Desolation and Consolation
Combating the loss of life’s meaning
Anybody with some
interest in paintings and artists would be familiar with Vincent Willem van
Gogh, (30 March
1853 – 29 July 1890), a post-impressionist, Dutch painter. In
just over a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil
paintings most of which date from the last two years of his life.
They include
landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, characterised by bold
colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to
the foundations of modern art. The notable ones are Sorrow (1882), The Potato
Eaters (1885), Sunflowers (1887), Bedroom in Arles (1888), The Starry Night
(1889), Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890), Wheatfield with Crows (1890).
The most
expensive painting by Vincent Van Gogh, featured his doctor, Dr Gachet, who
treated Van Gogh in the last days of his life. It was sold in 1990, exactly 100
years later for $82 million, which now after adjustment for inflation would go
up to $151.2 million.
During his
lifetime, van Gogh managed to sell only a handful of his paintings and was
forced to exchange some of his works for food or medical treatment. He exists
in the public imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius, the
artist "where discourses on madness and creativity converge"
But what did
Van Gogh think of his own work? He surely must have seen promise in his work in
the last three years of his life, when in October of 1888 Paul Gauguin who was
already a famous artist joined him in Arles, France. Their collaboration ended
abruptly when Van Gogh had a mental breakdown and cut off part of his own left
ear.
Did Van Gogh’s
melancholy and depression help him as an artist? Artists of such calibre have a
distinguishable approach to their work; they tend to have a workday spent
in complete solitude; exercising their minds in ways which is out
of the ordinary; developing a style which has freshness to it that sets
them apart; there’s a physicality to their profession; a distinct
dress code; and the eternal wait for acclaim which may or may not
come in their lifetime; which they may or may not seek.
Van Gogh was
only thirty-seven of age when he shot himself. He did not wait for the acclaim.
Is there a
connection between Van Gogh and Mother Teresa when you consider their lives on what
sets great artists apart?
Mother Teresa
was born August 26, 1910, twenty-years after Van Gogh’s death. She was an
artist too. Her nature of work was to aid "the
unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for."
Her work day was spent in solitude
before her Lord, Jesus Christ; and in sharing the solitude of the outcasts; the
sick, the destitute.
She too painted, not with brush or
paint, but with fingers and medicated cloth on the canvas of sores of leprosy
patients giving them a momentary respite from their wounds and the solace of
her company.
She exercised
her mind on how to bring comfort to those she was tending by founding clinics
for leprosy, tuberculosis and pregnant women; schools; homeless shelters;
orphanages; emergency aid programs; and more.
She established
her first home outside India in Venezuela in 1965, then a second in Rome in
1968. The first U.S. location was opened in the Bronx in 1971, and dozens more
followed around the world.
In 1985, as AIDS
ravaged the gay communities of many Western cities, and some doctors and nurses
still refused to touch its victims, Mother opened a hospice for them in New
York City, called Gift of Love, and then in other cities as well. The fall of
Iron Curtain in 1989 opened another door, and Mother moved her work quickly
into Russia and eastern Europe.
She developed a new style which set
her apart from other congregations (including her original congregation the Sisters
of Loreto). Mother called her
community the Missionaries of Charity (MC) and created a constitution that said
its aim was “to quench the infinite thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for
love of souls.”
In addition to the
traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the sisters would take a
fourth vow of “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.” The
distinctive thing about the Missionaries of Charity’s ministry was that the
sisters actively went out to the poor (rather than working inside convents,
hospitals and schools) and sought the most rejected.
There was a physicality to her
work, bending down, lifting, massaging, speaking, consoling, writing, calling up
for help and resources; an unimaginable workload carried on her five-foot lean
frame.
She had her distinct
dress code. A sari, she purchased at a bazaar in Kolkata (Calcutta) widely worn by most women of India,
but distinctive for its plain white colour with blue trim — and also for the
cheap material of which it was made.
Like Van Gogh,
Mother too suffered from melancholy and depression which she termed as “deep
darkness and desolation”.
Even those who
knew her well were surprised to learn that for decades she had experienced a
profound sense of abandonment by God. In letters to her spiritual director that
became public after her death, she wrote of a “deep darkness and desolation,”
adding, “I don’t complain — let him do whatever he wants.”
In Mother’s “deep
darkness and desolation” we can almost hear the cry of Jesus (Mark 15:34): “And at
the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema
sabachthani?” which means, “My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?”
On the cross, Jesus was filled with the sin of the world. God
abhors sin. Almost as a reflex God turned away from Jesus. Jesus sensed the
abandonment and gave up his spirit.
Jesus knew what was to come: the beatings, the exhaustion of the
Cross on the Road to Calvary, and the crucifixion.
At the height of His moment of desolation in the Garden of Gethsemane,
Jesus prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” The
temptations of ‘desolation’ as St Ignatius would inform us in ‘The Spiritual
exercises of Saint Ignatius’.
But Jesus quickly followed it up with, “Nevertheless, not my will,
but yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42). The response to ‘desolation’ is to double down
on prayer for God’s mercy to achieve ‘consolation’.
In Mark 14:34 Jesus tells Peter, James and John, “My soul is
very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.”
Jesus desolation was so severe that “And there appeared to
him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in agony
he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood
falling down to the ground. (Luke 22:43-44)
Father Brian
Kolodiejchuk, postulator of Mother Teresa’s canonization cause, explained “The darkness she
experienced was an aspect of her union with God — so it wasn’t that she had the
union and then lost it. Rather, she lost the consolation of that union and
alternated between the pain of loss and a deep and painful longing, a real
thirst for the experience of union that she had already known.”
While some
were troubled by this, many others understood it to be still another
confirmation of her profound faith and love. Her canonization does the same.
Mother did not
seek fame, though she did put the rewards of fame to good use for those in
her care. She would not seek canonization as a saint, but it was her due. A
debt an inhuman world owes to her majestic humanity. It also helps us Christians
to seek her intercession with God the Father, God the Son Jesus Christ, and the
Holy Spirit to make us more humane.
At the time of St.
Teresa of Calcutta’s death on Sept. 5, 1997, no one in the world was more revered as an icon of goodness and love. Her
canonization by Pope Francis on Sept. 4, 2016, though it took nearly two decades
to happen, was the crown of a remarkable life.
The story of Van Gogh
the ‘artist of artists’ and Mother Teresa, the artist-saint, reminds us that “darkness
and desolation” can come to all. We need to double down in prayer as Mother Teresa
did and not given in to despair as Van Gogh did by taking his own life.
The content for the above profile of Mother Teresa has been taken from https://www.motherteresa.org/
QUICK FACTS: NAME: Mother Teresa; BIRTH DATE:
August 26, 1910; DEATH
DATE: September 5, 1997; DID
YOU KNOW? On religious pilgrimage at the age of 12, Mother Teresa
experienced her calling to devote her life to Christ; DID YOU KNOW? Through her own
letters, Mother Teresa expressed doubt and wrestled with her faith; DID YOU KNOW? Mother Teresa was
canonized after the Vatican verified two people's claims of having experienced
miracles through her; EDUCATION: Institute
of the Blessed Virgin Mary; PLACE OF
BIRTH: Skopje, Macedonia; PLACE
OF DEATH: Calcutta, India; ORIGINALLY:
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu https://www.biography.com/religious-figure/mother-teresa
Thursday, 7
May 2020
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