Barry's Blog

"Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don't have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving." -Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

The cover story of the September 3rd edition of Time Magazine read, "The Secret Life of Mother Teresa," and chronicled newly published and previously secret letters of Mother Teresa, revealing her crisis of faith. They shed new light that the beloved icon spent the last half century of her life inwardly tortured by the sense that God had abandoned her. Even as she went about assuring the sick and dying of God's love, she herself felt only emptiness and loss. She took to calling Him, "The Absent One." In fact, the more the religious order she founded prospered, the Missionaries of Charity, the more her own religious life seems to have withered. These new revelations come from a selection of her letters to her spiritual advisers, published recently by Doubleday under the somewhat ironic title, "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light."

Less that three months before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu, now Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters" of Calcutta, would write to a spiritual confidant, the Reverend Michael van der Peet, that: "Jesus has a very special love for you. (But) as for me--The silence and the emptiness is so great--that I look and do not see, --Listen and do not hear--the tongue moves (in prayer) but does not speak...I want you to pray for me--that I let Him have (a) free hand."

What are we to make of these personal revelations? What might we learn from her experience? Does her "dark night of the soul" (to use the phrase from the famous 16th century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross) suggest that there is any value in doubt? What are we to conclude?

Some, especially the increasingly zealous atheistic cadre in the U.S., suggest that she finally "saw the light," that there is no God. Representative of this camp, Christopher Hitchens has written a scathing polemic on Mother Teresa, suggesting that: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith that could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself."

Others would argue, and I would agree, that great saints through the ages have often experienced painful periods of doubt and questioning. The doubting diatribes of King David in Psalm 22, and Asaph in Psalm 73, are proof enough. The fact that the Bible dares to record such musings on seeming Godforsakenness should be enough to persuade the thoughtful person that such spiritual struggles are evidence of faith, not the lose of faith.

I think Kenneth Woodward, writing last week in The Wall Street Journal, said it well: "From the letters I think we can say--must say--that Mother Teresa was a special breed of saint: a genuine mystic...Wanting this experience (union with God) doesn't mean that God will gratify that desire. In any case, the experience is often short-lived. Mother Teresa tells us in her letters that she once felt God's powerful presence and heard Jesus speak to her. Then God withdrew and Jesus was silent. What Mother Teresa experienced thereafter was faith devoid of any emotional consolation...In the end, Mother Teresa had to rely on faith, hope and charity. These are the virtues expected of all Christians, not just the spiritual elite. She was one of us after all."

Mother Teresa, you see, was cut from the same bolt of cloth as all of us. And in some mysterious way, to remove all of our doubts and questionings would be to remove our very humanness. For even the Son of God, God become flesh, followed a similar fate. C.S. Lewis, writing in the late 1950's for The Atlantic Monthly, had the following sage advice, taken from his article, "The Efficacy of Prayer."

"It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that. And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: 'I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic.' "

"Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, 'Why hast Thou forsaken Me?' When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle."

--C.S. Lewis, "The Efficacy of Prayer," in The World's Last Night and Other Essays

For FinishingWell,

Barry