The Life of a Mystic–Mother Teresa

If you’ve listened to the media reports about this book, you would be led to believe that Mother Teresa was an aetheist, who continued doing good works in God’s name, nonetheless. Yet after picking the book up and actually reading it, nothing could be further from the truth. What this book does do, is give us an even greater insight into the inspiration–the “call within a call,” that Mother Teresa experienced early in her mid-30′s which ultimately led her to leaving a religious community, that ran a private school, to form a new religious community made up of Indian sisters whose mission it would be to serve the poor in a radical fashion.

Who called Mother Teresa?

God.

The voice that would be silent later in her life, (what the media reports), spoke to her over the course of a year. Beginning on September 10th 1946 she began to hear the voice of Jesus giving her explicit directions on forming a community of sisters made up of women from India who He wanted to serve the poor in His name. He named this new community the Missionaries of Charity.

The “voice” of Jesus pleaded with her over and over throughout this year “Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor, Come, be My light,” from whence the title of the book comes. One could even say that this book is titled by Jesus Himself.

This mission entrusted to her was deeply related to a vision, one presumes of Jesus on the Cross crying out “I thirst” and the entire spirituality of Mother Teresa is immersed in this event. Recognizing Jesus in the faces of the outcasts (similiar to the crucified Christ) and her union with the crucified Jesus also explains the later absence of feeling and tangible presence of God similar to what Jesus experienced on the cross “My God, my God, why has thou abandoned me.”

Mother Teresa’s later experiences, like many mystics before her, can only be understood by reading the works of those who have written about the Spiritual path, most notably in this country Father Benedict Groeschel in his Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development (Spiritual Passages, Paper) and his recently released popular presentation Questions and Answers About Your Journey to God, even though both of these books are accessible to Catholics and non-Catholics, some Protestants might find the work of Evelyn Underhill, a Protestant herself, Mysticismmore to their liking.

This book provides a rare peak into the life of a modern saint. From the early supernatural phenomena to the popular acclaim in later life, Come Be My Light can help everyone to be a better follower of Christ.

Mother Teresa, “the night” Accepted as a Gift

From Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa:

 What happened after Mother Teresa said ‘yes’ to the divine inspiration that called her to leave everything in order to serve the poorest of the poor?

The world learned a great deal about what happened around her – the arrival of her first followers, ecclesiastical approval, the dizzying expansion of her charitable activities – but until her death, no one know what happened inside her.

This is revealed by her personal diaries and the letters she wrote to her spiritual director, now published by the postulator of the cause of her canonization. I do not believe that the custodians of these letters, before deciding to give them over to be printed, had to overcome the fear that these might disturb or even scandalize their readers. Far from diminishing Mother Teresa’s stature, they instead increase it, placing her beside the greatest Christian mystics.

“With the beginning of her new life in service of the poor,” writes Jesuit Fr. Joseph Neuner, who was close to her, ” an oppressive darkness came over her.” A few brief passages are enough to give us an idea of the weight of the darkness in which she found herself: “There is so much contradiction in my soul, a deep longing for God, so deep that it hurts, a constant suffering – and with this there is the feeling of not being wanted by God, rejected, empty, without faith, without love, without zeal… Heaven means nothing to me; it seems a hollow place.”

It is not hard to recognize immediately in Mother Teresa’s experience a classic case of what the scholars of mysticism, after Saint John of the Cross, usually call the dark night of the soul.

Johannes Tauler gives a startling description of this state: “Then we are abandoned in such a way that we no longer have any awareness of God, and we fall into such anguish that we no longer know if we were ever on the right path, nor know if God even exists, or if we ourselves are alive or dead. And so an anguish besets us that is so strange, it seems as if everything in the entire world were joining together to afflict us. We no longer have any experience or awareness of God, but everything else seems repugnant to us as well, and it seems we are trapped between two walls.”

Everything indicates that this darkness stayed with Mother Teresa right up until her death, with a brief pause in 1958, when she was able to write triumphantly: “Today my soul is full of love, full of inexpressible joy and an uninterrupted union of love.” If at a certain point she almost does not speak of this night anymore, it is not because it was over, but because she had learned to live within it. Not only had she accepted it, but she recognized the extraordinary grace that it held for her. “I have begun to love my darkness, because I now believe that it is a part, a tiny little part, of the darkness and suffering in which Jesus lived on earth.”

