Mother Teresa's Doubt II

[Continued from previous essay]. So, what is a person to do when these overwhelming doubts of the third kind occur? You really have three options. First, you can go public with the doubts immediately and bear the consequences. This is akin to coming forth with some kind of sexual indiscretion. Sometimes forgiveness will be extended to you, but often you will be shunned and cast out. Second, you can deny your doubt. We all lie to ourselves about things, even if we have taken great pains and made solemn vows always to be truthful to the self. We are creatures of self-deception, and we end up creating worlds that are the worlds we want to see rather than the worlds as they may in fact be.*

[*Actually, I will argue below that our age has given up the distinction between the world we see and the real world "out there," and that, as a result, the idea of a God "out there" is less and less convincing in our day].

Or, third, you can have your doubt become public after death, leaving your spiritual heirs to deal with it, much like a parent might leave conflicting provisions in the will or trust which will tie up the family finances and increase sibling rancor for decades to come. Though Mother Teresa apparently wished that her letters would be destroyed, the Church has kindly ignored her wish by publishing them.

Mother Teresa's Doubt--Crippling Doubt

There is no doubt that her doubt, of the third variety, didn't keep her from her service to the "poorest of the poor" in Calcutta. Perhaps she flagged in zeal or gave "less than 100%" on some days, but that is the nature of life. But, in my judgment, the loss of connection with God does mean, however, that you have lost faith. When you lose a sense of connection with another person, when the vital human chain has been broken, no life flows from one source to the other. Or, to put it differently, if life flows from one source to the other, it is not perceived by the one who feels the loss of connection. In that regard, some might argue that Mother Teresa's loss of a feeling of connection with God didn't really affect God's connection with her--it simply was her human weakness or blindness which couldn't "pick up" the divine signals. But the bottom line is the same.

So, my point is that I think the nature of the doubts she expressed are real and are serious. They bespeak a person who has lost faith. They bespeak a person who was once full of a sense of duty and the presence of God but who had gradually lost the latter. Faith, without the conscious feeling of the presence of God, is not faith. Does this feeling of God's presence have to be constant? No, I don't think so. Frequent? Well, now you are pressing me. But I would say that it at least has to be as real as your feeling of love for your children or spouse. There can be times where you doubt whether you love them and have a connection with them. But, if you "lose connection forever" with a spouse, well, you have lost your marriage.

Mother Teresa and the 20th Century Faith "Disease"

My thesis, then, is that Mother Teresa lost faith sometime during the darkness of the half-century when she was ministering to the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. My thesis, further, is that this loss of faith isn't unique with her but is shared, I would suspect, by at least 20-30% of all people "in the pew" and in the pulpit. That is, I think a good percentage of people who are professing Christians have lost the sense of God's presence or a connection with God which they once had. And, when I speak about this connection being "lost," I do not mean that it is a temporary blockage or loss, but a rather permanent emptiness. Why do they keep coming to church or preaching? Different reasons. Some like the companionship. Some keep coming out of guilt. Some keep preaching because they don't want to lose their pensions.

I think this emptiness results from a number of things, not least of which is the philosophical spirit of our age. We have lived, for more than 40 years, in an era with no one satisfactory label, but which many have called "postmodernism." Though the term is a squishy one, one of its chief features is a recognition that truth is perspectival--that your perception of the world is nothing more than that--your perception. Whether objective reality corresponds to your perception of the world isn't a question that the post-modernists answer because, in a sense, there is no "objective" reality "out there." Reality is a what we make of it, the sum of our perceptions, the product of our ways of seeing the world. Thus, a belief in an "objective presence" of God, with existence not only independent of us but who has a personality, character and action independent of our thought, is becoming a "hard sell" for the modern person. God, too, must be a product of some of our longings, rather than a being that has an "objective" (whatever that word means) existence apart from us. Thus, prayer becomes harder and harder to justify, and a convincing case for God's "intervention" in the world becomes harder and harder to make.

My point is that such a philosophy, while anathema to traditional orthodox Christian faith, is "all around" or "in the air we breathe." It erodes faith by subtly convincing us that there really is no objective reality out there to which the Bible bears witness. Even though people might protest to the contrary, that kind of thinking pervades not only our society, but also our churches. I think the "silence" of God that Mother Teresa felt was a species of the absence of God from the contemporary world. We just can't convince ourselves what a divine being independent of our longings might be like.

Conclusion

We all face the feelings relating to the sense of divine absence or silence. Mother Teresa did, too. The fact that she was honest with her feelings in these letters, however, doesn't make her a better Christian or a more "human" saint. It makes her like many other "doubters"--no longer people of faith. As the Catholic Church hasn't shown much eagerness to confront painful truths in its midst in the last few decades (clergy sexual misconduct), I don't believe that it will have the stomach to take this one on, either. The express train for sanctification has long ago left the station.

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