Reflection This Week
IF HER, WHY NOT ME?
   Reports are that in the recent book on Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light that makes public a huge volume of her intimate correspondence, we see what is an apparently very intense, fifty-year, struggle with faith and belief. She uses words like "dry", "empty", "lonely", "torturous", "dark", "devoid of all feeling" to describe what her interior spiritual life was like for almost her entire adult life.

   There are those who would be appalled to hear or read about such feelings from an obvious saint, from someone who stood out as an example of kindness, caring and love, certainly as a woman of faith. There are those who applaud her honesty even if she believed no one would ever read these letters and intimate writings since her wishes were that they be destroyed upon her death. There are even those who would and do claim that she was simply an atheist, a non-believer, in nun’s clothing.

   What she was was someone just like the rest of us: totally human, one with doubts and fears, one with a deep faith that was often tenuous, a lover of God who often seemed so distant. The fact that she was so brutally honest about her inner feelings, about her closeness to the God she loved and served, is what is amazing to me. She knew everyone considered her a saint but was haunted with “If you only knew.”

     Well, now we know. In her death and now in her writings she elevates herself even more. Even when she was at her lowest, when she experienced John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” at its most extreme, she continue to do her work, God’s work. As we know from Jesus’ words on the cross, despair and doubt can arise in the heart and mind of even the Son of God.

   Why one feels abandoned by God when one is doing the work of God, giving one’s whole life even unto death for the love of God, is one of those mysteries of faith that we will never fully understand. Mother Teresa certainly did not, as her writings attest. Yet as fully as her faith was tested, she never gave up on God or gave in to any temptation to give up her ministry because she felt abandoned by the One she vowed to serve.

   We who cannot measure up to her should feel a sense of relief knowing that we are not alone, realizing that a true saint was conflicted with the same doubts as we. Perhaps ours were never as deep as hers. For that we can be thankful. We also know that those same doubts, those same feelings of abandonment and loneliness and even despair will rear their ugly heads again in our lives. That is a fact of this life and a truth about faith. We need to be prepared.

   Mother Teresa never ceased praying, especially when her doubts and fears were at the worst. She hung in there – for fifty years. Perhaps what Mother Teresa felt is the way it should be. Perhaps a little, maybe even a lot, of insecurity is good for the soul. Perhaps we need to feel this way at times to keep us humble, to help us be aware of God’s grace and love even when we do not feel it. Perhaps, I don’t know.  However, even if it is, I, for one, do not like the feeling. Mother Teresa didn’t either. WJP