Mohler: faith not feelings
Colson: there are dark nights of the soul
Neuner: feelings not the bottom line in a relationship with Jesus
Satan thrives on disbelief.
God does not. By that I don’t mean that God disappears with disbelief. Rather I mean that He is ALWAYS there waiting, a loving God. A patient God. It is WE who thrive with our belief in Him, our awesome triune God.
Yeah. well, I propose, Mr. Colson, that without that Great Cloud of Witnesses -- the Church, without the Blessed Mother (which you enjoy by virtue of your baptism though you perhaps deny it today), nobody can survive a dark night of the soul, or spiritual desolation.
I don't know how "Christians" get by on just telling themselves over and over again, "the scripture is true. the scripture is true." One must have the Eucharist to have Life.
My questions to the doubters. What is the ratio of faith to doubt that a person can have and still be a Christian?
Faith is what kept Mother Teresa ministering to the poor and dying not feelings.We all get sucker punched by our feelings but people like Mother Teresa who continue doing what God called them to do in spite of feelings are doing it on faith. The “feelings” of love isn’t what keeps a man or woman by the side of a spouse when they become sick physically or mentally,it’s the love itself that keeps them there !!!
Actually, that's not true...I know I've never doubted My Heavenly Father's existence....
With the horrors Mother Theresa saw every day, it would be impossible for her, a human being, not to experience the feelings she did. But she carried on serving and loving the ‘unlovable’. Bless her heart.
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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.
Reminded me of this:
Mat 7:21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
Mat 7:22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
Mat 7:23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
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.”
There was a time when I felt much the same way. The experience taught me that sometimes in life, all you can do is pray, then grit your teeth and press on.
After all, if God did not spare his Son from suffering for the sins of the world, why should any of us expect to skate through life unscathed?
Apparently, Mother Teresa was was a great humanitarian...And she has been recognized as much thru out her lifetime...
I remember reading that Teresa never shared her faith in Jesus but encouraged people to follow their own God(s) in their own religion...
I have to wonder then, how Teresa figured this (her work) was God's work...God is not so interested in saving people's lives, but their souls...And their souls can be saved only thru Jesus Christ...
So out of all the bodies Teresa came in contact with, whether they lived or died, none will enter heaven??? And that is working the will of God???
All Christians have bouts of doubt, but for it to last year after year indicates something else at play...
It gives me goosebumps when saintly Christians reach across the Catholic-Protestant rift.
My heart has always been content to let Jews be Jews and love them from a distance, but Christians belong together.
Leanne Payne always teaches — “It does not say, in the Bible, ‘You will FEEL my presence.’ The Lord simply says, ‘I am with you always.’” It is a huge difference.
I don't think she suffers from a lack of faith, but from an inability to feel the presence of God. To me, that seems egotistical. I know that a Creator exists, but I don't expect to feel the Creator's presence. That would be presumptuous of me. Instead, I see the Creator's hand in everything. That's good enough for me.
Mother Teresa's spiritual problems stem from her egotism. She wants to see herself as Christlike, as someone who has the capacity to suffer as much as Jesus did on the cross, maybe even to out-suffer him. She seemed to be appeased when her spiritual emptiness was pointed out to her as being comparable to Jesus' desolation when he was on the cross and cried out to God (asking 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'). This strikes me as egotistical. She wants to feel closer to God by suffering as much as Jesus did, or more. I knew that her whole mindset was one of suffering, but I didn't understand the reason why, until the letters were revealed.
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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