Faith and despair

A piece in Time Mag about Mother Theresa and the despair she long felt, the silence she heard from her Beloved.
(Himself is really starting to think Catholic, he mentioned hearing about it and that it reminded him of Fr Corapi saying OF COURSE it is our spiritual leaders who too often fall, who would the devil go after first? In war, you try to take out the leaders.)
But it is a common, common story in the hagiographies of mystics and other saints, is it not?
So we'll have no more of that "you're supposed to be happy all the time," twaddle, thank you very much.
Everyone feels it from time to time, and the idea that Faith should function as spiritual zoloft is very damaging, in the way that unrealistic images of beauty are.
The unrealistic expectations it too often sets up can be mortal.
Far from disqualifying her for sainthood, to have lived the life she did always so close to the brink of despair shows the real heroism of her life, the heroism of her virtue, no?

"[R]adiating 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." ...
"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 "...

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.