Artists Passion

Cathedral Gallery of Avila. Spain

This week’s Time Magazine holds an article on the deceased Mother Teresa’s 50-year crisis of faith. From all accounts of her letters that are to be published later this year, the woman, who for many was a symbol of undying faith, struggled daily, in perpetual emotional pain, to feel the presence of her maker.

What are we the artists of this world to take from this? Can we divine any new understanding for what many, and the greatest of us have struggled entire lifetimes to comprehend. One need only think of the tormented Van Gogh who eventually committed suicide, D. H. Lawrence and the path of destruction his life took, or Anne Sexton. These are just to name a few.

Many would say there can be no relationship between these and any artists with what many termed a saint, Mother Teresa, who is on her way to canonization.

Perhaps not in the strictest sense of the word. Mother Teresa spent the last five decades of her life caring for the least of these in a country, Calcutta, where the word least indicates near non-existence. The poor of this country can truly be considered the least of the world on many counts. The artists listed above, like many of their counterparts and colleagues before, during and after their time, were involved in what others would term and others be hard-pressed to deny, a mission that held purely narcissistic ends—their artistry, painting writing, or their music such as with Mozart. And then we have the half century of Mother Teresa’s internal suffering that counted more than Mozart’s life time, not withstanding the years served as a nun before dedicating her life to some of the poorest people in the world.

There is no comparison when observing the two vocations from a purely strategic or external perspective. Mother Teresa committed her life to altruistic duties, while artists and many more were consumed with the overwhelming need to create and project what lay in them out onto the world.

But what of the years of endless emotional torture fed by a lack of feeling, or experiencing God’s presence, where in letter after letter, correspondence after correspondence Mother Teresa question where had God retreated to and why, at times suggesting if not our right stating, that she could see God’s presence in the lives of others while feeling divinity’s absence?

Freud, Ricoeur and others have suggested that life is a balance of altruistic acts stack against, or along with those of narcissistic means.

What can we as artists glean from Mother Teresa’s longing, her yearning, the same that resides in many, whether artist, human individual, or saint setting about to do divine work on a planet many have long feared and declared God has abandoned after creating?

What does the discovery of Mother Teresa’s letters in these years since her death suggest perhaps about our own need to feel the presence of something greater, larger, outside ourselves that when in the experience of it, or under its influence, we come alive within and manifest that energy in our artistry? And what of the relationship between artist and creation?

“Why oh, God, has thou forsaken me?

I search but do not see.

I listen but do not hear.

I reach out and receive only emptiness.

In the end we will not know whether Mother Teresa was simply depressed, overworked, burned out, or a saint experiencing the dark night of the soul as others did an have before her.

For me the dawn of a new day begins with my attempts at starting a new painting, writing the first lines of the first draft of a story, playing the opening note of a new piece of music that I long to play as if having known it all my life. This is also the darkest point. For I do not know if I can do it–again. It’s like running up that hill I have trod many times prior and each time thinking, pondering worrying, “Can I do it one more time, this time? Will I make it?�?

And then there’s my arrival at the other end to which I must answer, “Why do I start again? Why do I keep writing, painting, playing, running, trying?�?

The answer for me is as for one fellow writer addressing the question of “Why write?�?
“Because have not reached heaven.�? That was her answer.

Perhaps this is what links Mother Teresa and all artists, and humans. We are all searching in some way, shape or form, for that which lay beyond us, beneath the soles of our feet and keeps us going, that which we at times doubt and more often than not rail against when in the wake of its absence. But our yearning for it always brings us back—back to ourselves, back to our art, back to our beginnings, the point at which the umbilical cord is cut and we look back not to see God, but the face of our mother, a mother whose womb will one day close up and that we cannot enter to be born again. And so we work, we paint, we feed the hungry and the dying, we do what we can. We hope. And we struggle hoping that perhaps in the midst of this we will find comfort.

Perhaps that is what Mother Teresa’s letters are to us—comfort that we are not alone in our search.