Thank You, Mother

Whether in recent days you have read or heard about these haunting words and their original source, give them your full attention now:

"Where is my faith? Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness... If there be God — please forgive me."

"Such deep longing for God -- and ... repulsed -- empty -- no faith -- no love -- no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction -- Heaven means nothing -- pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything."

"What do I labor for?" “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."

"I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God -- tender, personal love. If you were (there), you would have said, 'What hypocrisy."'

"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."


Mother Theresa. You know, the beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner who is apparently on the fast track to sainthood?... Yeah, her. She said or wrote all of those words, revealed in a new book about her to be published this fall, in correspondence sent to friends and confidants over the last several decades of her life.

What’s your reaction?

Secular press reports I’ve seen treat this like another of the Mother’s miracles, though one with a wounded and stained history. The reports express surprise, as if it is some kind of newsflash that a person of such high spiritual regard, such laudable and selfless achievement, could experience, let alone openly confess, doubt and distrust of this magnitude.

There’s nothing necessarily mischievous about these secular takes. I doubt media people have it in for Mother Theresa, her beatification, or her place in Christianity’s hall of fame. More bluntly, I assume there are great numbers of Christians who upon hearing of her doubts reacted with similar surprise.

“She was a pillar of faith! No way she felt that much doubt.”

“She’s going to be a saint! They wouldn’t let her be a saint if she were that weak.”

“She’s my role model. I need her to be strong so I can be strong. Please tell me she didn’t really think those things!”

It is the faithful’s naive and needy from whom surprise at Mother Theresa’s doubts will sound most loudly. The naive, because they think of the spiritual journey as a linear progression in which travelers are stronger today than they were yesterday, and will tomorrow continue their steady, predictable advances. The needy, because invulnerable heroes – people who escape the demons of doubt – are for them an essential source of hope from whom even a hint of weakness can be crippling.

Seasoned followers of Jesus, however, will be heartened, not surprised, by Mother Theresa’s discouragement. First, because personal experience long ago proved to them that the road to spiritual growth is neither straight nor smooth-surfaced. Advances along the path today are painfully and easily erased tomorrow. Second, and I think more important, because followers of Jesus know that spiritual heroes conquer doubt; they don’t dodge it.

Exhibit A, Jesus. In the Garden at Gethsemene on the night before he died, all but abandoned by accompanying friends, Jesus pleaded with God to take away what seemed to be his inevitable fate. Yet, doubts clearly surfaced, he concluded his prayer with the conquering cry, “Not my will, but your will be done.”

Spiritual heroes survive doubt, but they can’t eliminate it.

Or, on a cross placed ignominiously between the death trees of two criminals, Jesus demanded God’s attention via the opening words of the 22nd Psalm: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But in the end, victory sounded with his final breaths: “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Spiritual heroes overcome doubt, but they can’t avoid it anymore than you or I can.

I honor Mother Theresa’s candor. That she chose to follow one from whom she felt so completely isolated, and by whom she felt wounded, abandoned, and helpless – that she fed and housed thousands, and loved millions of others while inside she wrestled with imponderable spiritual issues is a blazing testament to hope... my hope. After reading the quotations with which this essay began I know that in the spiritual despair of my past I had good, hopeful company, much the same company as I will have the next time.

Later on today – perhaps three minutes after I post this piece – when I am once again vulnerable, I will look to heaven and thank God for all the saints, including Mothers named Theresa.


Pray with me:
If she could, if he could, if they could... so can I. Help me learn from the example of other followers, God. May I learn not only from their service, but also from their doubt. Not only from their faith, but also from their fears. May I learn from them that to be obedient is not to be happy in the moment, but rather joyful in the end. In the name of Jesus I have had my doubts, yet in his name I still pray, Amen.