The silence of Mother Teresa

The most fragrant flower of the night of Mother Teresa is her silence about it. She was afraid that by talking about it she would draw attention to herself. Even the people closest to her suspected nothing, right until the very end, of her interior torment. According to her instructions, her spiritual director was supposed to destroy all of her letters, and if some of these were spared, it was because with her permission he had made a copy of them for the archbishop and future cardinal Trevor Lawrence Picachy, and these were found among his papers after his death. Fortunately for us, the archbishop refused to comply with the request to destroy them, which was even made to him personally by Mother Teresa.

The most insidious danger for the soul that is in the dark night is that of realizing that she is, in fact, in the dark night, in what the great mystics before her had experienced, and that she is therefore part of a circle of privileged souls. With the grace of God, Mother Teresa avoided this danger, hiding her torment from everyone under an ever-present smile. “Always smiling, is what the sisters and the people say of me. They think that inside I am full of faith, trust, and love… If they only knew how true it is that my joyfulness is nothing but a cloak I throw over my emptiness and misery!” A saying of the desert Fathers says: “However great your sufferings may be, your victory over them lies in silence.” Mother Teresa put this into practice in an heroic way.

Not just purification

But why did this strange phenomenon of the night of the soul last practically her whole life? Here there is something new compared with the experience and accounts of the spiritual masters of the past, including Saint John of the Cross. This dark night cannot be explained solely through the traditional idea of passive purification, what is called the “purgative way’, the preparation for the illuminative and unitive way. Mother Teresa was convinced that in her case, her ego was particularly hard to overcome, since God was constrained to keep her for so long in this state.

But this was certainly not the case. The endless night of some modern saints is the means of protection that God has invented for the saints of today who live and work under constant media attention. It is the suit of asbestos for those who must walk amid the flames; it is the insulation that prevents the electric current from surging and causing short circuits.

Saint Paul said: “Therefore, that I might not become too elated, a thorn in the flesh was given to me” (2 Cor. 12:7). The thorn in the flesh that was the silence of God was shown to be extremely effective for Mother Teresa: it shielded her from any sort of elation in the midst of the great noise the world was making about her, even at the moment she received the Nobel peace prize. “The interior suffering that I feel is so great,” she said, “that all the publicity and all the talk of the people has no effect on me.” How far from the truth is Christopher Hitchens in his vituperative essay “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” when he makes Mother Teresa out to be a product of the media age!

And there is an even deeper reason that explains these nights that extend through an entire life: the imitation of Christ, participation in the dark night of the soul that enfolded Jesus in Gethsemane, and in which he died on Calvary, crying: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Mother Teresa came to see her trial more and more clearly as a response to her desire to gasp, together with Jesus on the cross, “I thirst”: “If my pain and suffering, my darkness and separation from you give you even a drop of consolation, my Jesus, then do with me what you will… Impress the suffering of your heart upon my soul and my life… I want to quench your thirst with every last drop of blood you can find in me. Don’t be concerned about returning soon: I am ready to wait for you for all eternity.”

It would be a grave mistake to think that such people’s lives are nothing but gloomy suffering. In the depth of their souls, they enjoy a peace and a joy that are unknown to the rest of mankind, arising from the certainty – stronger in them than their doubts – that they are living according the will of God. Saint Catherine of Genoa compares the suffering of souls in this condition with that of Purgatory, and says that it “is so great that it can be compared only to that of Hell,” but that there is in it a “tremendous contentment” that can be compared only to that of the saints in Paradise. The joy and serenity that radiated from Mother Teresa’s face was not a mask, but rather the reflection of the profound union with God she experienced within her soul. She was the one who was “deceived” about her condition, not the people.

At the atheists’ side

Today’s world has hatched a new category of people: atheists in good faith, those who experience the silence of God as a painful burden, who do not believe in God and yet do not boast of this, experiencing instead existential anguish and an absolute lack of meaning; they too, in their own way, live in a dark night of the soul. In his novel “The Plague,” Albert Camus calls them “saints without God.” The mystics exists above all for them; they are their companions on the road and at table. Like Jesus, they “have sat at table with sinners and have eaten with them” (cf. Luke 15:2).

This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once they have converted, have thrown themselves into the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Leon Bloy, the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, and many others plunged into the writings of Angela da Foligno; T.S. Eliot, into those of Julian of Norwich. Here they found the same landscape that they had left behind, but this time illuminated by the sun. Few know that the author of “Waiting for Godot,” Samuel Beckett, read Saint John of the Cross in his free time.

The word “atheist” can have an active or a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also someone who is rejected by God – or at least feels himself to be. The first case is one of culpable atheism (when it is not in good faith), while the second is an atheism of suffering or expiation. In the latter sense, we can say that the mystics, in the night of the soul, are a-theists – without God – and that on the cross Jesus, too, was an a-theist, one without God.

