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| Mother Teresa's Secret Fire: The Encounter That Changed Her Life and How It Can Transform Your Own | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 34 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2468
Category: Book
Author: Joseph Langford
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Studio: Our Sunday Visitor
Manufacturer: Our Sunday Visitor
Label: Our Sunday Visitor
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 159276309X
Dewey Decimal Number: 271.97
EAN: 9781592763092
ASIN: 159276309X
Publication Date: October 15, 2008
Release Date: October 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This is the book that Mother Teresa wanted written.
"I waited in silence for an answer. Mother looked up and said, yes it is true. Then after a pause, she added, And one day you must tell the others...."-- Author Joseph Langford, co-founder of Mother Teresa's priests community.
Thirty years after her Nobel Peace Prize, five years since her beatification, and one year since the media-generated controversy regarding her dark night, Mother Teresa's message was never more important than it is today.
She continues to be a worldwide icon for Christians and non-Christians alike who long for something larger than our daily routines, something more meaningful and sustaining than anything money, fame or power can buy. She is a symbol of the nobility of the human spirit and every person's capacity to do extraordinary things.
At age 38, Mother Teresa broke out of her safe and reliable routine as a grade school teacher. With only 5 rupees to her name, she began going daily into the slums of Calcutta. By the time of her death in 1997, her Missionaries of Charity had spread to more than 120 countries and touched millions of lives.
What was it that caused this transformation? What special qualities did she have that moved her into action? How do we account for her universal impact from such extreme, humble conditions? What was it in her that touched so many so deeply?
Mother Teresa's Secret Fire provides the answers and what they mean for you.
With the help of her trusted friend and the co-founder of her missionaries of Charity Priests' community, walk in the footsteps of Mother Teresa to understand the depths of her spirituality. This is the message she asked Joseph Langford to share with the world.
Let her message guide you to the most neglected realms of your own spirit. Discover the inspiration, insight and instruction to transform your everyday life in the same way Mother Teresa transformed hers.
"Father Joseph Langford has given the world a book that goes to the core of Mother Teresa's Christian soul with relevance for peoples of all religions."
-- Rev. John J. Keane, S.A., Ecumenical Officer for Friars of the Atonement
"This is the book on Mother Teresa we have been waiting for. An outstanding achievement."
-Paul Murray, O.P. , Internationally renowned author, preacher, and professor of Spirituality
"In Secret Fire, Father Joseph Langford sets the record straight on her dark night."
- Monica Yehle, Editor, MISSION, Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States
"The beauty of her example and life surrendered to the will of God is an inspiration."
- Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley, Archdiocese of Boston
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| Customer Reviews: Read 29 more reviews...
 Mother Theresa truly was a saint... January 2, 2009
if she was willing to entrust such important, and difficult, insights to someone as cheesy and emotionally tone deaf as this author.
The content, not only her interior light and life, but the nature of God's love and the dark night of the soul, is wonderful and very important. TDNOS is not aridity, but the very intense absence of God from someone acquainted with his tender presence, the inner knowledge of sin's cold, darkness that compassion generally hides from us to keep us from despair. It needs to be better understood, and this book competently, from the intellectual point of view, lays this out.
Emotionally, it could hardly be more off-key at times. Anyone truly seeking God is not going to be as much of a spiritual, and worldly, status-seeker as the author betrays himself to be. Anyone bathed in the loving intimacies of light, would share that light with the reader, not stand on a tin podium and discourse about it.
However flawed the messenger, the message is an important gift.
 A fine, challenging book December 23, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I remember seeing the photographer Linda Schaefer on EWTN's "The World Over" when she was out promoting her book "Come and See: A Photojournalist's Journey into the World of Mother Teresa." She recounted how she approached Mother to ask for permission to photograph her and her nuns working their mission.
Mother basically told Schaefer that there was no shortage of photographers from around the world requesting to take Mother's photograph (which no doubt was true); the shortage was in people willing to actually perform the less glamorous work, the immediate work: to help wash the feeble and tend to the sick.
Mother told the surprised photographer she could be most helpful by putting her camera away and by instead ministering to the people in need that were all around them. It was only after Schaefer did this that Mother let her start snapping some photographs.
I mention this story because I always tremble a bit when reading about Mother Teresa. I'm not afraid I will read an account or a biography and find her lacking; instead, I worry she will find me lacking, not only as a Catholic but as a human being in general.
It's an odd experience -- when you're reading about Mother Teresa, you feel like she is reading you, too. It's amazing how the power of her personality comes through in this book, even though she didn't write it. (It's clear that the author, Fr. Joseph Langford, knew her well.) She was a servant of God and a force of nature. It's in a saint like Mother Teresa that you find there is no separation between faith and good works -- faith compels works and works strengthen faith. What is one without the other? In short, Mother Teresa's life made it clear that true grace is always a call to action.
"Mother Teresa's Secret Fire" is a wonderful book. It is not strictly a biography, although it often touches on the facts or Mother's life, and it isn't just an anecdotal journal about what life was like working beside her, although the book touches on that, too. It's really a meditation on how Mother Teresa came to fully feel and to understand God's boundless love for her and for the rest of us, his weak and wounded children.
