I read this article today and I feel compelled to share it with all of you... maybe because it was very well written and a good read, or maybe because I feel like I can relate and I think some of you might be able to as well. It was an article in Time Magazine from 2007, titled "Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith". I'm not one for plagiarism so everything I quote from the article will be in quotation marks and I will post the link to the online article at the end.
This article talks about how "doubt is a natural part of everyone's life, be it an average believer's or a world-famous saint's". It talks about the doubt that Mother Teresa faced over periods of her life. She wrote many letters to her spiritual confidants confessing how she truly felt. She says in one of her letters, addressed to Rev. Michael van der Peet, "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 tounge moves in prayer but does not speak." Is this surprising to you? It was to me, "that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God... was living out a very different spiritual reality". It's crazy to think that Mother Teresa herself struggled with doubt and faith, feeling God's presence and understanding purpose. I feel like this is something I struggle with myself, but as I continued to read, I realize I am not the only one. "In more than 40 communications, many of which never before been published, she bemoans the dryness, darkness, loneliness and torture she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God."
But the article goes on to say that "Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there." and "Theresa found ways, starting in the early 1960's to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work", this is encouraging to me. This is a real person, with real struggles, who did really great things amoungst the doubt that she faced. Powerful hey?
Why though? Isn't it curious "that absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta"? Why is there so much opposition? I wonder... Food for thought. "Mother Theresa knew what she was doing made sense" and she wasn't going to let up. But "she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate the particular moment on the cross when Jesus asks, 'My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?' His felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the cross, that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling, made sense of her pain."
I will end on one of my most favorite quotes from the article and a question. Mother Theresa felt in her heart that Jesus was saying to her; "You are I know the most incapable person - week and sinful but just because you are that - I want to use you for My glory. Wilt thou refuse?"
Will you refuse? Will I?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00.html
