Where Is My Faith? - Mother Teresa's Doubt

'I think of Agnes. From the time she was a young girl, Agnes believed. Not just believed - she was on fire. She wanted to do great things for God. She said she wanted to "love Jesus as he has never been loved before." She knew Jesus was with her and had an undeniable sense of him calling her. She wrote in her journal., "My soul at present is in perfect peace and joy." She experienced a union with God that was so deep and so continual that it was to her a rapture. She left her home, became a missionary, gave him everything.

And then God left her.

At least, that is how it felt to her. Where is my faith? she wondered. Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. . . . . My God, how painful is this unknown pain. . . . . I have no faith. She tried to pray: "I utter words of community prayers - and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give. But my prayer of union is not there any longer. I no longer pray."

On the outside she worked, she served, she smiled. But she spoke of her smile as her "mask, a cloak that covers everything."

This inner darkness and dryness and pain over the absence of God continued on, year after year, with one brief respite, for nearly fifty years. Such was the secret pain of Agnes, who is better know as Mother Teresa.

The letters that expressed her inner torment were a secret during her life, and she asked that they be destroyed. But a strange thing has happened. Her willingness to persist in the face of such agonizing doubts brings comfort and strength to people that an inner life of ease and certainty never could. As in her life she was a servant of the poor, so in her anguish she has become a missionary for those who doubt.

How are we to understand this? It should warn us about easy formulae that are guaranteed to make us feel closer to God. . . . .

Some people, of course, see this as Mother Teresa just battling up against the reality that God isn't really there after all. "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 could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself," writes Christopher Hitchens. Richard Dawkins warned everyone not to be "taken in by the santimoniously hypocritical Mother Teresa." This, by the way, strikes me as bad strategy. If you are trying to convert people to atheism, taking a shot at Mother Teresa can't be your best move.

But Mother Teresa didn't have this negative understanding. She did not reject God, but neither did she overcome her pain over God's silence. Rather, in a strange way, it became a part of her. A wise spiritual counselor told her three things she needed to hear. One was that there was no human remedy for this darkness. (So she should not feel responsible for it.) Another was that "feeling" the presence of Jesus was not the only or even the primary evidence of his presence. (Jesus himself said by their fruits - not their certainty - you shall know them.) In fact, the very craving for God was a "sure sign" that God was present - though in a hidden way - in her life. And the third bit of wisdom was that the pain she was going through could be redemptive. Jesus himself had to experience the agony of the absence of God: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And as his suffering was redemptive for us, so Mother Teresa could suffer redemptively by holding on to God in the midst of darkness.'

- John Ortberg "Faith & Doubt"