Christian Leaders Weigh in on Mother Teresa's 'Crisis of Faith'

Letters revealing Mother Teresa’s half-century-long “crisis of faith” have many pondering what to make of the secret life of one of the most revered figures in modern history.

Yet as theologians and psychologists offer interpretations for her deep “darkness,” a preeminent American theologian used Mother Teresa’s struggle to remind believers to trust Christ and not their feelings.

Whether it be an average Christian or a saint, doubts on the existence of God and turmoil over the inability to feel His presence is something every Christian has wrestled with.

Yet more important than dwelling on human emotions is securing one’s faith in Christ, according to Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and is one of the largest seminaries in the world.

“Salvation comes to those who believe in Christ – it is by grace we are saved through faith,” wrote Mohler in an online column Thursday in “On Faith” – a project of The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine.

“But the faith that saves is not faith in faith, nor faith in our ability [to] maintain faith, but faith in Christ,” he emphasized. “Our confidence is in Christ, not in ourselves.”

Mohler was responding to this week’s TIME cover story which explores Mother Teresa’s inner struggles in light of a new book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, which was made public for the first time letters covering a period of 66 years in which she questioned her beliefs and God.

In correspondents to her spiritual confidants, Mother Teresa laments on the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness,” and “torture” she suffers with her inability to feel God’s presence.

A letter to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier in 1953, according to TIME, read: "Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work.'"

Another letter in 1956 read: “Such deep longing for God – and…repulsed – empty – no faith – no love – no zeal. – [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction – Heaven means nothing – pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.”

Mother Teresa also painfully shared her inability to pray saying she just “utter words” of Community prayers– a confession that came from a woman who once said the Christmas holiday should remind the world “that radiating joy is real” because Christ is everywhere.

Yet despite the “pain and darkness” in her soul, Mother Teresa served tirelessly among the outcasts, the dying and the most abject poor in India. She brought countless sick Indians to her center from slums and gutters to be treated and cared for under the banner of Christ’s love.

“The very essence of faith, you see, is believing even in the absence of evidence,” said Chuck Colson, founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship, in a column Wednesday in response to the TIME article. “And it is the only way we can know Christ.

Colson shared that he experienced his own darkness of soul when a few years back two of his three children were diagnosed with cancer.

“We can conclude rationally that God exists, that His Word is true, and that He has revealed Himself” Colson said. “But without that leap of faith, we will never know God personally or accept His will in Christ.”

It was in the late 1950s when Mother Teresa met a well-known theologian, the Rev. Joseph Neuner, who helped her accept the “darkness” she felt.

Neuner gave her three pieces of counsel – first, there was no human cure for what she had, so she shouldn’t feel personally guilty about it; second, feeling Jesus is not the only evidence of His presence, and the fact that she longed for God is a “sure sign” of his “hidden presence” in her life; and last, the feeling of absence was part of the “spiritual side” of her work for Jesus.

Mother Teresa responded to Neuner in 1961: “I can’t express in words – the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me – for the first time in ….years – I have come to love the darkness – for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness & pain on earth.”

She later wrote to Neuner, “I accept not in my feelings – but with my will, the Will of God – I accept his will,” according to TIME.

“So what do the letters of Mother Teresa reveal? For one, they reveal the true cost of discipleship,” commented Colson. “To follow Christ is to embrace suffering and the Cross. And, at times, to say with Jesus, ‘My God, my God, why did you abandon me?’”

Baptist seminary head Mohler said that although he would not “presume to read Mother Teresa’s heart or soul,” he concluded from her story that faith should not be placed on volatile emotions but rather solely in the unchanging God.

“There is a sweet and genuine emotional aspect to the Christian faith, and God made us emotional and feeling creations,” wrote Mohler. “But we cannot trust our feelings. Our faith is not anchored in our feelings, but in the facts of the Gospel.

“Our confidence is in Christ, not in ourselves. We are weak; He is strong. We fluctuate; He is constant. We cannot trust our feelings nor our emotional state. We trust in Christ. Those who come to Christ by faith are not kept unto Him by our faith, but by his faithfulness,” wrote Mohler.

The Catholic Church is considering whether or not to make Mother Teresa a saint and the letters were collected as supporting materials for the process.

Mother Teresa died in 1997, nearly two decades after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Try again; from Matthew 25:

31 "When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy F140 angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. 33 And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35 for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; 36 I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.' 37 Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? 38 When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? 39 Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' 40 And the King will answer and say to them, 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.' 41 Then He will also say to those on the left hand, 'Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: 42 for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; 43 I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.' 44 Then they also will answer Him, F141 saying, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?' 45 Then He will answer them, saying, 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.' 46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

Sheep represent those whose faith is rooted in charity. Goats represent those with faith alone.

Forbidden in the Old Testament.

So from a Catholic perspective, cannabalism and drinking blood aren't sins any longer? Uh, okay.

How, specifically, does the fact that He "had not yet gone to the Cross" have anything to do with it??

So you believe they were eating his human flesh and drinking his human blood before He had died? Excuse me, but ewww. At any rate, remember at the last supper He said "Do this in remembrance of Me." He did NOT say "You have to eat and drink this to have eternal life."