Mother Teresa wrote words that no one would have expected from her: “They say that the eternal pain that souls suffer in Hell is the loss of God… In my soul, I experience precisely this terribly pain of damnation, of a God who does not want me, of a God who is not God, of a God who in reality does not exist. Jesus, I beg you to forgive my blasphemy.” But one realizes that her a-theism was of a different character, marked by solidarity and expiation: “In this world that is so far from God, that has turned its back on the light of Jesus, I want to help the people by taking on some of their suffering.” The clearest indicator that this atheism is of a completely different nature is the inexpressible suffering that it provokes in the mystics. Ordinary atheists do not go through this kind of agony because of their atheism!

The mystics have come within a step of the world where people live without God; they have experienced that dizzying plunge. Mother Teresa again writes to her spiritual father: “I was on the verge of saying ‘No’… I feel like one of these days something inside me will have to snap.” “Pray for me, that I do not reject God in this hour. I do not want this, but I am afraid I could do it.”

For this reason, the mystics are the ideal evangelizers in the postmodern world, where people live “etsi Deus non daretur,” as if God did not exist. They remind the honest atheists that they are not “far from the kingdom of God,” that in just one leap they could be on the side of the mystics, passing from nothing to everything.

Karl Rahner was right when he said, “In the future, Christianity will be mystical, or it will not exist at all.” Padre Pio and Mother Teresa are the response to this sign of the times. We must not underestimate the saints, reducing them to channels of grace, or merely good examples.

The Sanctity of Mother Teresa

From Sandro Magister:

Three days ago, speaking to three hundred thousand young people gathered in Loreto, Benedict XVI recalled that even a woman as holy as Mother Teresa, “with all her charity and the power of her faith,” nonetheless “suffered from the silence of God.”

And he added: “A book has been published containing the spiritual experiences of Mother Teresa, in which what we already knew is displayed even more openly.”

The book to which the pope refers is entitled “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.” It is on sale as of September 4 in its English edition, edited and with an introduction by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, the postulator of the cause of Mother Teresa’s canonization.

It presents some of the letters that the religious sister, who died ten years ago and is now beatified, wrote at various times to her spiritual directors. These letters attest to the long period in her life during which she experienced the “night of faith.”

The mere announcement of the book’s pending publication, even before it was released, stirred up a hornet’s nest of debate in various countries throughout the world, as if it contained unprecedented revelations shocking enough to demolish Mother Teresa’s image.

But everything in it was already well known, as Benedict XVI pointed out. The letters now published, together with other similar writings, were already contained in the eight volumes for the cause of Mother Teresa’s beatification. And when she was proclaimed blessed , on October 19, 2003, these were the exact words printed in her official biography released by the Vatican:

“There was an heroic side of this great woman that was revealed only after her death. Hidden from all eyes, hidden even from those closest to her, was her interior life marked by an experience of a deep, painful and abiding feeling of being separated from God, even rejected by Him, along with an ever-increasing longing for His love. She called her inner experience, ‘the darkness.’ The painful night of her soul, which began around the time she started her work for the poor and continued to the end of her life, led Mother Teresa to an ever more profound union with God. Through the darkness she mystically participated in the thirst of Jesus, in His painful and burning longing for love, and she shared in the interior desolation of the poor.”

Mother Teresa recounted this interior darkness, which lasted half a century – just as the entire world was admiring her radiant Christian joy – to no one but her spiritual directors, instructing them to destroy her letters after reading them. But they didn’t.

This darkening of faith marks the lives of many other saints, even the greatest. But there’s always something unique in each of them. In Mother Teresa, too.

In the commentary that follows, an outstanding author tries to address Mother Teresa’s uniqueness, precisely in relation to her doubts on the faith. He is Franciscan Father Raniero Cantalamessa, an historian of early Christianity and the official preacher of the pontifical household.

His commentary was printed in the Sunday, August 26 edition of “Avvenire,” right in the thick of the discussions following the announcement of the book.

In it, Fr. Cantalamessa maintains a bold hypothesis: he identifies in Mother Teresa the ideal companion for the many “atheists in good faith” who inhabit today’s world. He calls them the most beloved of Jesus, who on the cross experienced abandonment by God more than anyone else.

