Thursday, September 06, 2007
Mother Teresa and Her Lack of Faith?
While I was in Scotland the story about Mother Teresa’s lifelong struggle with her faith came out in Time magazine. A number of my readers have asked me what I think of this. Is it true? If so, what does this say about faith, about her work, and about her as a model for other Christians?
An Old Story – God’s “Absence” in Mother Teresa’s Life First of all, the news in Time magazine is actually not new. In 2003 First Things, the very excellent magazine of Catholic thinking (from a theologically orthodox position) ran this article in their May 2003 issue:
The Dark Night of Mother Teresa by Carol Zaleski http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=486
In 2002 , Father Brian Kolodiejchuk released a study of Mother Teresa’s life, based on some of these same letters referenced in Time. It was clear from what he released then that while she did have a mystical experience that led to her future career:
Jesus appeared and spoke to her, in a series of interior locutions and visions. “Wouldst thou not help?” Jesus asked her. “How can I?” Mother Teresa responded, expressing her fear of incurring ridicule, loneliness, deprivation, and failure should she leave her happy life as a Loreto nun, exchange her habit for a rough sari, and take up the uncertain life Jesus was demanding of her. Repeatedly he asked her, “Wilt thou refuse? You have become my spouse for my love. You have come to India for me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far. Are you afraid now to take one more step for your spouse, for me, for souls?” And again: “I want Indian nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying, and the little children. . . .” The chief motivation for the Missionaries of Charity, as she would often say, was not to do social work, but to adore Christ in the littlest and weakest of his children, and to bring Christ the souls for which he thirsts.
This was followed, according to the article in FT by “1946 and 1947, Mother Teresa experienced a profound union with Christ. But soon after she left the convent and began her work among the destitute and dying on the street, the visions and locutions ceased, and she experienced a spiritual darkness that would remain with her until her death.”
There are a couple of things that this issue of Time magazine raises.
An Attack on Faith? From God or from Time?
One must ask, why all the focus on this? I would like to believe that while the writer of the Time piece is very reverent about Mother Teresa, the publishers of the magazine are actually attacking faith and her work by this issue. Let me explain:
2006-2007 has become the year of the atheist. Not only have we been treated to a number of atheist books, with Dawkin’s God Delusion and Christopher Hitchen’s god is not great being the two most popular of the two, but we have also seen a large number of attacks on the notion of faith and of people of faith. Earlier this year with the commemorating of 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade in the United Kingdom, while Christians were focusing on the work of William Wilberforce and his crew, organizations like the BBC were going out of the way to say that Christianity’s role in abolition has been way overstated, that the Church of England actually owned plantations in the Caribbean that owned slaves, and that people like Wilberforce do not deserve such notoriety.
All of this is part of what many in the secular press and university (and I do not say that as a slander but merely a statement of fact) are seeking to do – to remove the positive accomplishments of Christians not from history, but from the faith that motivated them.
Whenever one had discussions of the great people of the 20th century, Americans almost always list Billy Graham and Mother Teresa at the top of those lists. For every Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggert or Jim Baker story there is, we can easily point back to these two people as a sign of Christianity and following Jesus with one’s whole life is really all about and what it produces.
A few years back the release of the Nixon tapes caught Graham seeming to agree to Nixon’s more anti-Semitic statements. There was an effort to impugn his character with such, but the efforts were met with little success because it was not seen as Graham going out of his way to be anti-Semitic and because Graham’s life did not indicate any such anti-Semitism. He continues to be viewed very positively by almost all Americans.
But Mother Teresa, she is untouchable. And so, these revelations about her lack of intimacy to Christ provide a way of re-interpreting her work. While a few, namely Hitchen’s, see her work as wasteful, as much ado about nothing, and as overblown, most people continue to be in awe of what she did for all those years in Calcutta. We know (or at least we tell ourselves) that we could never have done it, and that gives her a status as a saint (secular as much as religious) in our culture. Whenever Christianity is disparaged (often for our excesses), we point back to Calcutta and our faith always has that to count upon.
And then these letters are published. Some in the secular press, again notably Hitchen’s, point out that, see, it was not her Christianity that led her to do what she did – she did not really have an experience of Jesus – but it was her humanism. Her work does not belong to Christianity, but to secular notion of the goodness of all human beings. Praise be!
What we are seeing is both the ignorance of the media and the secular world about the meaning of faith, and the role that for too many in the modern and now post-modern world, Christian and non-Christian alike, that experience plays in life.
While those who oppose Christianity and faith in general see the reality of Mother Teresa’s relationship with Jesus Christ as vindicating their belief that faith is ultimately an illusion, they only prove that they do not understand what we mean by faith.
First off, we must point out that Mother Teresa did have a mystical experience that called her to take on a life and a calling that few would even imagine. It was Christ who personally called her to her role. Not humanism. Not a general desire to do good. It was Christ. Everything else that follows flows from that central experience in her life that it was Christ who called her to do what she did.
Both secular and religious people are willing to take risks and pursue life goals. There is a general category of being “called” to things in life that is applicable to all human beings. The question is however, what is it that motivates us to stay on track with these callings? And what of those whose callings themselves are what most of us would call “horrific”? It is easy to sense that one is called to do great things. Both religious and non-religious people feel that sense and act on it. But the number of people I know who are non-religious who feel called to lives that are utterly difficult – like the streets of Calcutta – is well, zero. Yes some do endure it – like Nelson Mandela (who was recently honoured with a statue in Trafalgar Square, and appropriately so, though I do wonder when Mother Teresa’s will be put up), but his calling was not prison on Reeker’s Island, but to overthrow Apartheid and to eventually run the country. This is quite a different calling, though I still respect Nelson a great deal for answering it.
