Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light - The Private Writings of the Saint of… (original 2007; edição 2007)

K-4

So moving, hopefully even life-changing. I am greatly annoyed, however, at how highly edited and shallowly commented on it is. I was left really wanting a published version of her journals, with footnotes, but little to no in-text comments. ( )

I still think she was depressed, and I fear that holding her up as a model may discourage people (esp Catholics) from getting psychological help. I also wonder about her commitment not to tell about her inner life--perhaps that's necessary for living in community. Certainly if you want the information in this book it is here. I did occasionally get a little annoyed at the editor. She comes up with a totally impractical of the sisters supporting themselves with farming--and he says the bishop just doesn't understand. ( )

Literature

Review: Come Be My Light by Mother Teresa/ Brian Kolodiejchuk.

The book was inspirational but not what I thought. The book was mostly letters Mother Teresa wrote to who she called her guardians; priest, the Pope and other sisters at her convent where she was stationed for twenty years as a nun and through her many years of journey founding the Missionaries of Charity throughout the world.

I expected to read of some knowledge of events on what Mother Teresa did for the poor and ailing people she followed. I wasn’t looking for the gloom, nitty-gritty of the people she encountered yet I wanted to know how she helped these people, what she had accomplished, some kind of a descriptive narrative of the people, the environments, just some kind of data to create a somewhat story of what she did.

I don’t even know why these letters of her thoughts and how distressing her mind and body was had been edited into this book. Mother Teresa wrote these letters in confidence and asked each person she wrote too that she wanted them burned not published. These letters were all about herself, her feelings, nothing about her work.

Mother Teresa was special, an inspiring person. This book was edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk and I feel he hurt her character more by creating words of false hope in his analyses to her letter writing.
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