He performed all his other miracles before having "gone to the cross".

None of His other miracles had to do with what you are claiming, that the bread and wine at the 'last supper' were His actual flesh and blood.

Uh, Jesus, after death, had (and has) a very real body.

Uh, yes, but it is the human flesh He walked the earth in, made imperishable as ours will be at resurrection. God is Spirit as scripture says and, of course, has no flesh.

But as I said, Protestants don't REALLY believe what the Bible says

Sure, we do. Including the verse that says Jesus' words are SPIRIT and they are LIFE.

Teresa’s agony: A meditation on walking by faith

Alan Keyes
September 3, 2007

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, the person we knew as Mother Teresa endured, throughout her career of ministry to the dying, the travail we would ordinarily associate with damnation, which is the sense of “being without God.”

I read the article with what I found to be a surprising sense of confirmation, as when we return to a place long familiar and find there exactly what we remember. Is anything so disturbing as such unexpected familiarity? I have since then been preoccupied with the clues that it immediately brought to mind, the two most important being Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane and His cry of seeming desperation shortly before His death on the cross. I have heard sermons and read meditations that purport to see in these moments the ultimate confirmation of Christ’s humanity. In the context of Mother Teresa’s spiritual suffering, however, I was put in mind of G. K. Chesterton’s observation, in his biography of St. Francis of Assisi, that “if Saint Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis.”

Oneness with God — and aloneness

No Christian can fail to appreciate how Teresa’s selfless dedication to the “wretched refuse” of Calcutta’s teeming byways resembled the Passion of Christ. To that extent, her experience may add something to our understanding of the Passion. As Christ in Gethsemane totally committed himself to do his Father’s will for the sake of our salvation, so Teresa totally committed herself to love with the heart of Christ, to surrender every semblance of worldly glory in order to confirm the presence of God in the lives of those condemned to oblivion by the world’s unlovely sinfulness.

But in this total commitment to the heart of Christ, one must experience Christ’s love of God, which is not the love of one being for another, but the expression of God as He fulfills the promise of His own perfect will. The moment of that fulfillment therefore belongs to God alone — as He was before the promise of Creation, as He is in and of Himself, even in the midst of it.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, as Christ prepared to fulfill God’s promise of salvation, the disciples slept. Similarly, in the Garden of Eden, as God prepared to fulfill the promise of human creation (”Let us make man in our image and after our likeness”), Adam slept. The moment of perfection, when every promise is fulfilled, belongs to God alone, who is the be all and end all, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.

Christ on the cross was the instrument of God’s perfection, the expression of His absolute commitment to human salvation. But as the fulfillment of that commitment belongs to God alone, in the moment of that fulfillment Christ represents to us in human terms the absolute presence of God, of God alone, of God without the possibility of any other reality.

But from our human point of view, in terms of our human consciousness, what would it mean to be thus absolutely alone, so perfectly identified with the presence of God that we feel in His presence no other being but our own?

It would mean that the closer one comes to becoming the perfect expression of Christ’s heart, the closer one gets to His consciousness of complete identity with His Father, God. The presence of God then no longer appears as something that exists outside us, because it exists in and through our faithful representation of Him.

But as we lose the consciousness of being separate from God, we must lose our consciousness of God as a being separate from our own. In that moment, we seem to lose the One who has been the focus of all our love, all our hope, all our longing to be. Our heart cries out with the passion of Christ, “My God, My God hast even thou forsaken me?”

The irony of faithfulness

It is as if these words are written above the gateway of a spiritual wilderness through which Teresa wandered in her heart, even as in her body she walked ever more faithfully in the footsteps of our Lord. Indeed, this was the glorious irony of her faithfulness — that every day, she walked as God would have her walk, though without an emotional sense of confidence in her certain, sure reward. Hers was the faith to silence the scornful, who pretend that the essence of Christian living is greed for some other-worldly reward. When the comforting knowledge of God’s presence no longer confirms the certainty of that reward, then does the truly Christian heart conclude with Christ, “Into thy hands O Lord I commend my Spirit,” staking hope and life and all on faith — on lonely faith, on faith alone.

It would do much for the reconciliation of humanity if we take the time to reflect on Mother Teresa’s gift — her sharing in the loneliness of God. As some faithful Christians of the past received in their bodies the marks of Christ’s passion, so she bore its mark upon her spirit, in her soul. Hers seemed a ministry to ease the suffering bodies of Calcutta’s dying poor, but in truth she journeyed as well through the spiritual wilderness of this purblind world, feeling in her heart the lonely desperation that is so much the hallmark of our times, particularly among the nations that once acknowledged the light of Christ, but are now relapsing into darkness. She lived for God in that darkness, where He seems no longer to exist, so that all may know that even there His love abides.

New eyes and a new consciousness

When we look for evidence that even now she continues her godly walk amongst us, we should look for miracles of spiritual healing and transformation. She was the patroness of dying bodies, but she is the patron saint of dying souls. Now she walks the byways of their spiritual Calcutta, ministering to their loneliness from her long familiarity with the neighborhoods wherein they waste away.

But she has new eyes now, I think, and a new consciousness, that sees the presence of God where He has seen it all along and that may, at last, take comfort in His sight.

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/keyes/070903

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