But this still does not get to the core issue – did Mother Teresa lack faith? Was her life after 1947 one long battle of faith? Yes and no.
The Dark Night of the Soul – Curse and Blessing
The “Dark Night of the Soul” is a category that has been present in Christian spirituality since the 16th century after the Spanish mystic John of the Cross. It is the going through the dessert or through the long night alone – a sense of being utterly abandoned. It is often accompanied by the sense of being unable to truly pray, of sensing that prayer and other traditional means of engaging with Christ are devoid of power.
Now here our modern sensibilities, especially those formed in the revivalist Protestant worldview of American Christianity, are deeply troubled. Is not such an experience in fact the loss of faith? Is this not the most dangerous and hideous of experiences? To us perhaps it is or would be, but Catholic piety understand this quite differently.
For them, the Dark Night is not viewed as a negative experience to be avoided at all costs, including we dare say by the use of psychological games to simulate God’s presence. Instead, it is a great blessing, a gift given by God to a very few, in order that their obedience and faith would be that of truest quality. While it is not to be sought, it is to be embraced.
By all accounts, Mother Teresa embraced this Dark Night. Would she have preferred her mystical union of 1946-1947? Of course, as would any of us. Instead, and here again I quote the First Things article, “This was exactly the way Mother Teresa learned to deal with her trial of faith: by converting her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God. It would be her Gethsemane, she came to believe, and her participation in the thirst Jesus suffered on the Cross. And it gave her access to the deepest poverty of the modern world: the poverty of meaninglessness and loneliness. To endure this trial of faith would be to bear witness to the fidelity for which the world is starving. “Keep smiling,” Mother Teresa used to tell her community and guests, and somehow, coming from her, it doesn’t seem trite. For when she kept smiling during her night of faith, it was not a cover-up but a manifestation of her loving resolve to be “an apostle of joy.”
Now of course, she had those earlier experiences of both Jesus’ calling her to her life’s vocation and of the mystical union of 1946-1947. To my knowledge no one has claimed the “Dark Night” experience without having prior intimacy with Christ. The fact that she did not “feel her faith” did not mean that she did not have faith. The fact that she felt abandoned by God did not mean that she believed she was in fact abandoned by God. Her faith sustained her not despite her experience, but in concert with her experience.
Feeling the Faith – Can You Believe Despite Your Emotions
In our modern culture, especially in evangelical and charismatic circles, there is a real focus on experience and feeling. And to some degree this is appropriate and good. Our faith should never be a merely intellectual quest, it should never be divorced from our hearts. And yet, feelings and experiences, as valuable as they are, do not substitute for faith. They do not provide the deep support for the challenges of life. Could Mother Teresa’s work amongst the poor and dying of Calcutta have been sustained by “feelings”? Would that not have made her either a deviant, as Hitchen’s has come close to accusing her at times? Or, would that not have made her faith the great intoxicant that Freud and Marx both saw it as – “Look, my faith is beaming even as I am touching hundreds of dead and suffering.”
The writer of The Letter to the Hebrews, gave us in chapter 11 of that book the greatest definition of faith:
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.
We prefer emotions. We look for experiences. And again, these are not bad things. But they are not substitutes for faith. Mother Teresa’s faith was certainly tested, but she made the decision in her Dark Night of the Soul not to spurn God, not to sit down and wait for a new experience of God, but to embrace the loneliness and forsakenness of her relationship with God as part of her calling to a world of people whose whole lives – emotional, physical, societal, and spiritual – were marked by such experiences.
This, the writer of the First Things article, is part of the reason why her order’s piety was so centred on the Eucharist. It is a “also a way of dark knowing and dark loving. To all appearances he is absent, as Aquinas says in the Tantum ergo Sacramentum, so faith must supply what is lacking to our feeble senses. Humanly, there were times when Mother Teresa felt burnt out, but faith supplied what was lacking even to troubled faith; spiritually she was often desolate, but her vow endured and her visible radiance—to which everyone attests—was undiminished. This lifelong fidelity should not be confused with a Stoic determination to keep going in the face of defeat. It was something else entirely: objective Christian joy.”
Mother Teresa – More Than Ever Our Model of Faith
And so I for one thank Time for publishing these accounts for a larger audience, even if there purposes were not noble. We live in an age of subjective emotionality. We want to feel good all the time. We want to “feel” the things we believe. And if we don’t, well, then out goes belief. Perhaps that is why angst has become the norm for so many, especially in my generation.
Again, feelings and emotions are not bad things, but they cannot be based merely on our subjective personal experience. As my one friend Clint has so often pointed out when people talk of experiencing God, “Was that God or your pizza from the previous night?” For many that is irrelevant – I had the experience and that is enough.
George Barna has a statistic he uses a lot to point to churches failure: over 50% of Christians have not had an experience of God in worship in the past month. I used to point to that as a sign of how we need to prepare people for worship more (and I think we do need to do that). But as I researched to write this post it occurred to me that maybe our “experiences” of God are too emotional, to feeling oriented. Perhaps the simple fact that we did not “feel” God in worship is not a bad thing. Perhaps we need to ask, did you leave worship believing God more and willing to step into whatever it is that God is calling you towards in your life with more zeal? That would be the question to ask in view of God’s work in Mother Teresa’s life.
I am glad that at this point God has not tested me with great period of time like Mother Teresa experienced. My faith is weak, and he will not burden us with loads to heavy to bear. But this I know, while her faith was tested, it is clear that her faith never broke, and she is a model for all those who are desperate to hear God’s voice in their own life.