Fr. Langford isn't just out to convey a glimpse of this sainted woman -- he wants to save you by making Mother's understanding of God and His love known to you. It's a tall order, but Fr. Langford is, after all, a priest, and in the end he wants to accomplish what Mother wanted -- to bring people closer to God. I think with "Mother Teresa's Secret Fire," he does a fine job.
"I Thirst" December 23, 2008
Mother Teresa's Secret Fire contains brief but telling biographical information about Mother Teresa. I didn't know much about her before reading this book, but I have known for a long time about the wonderful good she did for the world. It was fulfilling to be able to fill in the details I previously didn't know.
Most of this book revolves around the subject of Jesus thirsting for our love, while we conversely thirst for his love also. Repeated in several different ways through several different stories, this is essentially what the book is about. This is what motivated Mother Teresa and what she dedicated her life to.
I never felt like I was getting anywhere in the read. I kept waiting for there to be more information, but in the end I realized the focus of this book (and the focus of Mother Teresa's life) was this thirst.
For those who wish to know more about this subject this might be a good read. For people wishing for a more biographical study of Mother Teresa, you might want to look elsewhere.
Sharing Mother Teresa's Message with the World December 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What was the secret fire that fueled Mother Teresa? That is the question that Father Joseph Langford, who co-founded the Missionaries of Charity Fathers with Mother Teresa, attempts to answer in "Mother Teresa's Secret Fire." The first section, "Fire in the Night," tells of Mother Teresa's Inspiration Day - September 10, 1946 in which she received her call within a call - "a divine mandate to leave the convent and go out to serve the poor in the slums." More importantly, "she had been graced with an overwhelming experience with God," an experience which she largely kept secret for many years.
The second section, "Illumination" explores the light that emanated from Mother Teresa. People "could feel the presence of God in Mother Teresa; they intuited her holiness, and were drawn to it." Being "light would become the focus of Mother Teresa's entire vocation." She experienced great darkness in her own spiritual life, but that darkness enabled her to share in the pain of the people that she ministered to. She was sent to shown them God's love, to bring them light. She wanted to show all of us how to do the same in whatever place we find ourselves in this world.
The final section, "Transformation," illustrates how the "consuming fire" within the young Sister Teresa turned her into Mother Teresa "and how it can transform us as well." The initial moment of inspiration was just the beginning. What fueled Mother Teresa throughout her life was her ongoing prayer with God. "Prayer was the flame that rekindled the secret fire she carried within." Prayer is available to each and every one of us. "The gift of God's love is the fruit of a free and personal decision; one that cannot be coerced and manipulated, but only requested, yearned for, and waited on in prayer." God will always respond.
Mother Teresa's central message, the secret that she received on the train that September day in 1946, was the thirst of Jesus. Jesus wants each of us. God always loves us. He yearns for our love in return. We are all born with the desire for God. "Only God can satisfy us." In "Mother Teresa's Secret Fire," Father Langford does a remarkable job of promoting Mother Teresa's message and sharing it with the world.
Mother Teresa's Inner Journey December 18, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
When we come upon the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta we are accustomed to hearing about her ministry to the "poorest of the poor". Her legacy is well known to people throughout the world for her globe trotting work helping the poor in the slums of Calcutta, AIDS patients, and other unfortunate people. Much is known about her life from Skjope of the former Yugoslavia to the streets of Calcutta, but far less is known about her inner life and motivation.
From Joseph Langford's `Mother Teresa's Secret Fire' we get a revealing portrait of her interior life. Centering on an intimate encounter with God on her way to a retreat while taking the Darjeeling train on September 10, 1946, Mother Teresa received a singular message from God about "His thirst" for souls. Noting that Jesus cried out "I thirst" before dying on the cross, Mother Teresa with a singular passion and who described herself often as the "pencil of God," elaborated about that thirst being not so much for water as a thirst for our souls.
Langford also expounds on this thirst. Tying the familiar events of Mother Teresa's life, including winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he gives light to her speeches, her journals and other writings which illustrate and elaborate what this divine thirst (or longing or ardent desire) for mankind entails. But once he establishes the prime mover of her inner life, he elaborates less about her life and more about her message. Having the support of scripture and the writings of formidable saints, Langford makes the case that divine thirst has been a theme of many a mystic's writings. (Who would not be taken by their metaphorical take on thirst from Psalm 42 "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God."?) Cogently, Mother Teresa's writings still convey God's message at a time when spiritual indifference and crisis seem to be coming to a climax.
Always returning to that ineffable encounter Mother Teresa had with God on the Darjeeling train, Langford manages to anchor his writing without seeming fragmented. The focus only improves during the reader's own journey which is enhanced by a meditation on the love of God and how our relationship to Him is seen as quenching Jesus's thirst when we return our love to Him. Sometimes he is too repetitive in the beginning about ideas that are sometimes hard for anyone to convey, but his clear improvement makes the sublime even more readable as the pages go on. One of the best passages comes late in the book where he reveals her written meditations about the Samaritan woman's encounter with Jesus at the well.
For its import and impact, this is clearly a five-star book, but for the presentation, I subjectively dock one star, yet I highly recommend this spiritual journey even for a few bumps along the way, which undoubtedly even Mother Teresa herself encountered on that Darjeeling train.
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