MOTHER TERESA
We should all have such doubts

LORNA DUECK
Executive producer, Listen Up TV
On-line 05/09/07 07:51 AM

In the many-layered onion that is spirituality, today's 10th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa has exposed a woman who lived with deep doubts about the presence of God in her life. A new book shows that our generation's most famous Christian woman kept secret feelings that her soul and psyche were surrounded by darkness, angst, loneliness and despair.

'You've got to be kidding,' was my first reaction.

But, in fact, letters revealing Mother Teresa's agony span 60 years of her life, are in her own handwriting, and have been delivered to us by her postulator, Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a senior member of her Missionaries of Charity, and the very cleric assigned to help evaluate her path to sainthood.

The news hits deep into a poverty Mother Teresa diagnosed as rampant in the West: spiritual poverty and hunger for God. If a woman who lived her life as a self-described "spouse of Christ," who set up daily prayer routines that were four hours long, who gave free service to the poor in more than 160 homes in India, with similar ventures in another 100 countries, if such a Nobel Peace Prize-winning woman had doubt so profound it left her in agony, is the journey to God really worth it?

A culture obsessed with feelings over facts would say: of course not. After all, we're the experiential consumers who would rather be wowed by the death anniversary of that other famous woman, Diana, Princess of Wales - a much easier life lesson to consume. After all, divorcing a prince is more believable than faithful marriage to an unseen eternal king.

Mother Teresa's doubts are a risky thing to release to a public that doesn't sit well in silence and think. Silence was a gift the Calcutta nun wanted for us. Her first home for contemplative sisters was put in New York, not the Himalayas because, said Mother Teresa, she felt "silence and contemplation were needed more in the cities of the world." Silence, said her five-line business card, launched her "simple path" of prayer, faith, love, service, peace.

Despite her doubts, she prayed "O God, we believe You are here." She eclipsed her own spiritual poverty by simply doing what Scriptures advised: "Walk by faith, not by sight," and she rested in the Bible's statement that "God's paths are beyond tracing out."

The world is a better place because she lived by what she knew faith was, not only by what she felt faith should be.

For the title of this doubt-filled book, Father Kolodiejchuk chose what Mother Teresa remembers as a 1947 locution from Jesus, where she heard Jesus say "Come be my light." It was a rare moment of clarity for her, and Father Kolodiejchuk argues his heroine always knew her darkness would help others experiencing spiritual poverty, and if she achieves sainthood, it will be because she shone in darkness, not light.

The letters, hidden until now in Jesuit archives and protected by the Archbishop of Calcutta, she wanted destroyed, she said, "because she didn't want attention placed on herself, but on Jesus."

So this woman of such high media profile had a secret we didn't really get: She was happy, productive, overflowing in love and trusting in other followers of Jesus in order to overcome her doubts that she was good enough for her "groom." Yet, with only two sets of clothes, one pair of sandals, a bucket and basic eating utensils, she influenced decades of conversation about what it means to follow Jesus.

If her walk was a dark one, then maybe we should all dim a few lights.

Lorna Dueck hosts Listen Up TV, a weekly newsmagazine on spiritual perspectives in current events, seen on Global TV, Salt and Light TV, CTS and Christian Channel