Mother Theresa's Doubt and Faith

"Jesus has a very special love for you," Mother Theresa of Calcutta wrote to her spiritual advisor Fr. Michael Van der Peet in 1979. "As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear…I want you to pray for me that I let Him have a free hand."

"What do I labor for?" she questioned in another letter. "If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."

These and many other quotes compiled from private letters of Mother Theresa are presented in the recent book Come, Be My Light by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk who knew Mother Teresa for twenty years and is the postulator for her cause for sainthood. The letters reveal that for nearly the last 50 years of her life, Mother Theresa did not feel the presence of God, as Fr. Kolodiejchuk, writes, "either in her heart or in the eucharist."

Mother Theresa had her critics during her lifetime…critics to whom these statements of her spiritual doubt and dryness were voraciously consumed like raw meat thrown to hungry lions. The leader of the pack, Christopher Hitchens, had a rather scathing article on the topic published in the Sept. 10 issue of Newsweek.

Just to provide some context for his remarks, Hitchens had previously authored The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Mother Teresa, and more recently the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great. If a person looks at the world through purple-tinted glasses, I guess it’s no surprise they’ll see everything as purple.

Take another look at the statements above. They do not express a lack of faith in God so much as a lack of sensing God’s presence…a lack of the consolation and peace which most people generally experience as fruits of their prayer. The prayer is still addressed to Jesus. Being so forthright in sharing her spiritual struggles with spiritual advisors, should we not accept that Mother Theresa brought that same honesty into her more public statements?

Would it not be logical to see her questioning in the context of a search for integrity than to consider her public statements of faith as a sham and cover-up? In her acceptance speech on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Theresa said that, in dying on the cross, God through Jesus made himself the hungry, the naked, the homeless one. “Christ is everywhere”, she said, "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

She was not a fake or a liar but rather a seeker whose perseverance in self-sacrifice, prayer and charity may be seen as all the more heroic for the absence of that consolation and peace which provide such support for most of us.