By RAY WADDLE

Of all the world’s heroes, the psychology of the saint is particularly impenetrable. But if we had the chance, who would really want to know the details? Their lives were luminous and inspirational. That has to be enough. To grasp all their mental motives or missteps might only disillusion. Right?

Mother Teresa is breaking that taboo. This summer, 10 years after her death, a new book made a startling disclosure: for the last 50 years of her life, she was in turmoil because she painfully felt God’s absence.

Despite her standing as a titan who built a sprawling mission organization to comfort the poor, this smiling “living saint” discreetly admitted for decades to deep spiritual frustration, seeking the God who would not come.

“There is no God in me,” she once wrote. “If I ever become a Saint -- I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven – to light the light of those in darkness on earth.”

News of her epic ordeal played out briefly in the media. Atheists scoffed: another pious fraudulence exposed! Defenders calmly claimed she joins the many religious heroes who wrestled with doubt yet believed.

But her celebrity, influence, and the ungodly duration of her anguish make her case unprecedented. We have a choice - either write her off, or take up the challenge once again of probing the enigma of belief.

Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” is edited by a priestly associate who narrates her spiritual journey using excerpts from her correspondence. It traces her early days as a nun, her mystical experience of God’s presence in 1946, then five decades of inner turbulence and aridity until her death in 1997, age 87.

Since then, because everything is sped up today, Mother Teresa has been on the fast track to canonization. These revelations won’t likely torpedo the proceedings but paradoxically fuel momentum for sainthood, and the book will stir group study and individual devotions. The reason: During the desert years, Mother Teresa felt God’s absence – but not God’s non-existence. God had visited her in 1946; now God was permitting darkness, but overseeing all. In her own mind, this gave her suffering meaning. She never stopped comforting others or inspiring devotion to Jesus. She found God not inside but in the faces of slum-dwellers. There she found solidarity, perhaps salvation.

Because of her anguish, Mother Teresa will one day be patron saint of a whole epoch – ours – where all-consuming technology, not God, supplies the solutions, and an obsession with the body replaces the soul, and as a result millions are numbed and struggling, but waiting, waiting.