Pope Remembers Mother Teresa During Audience

From Asia News Italy:

Dear friends, the life and witness of this true disciple of Christ, whose liturgical memory we celebrate today, are an invitation to you and the entire Church to always serve Christ in the poor and the needy. Keep following her example and always be the instrument of Divine Mercy,”

Q & A with Pope Benedict: Mother Teresa and God’s Silence

One of the hallmarks of this papacy is his question and answer sessions which bring his message right to the heart of real questions. Yesterday he addressed the issue that has been in the news all week in the U.S.-Mother Teresa’s dark night…from Asia News Italy:

The vigil, which included chanting and music, saw some speakers bear witness as to what it means to be young today, addressing questions to the Pope. From the southern Italian city of Bari, Piero, an engineer, and Giovanna, a social worker from the city’s slums, were the first to speak. After talking about their own commitment, they asked: “How is it possible to hope when reality takes away whatever dream for happiness you may have, denies you a chance to plan your life?”

In his reply the Pope said that the anxiety the question betrays did not need any theoretical or feel-good answer. Putting aside his prepared text, the Holy Father spoke about marginalisation and ghettoisation, tragedies caused by the inaction of centres of power. He went on to say that the institutions that should take care of the powerless like the family and the parish church have been weakened. He further stressed that for the Church no one is an outsider and everyone is part of the whole. Christ was born in Nazareth, a place far from any centre of power; and yet he “revolutionised the world.” The Church should go back into the poorer neighbourhoods and with Christ’s help rebuild the social fabric of their inhabitants. For this reason young people he said must “change the world,” starting in its poorest corners, places time forgot.

When it was her turn, Sara, a 24-year-old office worker from Genoa, spoke about young people’s confusion, about the violence they experience and the lack of educators “as good and credible reference points to whom one may turn with one’s pain is too much. . . .  Holy Father, in this silence so heavy for me and my faith, where is everybody? Above all, where is God?”

“Every believer knows about God’s silence,” said the Pontiff answering off the cuff. “With all her charity, even Mother Teresa suffered from God’s silence.” But he recalled a story about Pope John Paul II, when he was still Cardinal Wojtyla. A scientist told him that he was “certain” that God did not exist but that “whenever he looked out at the mountains, he saw that He existed.” In truth, “the beauty of creation,” the Pope said, “is a sign of God’s goodness.” Not only do we meet God in creation, but we feel his “presence in the liturgical celebrations and in the Word,” he said. We have the same experience in the “great music by Bach, Mozart, and Haendel.” Listening to them we discover that God is the source of everything. Also there is friendship and companionship in faith and travel like what young people in Loreto have experienced. “God,” he said, “wants us to bear witness to our faith and be a light” onto others.

Acknowledging that “it is hard to talk to our friends about God and the Church,” a God “of prohibitions” and “a Church that imposes,” he urged his audience to “try to experience the living Church, not the image of a Church that is a centre of power.”

Remembering his visit to Fazenda Esperanza in Brazil, a drug rehab centre, he said that “the certainty in God’s existence means salvation from desperation.” God “broadens life,” he noted; “drugs destroy it.”

He concluded saying that “Christ came to create a network of communion in the world so that we can all help each other. In so doing we discover that the commandments and the relationship to God are in reality a path to joy.”

A Suffering Servant

Evangelical Christian Chuck Colson’s take on Mother Teresa, from Breakpoint:

For the first time in more than 30 years, Mother Teresa graces the cover of Time magazine. But unlike the 1975 cover that hailed her as a living saint, this week’s cover titillatingly trumpets, “The Secret Life of Mother Teresa.” The subtitle declares, “Newly published letters reveal a beloved icon’s 50-year crisis of faith.” NBC led the TV pack with serious questions about her faith.

Those letters, written by Mother Teresa over more than 60 years, form a new book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. So what do these letters really reveal? Newsflash: One of the great saints of the 20th century had doubts. At times, she even doubted the existence of God. Imagine that!

Now, to put this in perspective, imagine that for 60 years you waded knee-deep in the gutters of Calcutta to tend to the outcast and the dying. In the midst of unspeakable squalor and human suffering, might you at times not doubt God?

Here’s more news: Mother Teresa struggled with depression. When you wrestle with the devil surrounded by human misery, you might have good cause to be depressed! I know from the years I have spent ministering in prisons. There are many times that you question, “Where’s God?” To be depressed in such situations simply makes you human. To carry on through the depression reveals the hand of God.

Not surprisingly, Mother Teresa’s letters are red meat for the media. And atheists like Christopher Hitchens could not resist ridiculing her dark night of the soul. “She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person,” Hitchens told Time. “Her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith [which] could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.” Hitchens even compared her to the old communists who realized their lives were meaningless after the Soviet Union collapsed. What rubbish!

And meaningless is the last word you would think of to describe Mother Teresa. To help the poorest of the poor die with dignity was the greatest example of faith, particularly while you are suffering yourself, with doubts and with pain and with depression.

