Hope Endures

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, 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 - in the sprawling, fetid garbage dump of Manila, and the crowded slums of urban India. The sheer numbers of desperate people she encounters and helps are huge and humbling, their circumstances devastating; yet these interactions with other souls are not unbearable to her - rather, she draws strength and courage from them, knowing that this is her calling, to help all who present themselves, and to be with them in their suffering.

Untimately, though, she cannot bear the rigid, often psychologically abusive, administrative culture of the order - and its insistence on unquestioning obedience that harms the young sisters mentally, emotionally, and spiritually while limiting the good they can do. Beyond her inner struggle to find her right path amid suffering many illnesses herself as a result of her service, Livermore also has to resist pressure from Mother Teresa and other superiors who try many arguments to keep her from leaving. But leave she does, and goes 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.