Yeah.
A bruised reed he will not break,
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
-- Isa. 42:3 [ESV]
Doubt and faith are not antithetical. The opposite of faith is antipathy or hostility, not doubt. It takes incredible resilience of faith to hold on and believe when every fiber of your being cries out how screwed up this world is, and seeks to indict God. But, as in Ps. 73, we may be foolish, myopic, and short-sighted, but God upholds us even through our doubts.
Heck - if doubt were some sort of unforgivable sin, than a large number of the Psalms - which were written in raw doubt - would be sinful, and Christ's cry of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?" would be sinful.
The interesting story in Mother Theresa is not that she struggled with doubting God. Frankly, any human who didn't struggle with doubt after seeing what she saw on the streets of Calcutta would be some sort of unfeeling sociopath. Far more intriguing - and uplifting - is how Mother Theresa clung onto her faith in the midst of her doubt, and continued the acts of mercy she felt Christ called her to. Despite deep doubt and despair gnawing at her from within, she pressed on without wavering. That's simply amazing.
Now, as regards the orthodoxy of certain statements of Mother Teresa, I take no position. Too many of those statements are quoted by people with agendas unfriendly to Mother Theresa, wholly divorced from their context. Furthermore, wasn't she Macedonian? Did she speak English well, if at all?
My mama always told me, "Never put things in writing." Unfortunately, my mama didn't write that down.
There are many things to consider here, but one of them is NOT how Mother Teresa “ended up”. Her life was in God’s hands and so her judgment is not ours to make and anyone should hesitate to do so. It is God’s mystery, not ours, how things were when she met her God face-to-face.
What I do know is that it isn’t at all uncommon for good and holy Christians to go through periods of spiritual dryness, of darkness and of doubt. Some call it the “desert experience”. Others refer to it as the Dark NIght (both in the sensory sense and in the spiritual sense). It is understood to be time of purification.
We have the Psalms to illustrate that to us—with their times of praise and temple worship and then their times of suffering and seeking God in moments of trial. We all know of the Psalm 23 “valley of darkness”, but so beautifully expressed also is the whole of Psalm 84-—”when they go through the Bitter Valley they make it a place of springs”.
It is the testimony of our lives and how we endure with God’s grace—as St.Paul writes: “all is grace”.
I think now especially of Fr. Walter Czisek as he writes of his 23 years in the Russian Gulag-—and Fr. Van Than as he smuggled his letters out to his people while suffering and imprisoned in Viet Nam.
Each of us is given that measure which God in His mysterious and wonderful will has designed for us. For some, it will be much easier than for others and we don’t know why this is so—we only know that it is.
Mother Teresa may not have had a “mask” or a “cloak” as much as it may have been God’s will to conceal from the world at large the true measure of her holiness—a sort of mini-version of the Mose’ veil.
We poor mortals just don’t know it all. Though we did try it once—in the Garden. It obviously failed.