She continued to do the toughest job anyone could possibly do. And she did it to her dying day. Why? As she wrote to her spiritual advisor, she submitted to God. “I accept,” she wrote, “not in my feelings—but with my will, the Will of God—I accept His will.” I came to that realization in my own dark night of the soul a couple of years ago when two of my three kids had cancer.

The very essence of faith, you see, is believing even in the absence of evidence. And it is the only way we can know Christ. We can conclude rationally that God exists, that His Word is true, and that He has revealed Himself. But without that leap of faith, we will never know God personally or accept His will in Christ.

So what do the letters of Mother Teresa reveal? For one, they reveal the true cost of discipleship. To follow Christ is to embrace suffering and the Cross. And, at times, to say with Jesus, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?”

Certainly Mother Teresa took on the suffering of the world just as her Lord had done. And she demonstrated a kind of faith that few ever experience. But hers is a faith that will be a lasting witness to the world—when Christopher Hitchens and the media critics are long forgotten.

Letters Reveal Mother Teresa’s Heroic Spiritual Struggle

From Catholic World News:

Cardinal Julian Herranz, the former president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts (the Vatican’s top canon-law body), told the Italian daily La Repubblica that Mother Teresa clearly suffered through the “dark night of the soul,” like many other great saints.

The book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light includes letters that Mother Teresa sent to her confessors and spiritual directors over a period of years, recounting her internal struggles and her sense of aridity in prayer.

The frank content of the letters– describing the spiritual struggles of a woman who is revered worldwide as a saint– has prompted some secular media outlets to question whether Mother Teresa had lost her faith in God. But any such interpretation of the work is profoundly mistaken, Church leaders agree.

Cardinal Herranz noted that leading mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross wrote extensively about the “dark night of the soul.” Their spiritual trials reflect the agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, he said. They should be recognized, the Spanish cardinal added, as “a test of greatness of faith.”

Even Christ Experienced Darkness says Cardinal

Cardinal Herranz compares the darkness experienced by Mother Teresa (related in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light) to what Christ experienced in his  agony in the  Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. From Catholic Online:

Vatican officials said a new book detailing Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s long “crisis of faith” illustrates her spiritual strength in the face of doubt.

“This is a figure who had moments of uncertainty and discouragement, experiencing the classic dark night that God gives to chosen people in order to forge them on the road to holiness,” said Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, a member of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes.

“These moments of crisis felt by great saints are normal and in line with the church’s tradition,” Cardinal Herranz said Aug. 26. Even Christ experienced a similar spiritual trial in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross, he said.

Such moments of “weakness” are in fact “the proof of the greatness of faith of Blessed Mother Teresa and take nothing away from her holiness,” he said.

Cardinal Herranz, who spoke in an interview with the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, said the progress of Mother Teresa’s sainthood cause would not be affected by the letters published in the book.

Mother Teresa Chose the “Better Part”

From Our Sunday Visitor:

Many people were blessed to be friends or colleagues of Mother Teresa, who had a permanent impact on their lives. Our Sunday Visitor asked two of these fortunate people to reflect upon what made this simple sister so special.

It has been 10 years since Mother Teresa went home to God. Her beatification in October 2003 placed her one miracle away from canonization.

As with any saint, there is a danger of turning Mother Teresa into a plastic statue and adorning her with ethereal glow. In my 12 years of association and friendship with Mother, what impressed me most was her beautiful humanity.

Mother Teresa first of all was a mother. She had an extraordinary maternal love. She listened intently to you as if you were her only child. She cared about your best interests and sometimes told you things you didn’t want to hear.

She didn’t judge. Mother used to say, “If you judge people, then you have no time to love them.” She was thoughtful and considerate and, like many mothers, she was never too busy for the little things.

I remember one morning in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1989. I had attended early morning Mass with Mother at her contemplative sisters’ house where she was staying. I rushed out after Mass to go and run the errands she had given me.

I raced to the Missionaries of Charity truck and was about to pull out when I saw a commotion at the door — Mother had come outside and was gesturing for me.

I hastily parked the truck and ran to see what she wanted. To my utter surprise, she had come out with great urgency to give me a peanut butter sandwich and a banana so that I had something for breakfast. That’s what mothers — and saints — do.

The Secret Suffering of Blessed Mother Teresa

The book  Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light will be released on Sept. 19th, but is available for preorder now.

From Time Magazine:

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the “Saint of the Gutters,” went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. “It is not enough for us to say, ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,’” she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had “[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one.” Jesus’ hunger, she said, is what “you and I must find” and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world “that radiating joy is real” because Christ is everywhere — “Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive.”

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured Van der Peet. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.”

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.