People would be surprised if they knew what their souls said to God sometimes.
Brother Lawrence

Mother Teresa is in the news again, this time not for Noble Peace Prizes or canonization conversations, but because another side to her life has come to the fore. In a new book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light we gain unprecedented access into some of the inner spiritual life of this remarkable woman. We get to hear some of what her soul said to God, and some of it, much of it, is painful. I have not read this entire book, and so my picture is incomplete. I have only read the excerpts printed in Time magazine and a few pages from the book.

From what I have read, however, I would say that my respect for Mother Teresa has grown and deepened. She can no longer be considered in any sense a plastic saint, a one-dimensional person, whose “holiness” is so far removed from the normal lives of mortals that she can only be admired, but certainly not emulated. She sought to follow Jesus and in that following struggled with internal doubt, with dark nights of the soul - - - yet she continued to follow. She continued to trust that her actions on behalf of the poor were meaningful, and meaningful to the God she once experienced as so close, but whose distance became her internal reality. If the essence of faith is trust, then Mother Teresa remained a person of deep faith in the midst of her experiences of doubt.

In reading about Mother Teresa’s life, I was reminded of words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who lost his life to the Hitler government. There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting and blissful experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his or her life. But in this world such experiences remain nothing but a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. We have no claim to such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of gaining such experiences. (Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, 329)

The Christian life is as much about practices as about experience – practices of prayer, of worship, of compassion, of justice. Christian faith is about openness to the world and responsiveness to its beauty and pain. When we engage consistently in these practices, when we are open to the world and responsive to it I believe we find Jesus (that’s what I preached this morning – in part, reflecting on Mother Teresa), but maybe we find Jesus in a very different form than what we may hope for or expect. Mother Teresa did not experience the Jesus she hoped to, but I’m not sure that Jesus was absent. One follower of Mother Teresa could say of her, “She always led us to Jesus, especially in very difficult moments” (Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 336). Jesus seemed to be there somewhere, even if Mother Teresa had a difficult time finding that presence.

Yet she kept on, she maintained the practices that were so important to her faith – prayer and compassion for the poor. Our experiences, those of us who are Christians, will continue to be experiences of doubt, of God’s presence and of God’s seeming absence. Will we have the faith to keep the faith even in the dark and dry times? I hope I will.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

P.S. For other insightful comments about the recent stories about Mother Teresa, please follow the links to the blogs of Michelle Hargrave and Jeff Ozanne.