Mother Teresa Doubted the Existence of God
August 24th, 2007I wonder: How many saints felt the same way as Mother Teresa?
Via: CBS:
In life, she was an icon for believers of God’s work on Earth. Her ministry to the poor of Calcutta was a world-renowned symbol of religious compassion. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mother Teresa had a calling, she told CBS News in a rare interview, based on unquestioned faith.
“They are all children of God, loved and created by the same heart of God.”
But now, it emerges that Mother Teresa was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared she was being a hypocrite, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips. In a new book that compiles letters she wrote to friends, superiors and confessors, her doubts are obvious.
Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit leaves her.
“Where is my faith?” she writes. “Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … If there be God — please forgive me.”
Eight years later, she’s still looking for the belief she’s lost.
“Such deep longing for God,” she writes. “… repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal.”
As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she says, is a mask.
“What do I labor for?” she asks. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”
“These are letters that were kept in the archbishop’s house,” says the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk.
The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who’s making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa’s proposed sainthood. He says her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her cause.
“Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic,” says Rev. Kolodiejchuk.
According to her letters, Mother Teresa died with her doubts. She had even stopped praying, she once said.
The church decided to keep her letters, even though one of her dying wishes was that they be destroyed. Perhaps now we know why.
For someone to doubt the existance of God does not mean that there is no God.
Which makes her no different from those who are called to be “the chosen” or “the elect” of God…according to 2 Thessalonians, the elect will experience a “falling away” from their faith. IMHO, being someone able to discern much Bible truth, most if not all the “elect” will either at some point call themselves “atheist” (which I was for about ten years in the 70s-80s) or “agnostic” (which I was for most of my life, until very recently). Most of those who call themselves “Christian” are in fact “Churchian” and are part of the anti-Christ “Mystery Babylon” system (see Revelation 16-20). They worship a “Chruchian” Christ, not the real one. Who know? Maybe one day the makers of “Zeitgeist” will be part of the “chosen”!
How many saints felt the same way? Probably most all of them. Only brainless minions do not doubt. Have you never second-guessed your beliefs?
It was a comfort to me to read that Mother Theresa struggled with her faith.
For much of my life, I’ve believed very strongly that the whole course of my life was “Providential”–that everything I was offered, at every moment, was a good gift of an incomprehensibly beneficent Providence. I believed this even about the troubles and tragedies.
But then I had a series of troubles (they weren’t even tragedies) in which my prayers went unanswered. (Or else maybe the answer was “no.”) This went on over a period of two or three years, until I had a crisis of faith.
It didn’t help that I attended a church (for awhile) that was officially supporting the war in Iraq–and playing psychological games with its membership to extort their support for the war. This even though it is illogical to confuse churches with religion.
Well, as it turns out, my disappointments of those years have since been revealed as Providential. I was probably prevented, by my disappointed ambitions, from pursuing a dangerous and destructive course.
I’m getting older now–I’m 59–and in retrospect it seems to me that I’ve been in heaven my whole life, and too foolish to recognize it. I can think of no “good gift” that has ever been withheld from me–though among those “good gifts” were demands that I sacrifice, and deal with a lot of anxiety, because of my values (or what I valued).
If I’d been wiser, I might have realized that the supposed “sacrifices” were hardly sacrifices at all, and that all the anxiety surrounding them was utterly needless.