Christian Psychology
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That same day Mother Teresa began to receive, in
the words of her confessor, a series of “interior locu-
tions.” Locutions are supernatural words, manifesta-
tions of God’s thoughts. She referred to this locution as
“The Voice,” and heard it almost daily for over a year.
She and this voice carried on an intimate and regular
exchange. He addressed her as “My own spouse” or
“my own little one.” She replied “my own Jesus.” He
revealed his inmost thoughts to her; his love, his pain,
his thirst. Their conversations were regular, joyful, inti-
mate, and even practical as Jesus advised her over details
for the establishment of the Sisters of Charity (Mother
Teresa, 2007, pp. 44-45).
Then as suddenly as the locutions appeared,
indeed, at the moment of the final triumph of the estab-
lishment of the new religious order, they disappeared.
Decades of despair and spiritual “dryness” followed.
“Pray … for me … that Our Lord may show Himself
– for there is such a terrible darkness within, as if every-
thing was dead” (Mother Teresa, 2007, p. 149). “If my
suffering satiates your thirst – here I am Lord, with joy I
accept all to the end of life…” (Mother Teresa, 2007, p.
164). Despite her despair, our simple medical catego-
ries do not fit; she was not depressed. By any external
measure she was cheerful and productive, to all around
her she was a joy and an inspiration.
Decades later, in 1987, God spoke to her again,
indirectly. While she was at a retreat, the priest from
Rome who ran the retreat and knew nothing of Mother
Teresa’s private life and pain received a message from
God. He writes, “While I was saying Morning Prayer
silently with my office book, I suddenly had a thought
insinuated in my head – as if someone had spoken,
but I didn’t hear it with my ears. But it seemed quite
clear: ‘Tell Mother Teresa I thirst.’” Thrice the message
was repeated, finally more as a command. Finally he
handwrote a note to Mother Teresa, starting “you may
think I am crazy” but then telling her the story. Mother
Teresa found him and talked to him, asking only “What
else did he say?” – nothing; and “what did he mean?” –
I don’t know (Mother Teresa, 2007, p. 311).
Mother Teresa’s awe inspiring story leaves us with
many questions. Why did God speak to her? Why
did God stop? What is the full meaning of the thirst
metaphor? For our purposes, what does the story of
her life and experience of God teach us from a Jungian
perspective?
Teresa was a devout Catholic. God was out there,
he related to her as a person. The locution was his voice.
The voice was very “real,” in the most matter of fact and
everyday sense. For the Jungian, the voice would have
been seen as real, but “psychically real.” For Mother
Teresa, perhaps that distinction would have seemed
strange, even incomprehensible.
Critics of Jung have suggested that he, despite his
deep interest in religious matters and sensitivity to spiri-
tual issues and his own protestations, articulates a psy-
chological theory that is in fact, protestations notwith-
standing, covertly reductionistic. Much in Jung’s writing
justifies this reading. Jung’s understanding of God is
clearly different than Mother Teresa’s. For Jung, God is
within. He acknowledges that he is criticized as Gnos-
tic, he writes of the essential “identity of God and man,
either in the form of an
a priori
identity or of a goal to
be attained” (Jung, 1967c, p. 5) He talks of what he
supposed was the traditional religious view; namely, that
God is outside of man, as a prejudice. Mother Teresa, a
devout Catholic, likely would have none of such a view
of God. Jung acknowledges the realistic danger of view-
ing “Christ within,” asserting that the Church instead
insists on identification with the historical Christ whom
“we have seen, heard, and touched with our hands”
(Jung, 1967e, p. 293). According to Jung, the Church
suppressed Gnosticism because of its dangers to a primi-
tive consciousness that might identify too closely with
the God within (Jung, 1967e, p. 293).
Religious views of the relationship between God
and man are actually much more complex than Jung
allows. Church Fathers like Augustine spoke poignantly
of the intimacy of God in his transcendence. Jung
argues against a straw man of God set apart from His
creation, not Augustine’s God, who is “more inward
than my most inward part” (Augustine, 1991, p.43).
Jung describes a progression of religious develop-
ment, from the “primitive” mind that projects onto
God natural forces that are misunderstood to the more
traditionally religious like Mother Teresa, finally culmi-
nating in the highest form of development where God
is understood to be a psychological phenomenon that is
“within” rather than “without” (Jung, 1967a, p. 309).
In this schema, Mother Teresa would be at a lower level
than the religious and New Age dabblers so common
in modern society. Very psychologically minded, such
individuals might perhaps sample Hindu and Buddhist
religious practices like yoga and meditation, feel the
presence of a spirit guide that they have borrowed from
Native American religion, recall past lives, and attend
a non-sectarian mega-church on Sunday. But for such
“advanced” individuals, religion is a arguably hobby that
has little impact on their petulant, materialistic and self-
centered lives; whereas for Mother Teresa religion really
mattered. She could sacrifice her life to God because
God was “real.”
Jung, of course, would never have identified him-
self with New Age religiosity, and had a profound re-
spect for the power and sanctity of traditional religious
experience. Yet his exclusive insistence on the internal
and psychological experience of the spiritual can readily
devolve into those former types of beliefs.
From Jung’s identification of God and man, it is a
small step to a reductionistic stance. “Gods are per-
sonifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal
themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the
psyche” (Jung, 1967b, p. 163). Yet again, “What is the
MOTHER TERESA AND CARL JUNG
