Encouragement that I’ve desperately needed for over a year came last week from the most unlikely of sources: news of the human side of Mother Teresa’s profound faith.
When I pour over each day’s headlines I see the same news, rarely anything “new.” So news in Reuter’s and Time last week of Mother Teresa’s doubts about God shocked me. I no longer felt alone in my sorrow; more importantly, I felt less ashamed that I struggled in my faith.
How could this woman’s letters read so much like the pages in my journal? Ten years after her death, Mother Teresa has touched another life. Mine. Her human struggles greatly impact me.
I’ve beaten myself up for so long because the beautiful and wonderful things in my life have been overshadowed by what torments me. It doesn’t help when my brothers and sisters in the Lord minimize my sadness with counter-productive Christian-ese clichès (“God is true,” “Give it to Jesus!” “Real Christians don’t get depressed” — I used to be in denial and said all of those same things to people). It has become my internal struggle: on the outside, I’m all put together, wearing my ministry smile. Inside, I’m one who wonders, “Where is God in the equation of suffering?
Maybe I should also ask, “Where are God’s people in the equation of human suffering?”
In a strange way it helps to know that Teresa continued her mission despite severe doubts about God; she experienced darkness and emptiness in her soul yet pressed on. