So it's kind of a conversation across centuries about faith and doubt, about perseverance |
| 1:26.6 | and holiness. |
| 1:28.3 | So I'll start with Mother Teresa. |
| 1:30.3 | I actually saw her once in the flesh, only once. |
| 1:33.3 | And that was at Harvard, actually. |
| 1:36.3 | She'd been invited by the graduating seniors in 1982 |
| 1:39.3 | to give what's called the Class Day address |
| 1:42.3 | on the eve of commencement. |
... |
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