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Mother Teresa's
Doubts:
Newly Released
Writings Reveal Secrets
Week of December 2, 2002 |
We
all have heroes, people we wish to be more like if only in a small
way. The best show us what we can be but can also seem unreachable,
an ideal to which no one can possibly measure up.
Few
in modern times have been more universally admired than Mother
Teresa. Led by a series of visions she experienced in 1946,
Calcutta’s “Angel of Mercy” ministered tirelessly to the poor and
desperately ill until her death in 1997. In so doing, she became a
near-mythological symbol of faith and selfless good works.
Now
we are learning more about the human behind the humanitarian. A
collection of letters and diaries to be published this month as “Il
Segreto di Madre Teresa” (Mother Teresa’s Secret) reveal the depth
of the pain she bore and its tremendous toll on her spirit.
As early as 1958 she wrote “My smile is a great cloak that hides
a multitude of pains.” Because of her perpetual good cheer, she
felt others believed “my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing
and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my
heart. If only they knew.”
In
a darker moment she noted “The damned of hell suffer eternal
punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own
soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does
not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist.”
Such thoughts are not in keeping with Mother Teresa’s impossibly
perfect image, yet nothing comes between believers and belief like
the word “why.” Why do bad things happen? Why does suffering
befall the good and the innocent? If there is a God, why doesn’t he
end it with a wave of his hand or a passing thought?
When the
universe doesn’t operate as we would have it, we question his
motives, then his goodness, then his existence. Doubt feeds doubt
until there is little room for faith. With the great weight she
carried, Mother Teresa could not have been immune.
A
year before Mother Teresa’s death, I spent a short time volunteering
at her Home For The Destitute and Dying in Calcutta. I washed
laundry, cleaned dishes, and brought food, water, and companionship
to people dying wretched deaths of diseases most Americans know only
from books. At the end all I could do was weep.
I
cannot honestly say I left India with any real understanding of what
it would take to endure such labor, day in and day out, for decades
without respite, until death. I do appreciate the enormity of it,
and know without question that the strength required is beyond what
could come from within.
In
one of her visions, Mother Teresa heard
the voice of Jesus say “You will suffer, suffer very much, but
remember I am with you.” The Bible says we will be given what we
need to complete God’s will, but it does not promise one ounce
more. That Mother Teresa’s faith was so battered yet neither broke
nor deterred her mission stands as stark proof.
Mother Teresa would surely have known the words of 1 John 3:18-20:
“Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with
actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to
the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence
whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts,
and he knows everything.”
Obeying this, she could not fail. That she conquered doubt may
stand as her greatest triumph.
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Click here for
Brent's column on meeting Mother Teresa
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