An Australian Sister’s Story of Leaving Mother Teresa, Losing Faith and Her On-going Search for Meaning
Reminiscent of Lapierre’s THE CITY OF JOY, this searing, eye-opening memoir is by an extraordinary woman who served for eleven years as a nun in Mother Teresa’s order, working with the world’s poor. Ultimately, it is also the story of her journey into disillusionment with the order and her crisis of faith.Enormously compassionate and unflinchingly honest, Colette Livermore recounts the horrors she saw and tried to remedy in her work with the sisters of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in some of the poorest places in the East - the sprawling, fetid garbage dump of Manila and the crowded slums of urban India. The sheer numbers of desperate people Livermore encountered and helped was huge and humbling, their circumstances devastating; yet these interactions with other souls were not unbearable to her - rather, she drew strength and courage from them, knowing that it was her calling to help all who presented themselves, and to be with them in their suffering.Untimately, though, she could not bear the rigid administrative culture of the order, and its insistence on unquestioning obedience, which was harmful to the young sisters mentally, emotionally and spiritually, while limiting the good they could do. Beyond her inner struggle to find her right path amid suffering many illnesses herself as a result of her service, Livermore also had to resist pressure from Mother Teresa and other superiors who tried many arguments to keep her from leaving. But leave she did, and went on to become a general practioner and an atheist, while continuing her life’s work helping the disadvantaged, building a new life of humanitarian service.An inspiring story of an incredible woman, HOPE ENDURES is also a critique that asks readers to question blind faith and obedience and discover their own true path to practising goodness in life.
