This week, a new book about Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, based on the many letters she wrote to her spiritual counselors and confessors over an almost 50-year period, show a spiritual life that was, as she described it, dry, dark and lonely.

Father James Martin, in a commentary on All Things Considered, says Mother Teresa's spiritual struggles is a reminder of the, not so well-known, “Dark Night of the soul” we may experience in our spiritual journey. Days when we may feel God is absent. Days when we can't feel God's presence.

Mother Teresa faithfully did God's work in this state of darkness for years.

“ When I finally see Jesus, I will tell him I loved him in the darkness.”

— Mother Teresa, “Saint of the Gutters”