Over the weekend I finished reading an advance copy (courtesy of The Catholic Company) of Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire, by Joseph Langford, which attempts to answer the question, ”What hidden inner fire motivated [Mother Teresa] and drew her on, in the most squalid conditions, to become the saint she was?” It does so in a manner that seeks to transform the reader in much the same way Mother Teresa was transformed by her encounter with Christ. It is a deeply affecting book that I hope you will consider adding to your “To Read” list.
In one respect, the entire book is a long commentary on Jesus’ words on the cross, “I thirst,” her experience of Jesus’ saying these words to her so profound that Mother Teresa had the words placed on the wall of her chapels throughout the world. The first part of the book is devoted to how this message of Jesus’ incredible thirst for us changed the life of this extraordinary women. If that were all the book did, it would be a nice story about the life of a saint and that would be the end of it.
However, understanding what touched Mother Teresa is important not just for what it did for her, but for what it can do for us. Thus, Langford’s book moves from “information to transformation; from beholding the light that shone in her night, the light that reveals God’s love and draws us to him, to actually meeting the Source of that light and love.”
Here, Langford’s book is more than simply a discussion about Mother Teresa’s prayer life and how she talked about prayer to her sisters and others, although it contains that. Instead, his discussions of God’s grace and God’s love and desire for us could be fruit for many days of prayer. Langford’s discussion of various types of prayer and of the ways in which the evil spirit (to use Ignatius’ term) tries to move us away from God are useful instruction for anyone who is serious about a life of prayer.
In addition to the textual discussion, the book includes two beautiful meditations as well as appendices containing quotes by Mother Teresa and by other saints and spiritual writers that speak of God’s thirst for us. Another appendix does a thoughtful job of situating Mother Teresa’s (and Langford’s) understanding of the meaning of Christ’s words, “I thirst,” within the biblical use of the symbolism of thirst. All of these make for some great prayer material. Although Mother Teresa is not one of the mystics I’m using for the Praying with the Mystics retreat in daily living I’m currently presenting, I plan to share some of this material with the retreatants.
Langford understands, as did Mother Teresa and the other mystics, something fundamentally important to all of us: the existence of a personal God with whom we exist in a state of relationship. Langford writes:
Our source of transformation is not some unnamed cosmic energy to be tapped at will, and it is surely not “the universe” (as popular post-Christian literature would suggest). Instead, it is the dynamic love of a personal God. Therefore, its bestowal is not something mechanical or automatic, like taking a product from a vending machine, but only given in a state of relationship with him. Because God is love, he is more than some anonymous force whose principles, once discovered, can be bent to our will, or simply used to “manifest” our desires – God is, rather, an infinite, eternal, and autonomous Person.
