Surrounded with fullness of living Food, you allow yourself to starve

Advice from Mother Theresa to Malcolm Muggeridge who was struggling with the offences of the institutional church before he finally converted to Roman Catholicism.

"One reason for my hesitating so long before becoming a Catholic was my disappointment at some of the human elements I saw in the Catholic Church.  In spite of the following letter from Mother Theresa I still held back, and a number of years went by before I could make up my mind.

“I think, dear friend,” she wrote, “I understand you better now. I am afraid I could not answer to your deep suffering.  I don’t know why, but you are to me like Nicodemus (who came to Jesus under cover of night), and I’m sure the answer is the same: ‘Unless you become a little child…”

“I am sure you will understand beautifully everything – if you would only become a little child in God’s hands.  Your longing for God is so deep, and yet he keeps Himself away from you.  He must be forcing Himself to do so, because He loves you so much as to give Jesus to die for you and for me.  Christ is longing to be your Food.  Surrounded with fullness of living Food, you allow yourself to starve.

“The personal love Christ has for you is infinite – the small difficulty you have regarding the Church is finite. Overcome the finite with the infinite.  Christ has created you because He wanted you.  I know what you feel – terrible longing, with dark emptiness – and yet He is the one in love with you.  I do not know if you have seen these few lines before, but they fill and empty me:

My God, my God, what is a heart

That Thou should’st so eye and woo,

Pouring upon it all Thy heart

As if Thou had’st nothing else to do?"

From "Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim," by Malcolm Muggridge