Christian Psychology
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did he mean, but rather, “What else did he say?” Mary’s
response to the Annunciation is this purest example of
this response of faith, “Behold, I am the handmaid of
the Lord.”
Teresa’s answer has its own dangers, her confessors
and her superiors help her distinguish whether her call
is a true one. The stability of her call, its constancy over
time and through hardship, testifies to its divine origin.
And Mother Teresa was a very special kind of saint; and
a very modern one. She wasn’t some psychologically
simple throwback to medieval times, who accepted her
call without reservation or reflection. The bulk of her
posthumous autobiography is concerned not with her
call, but with the absence of a call, with decades of de-
spair, darkness, thirst and spiritual dryness. “Our Lord
thought it better for me to be in the tunnel – so He is
gone again … Please ask Our Lady to keep me close to
herself that I may not miss the way in the darkness.”
Again,
“Lord, my God who am I that You should forsake
me? … You have thrown me away as unwanted
- unloved. I call, I cling, I want – and there is no
One to answer – no One on Whom I can cling –
no, No One. – Alone. The darkness is so dark - and
I am alone. … So many unanswered questions live
within me – I am afraid to uncover them – be-
cause of the blasphemy” (Mother Teresa, 2007, pp.
187-188). “What are You doing my God to one so
small” (Mother Teresa, 2007, p. 196).
Perhaps part of the blasphemy is the Gnostic,
Job-like concern that God is doing evil to one so small
and lowly. Of her work she never doubts, like Jung she
knows it is not hers, “it is His, not mine.” Late in life
she comes to a certain dark peace, and comes to love the
darkness she feels, and writes less and less of it. Know-
ing late in life that she will be suggested for canoniza-
tion (the Catholic process of acknowledging sainthood)
she writes, “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”
(Mother Teresa, 2007, p. 1). That is a very modern
saint that understands the human condition in our era
where the absence of faith is so keenly experienced.
Let us return again and finally to the image of the
woman at the well. She needs Jesus; he has living water
that will quench her thirst forever. Yet Jesus needs her;
as she points out, he has no bucket, no rope, and the
well is deep. They are at the site of Jacob’s well; where
God in the past quenched the thirst of the one near-
est and dearest to him, Jacob, the Father of his people.
Figuratively, Jesus renews this well, makes it come alive
again. With the Gnostic themes that are uniquely Jo-
hannine, Jesus calls the Samaritan woman to an internal
worship. John calls forth the heretical idea that God
can be worshipped within. “Believe me, woman, an
hour is coming when you will when you will worship
the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
… Authentic worshipers will worship the Father in
Spirit and truth …” (John 4:23). Christ, as reported by
John, describes a kind of spiritual evolution; from the
mountain to the Temple to the Spirit and Truth within.
The danger of placing the other totally within,
risks the trivialization and personalization that Rieff
(1987) describes. Jung scholars have struggled with this
within/without conundrum. Ulanov (2000) offers a
creative solution, suggesting that what is within is the
God-image, not God. The God-image is that part of the
psyche that communicates with God, a kind of one-way
cell phone connection to heaven. That way we can keep
God inside, but let him be outside as well. As Ulanov
(2000) acknowledges, Jung himself might not have
made that distinction.
Let us compare the response of Mother Teresa’s
religious superiors and confessors to her visionary expe-
riences to what we might imagine, in a thought experi-
ment, to have been Jung’s. Imagine Jung meets Mother
Teresa and she describes her religious experiences. He is
fascinated, respectful. He acknowledges the numinous
power of her vision. It is important and “psychically
true” for her. He is like an intent tourist or anthropolo-
gist visiting a Greek Temple or Gothic cathedral. He is
awestruck, fascinated; but he doesn’t really believe. Or
more precisely, he believes that the God-image spoke
that way to Teresa as part of her individuation, but
might speak in a totally different way to him, and the
two are not related in any way.
Mother Teresa’s confessors, in contrast, tried to
judge if her visions were true in the ordinary sense. They
bade her wait, to be sure that they were consistent over
time and were not a temporary product of her imagina-
tion like the vision of Abbé Oegger. They examined if
the visions were consistent with church teachings and
the experiences of devout and respected individuals that
preceded her. Then they believed, in the ordinary sense.
The experience within was validated by what we know
or think we know of the without.
On their most fundamental level the differences
between a Jungian understanding of Mother Teresa’s
experiences and a traditional Church view is a philo-
sophical one. Jung concept of psychic reality eliminates
any serious consideration of ontological issues. Episte-
mologically, Jung is in a lonely group of what we might
call radical psychological empiricists. For Jung, we can
only know what the psyche experiences. Unlike tradi-
tional empiricists, however, he includes in that category
a whole range of phenomena that traditional empiricists
would be loath to include because they are private and
“subjective” – dreams, visions, active imagination. The
Catholic Church, with its ancient traditions relatively
untouched by modernism, disavows the skeptical
empiricism embedded in Jungian theory. The Church
insists on the ontological reality of God, and believes
with certainty that we can come to know God’s will
through faith and reason, enlightened by revelation and
MOTHER TERESA AND CARL JUNG
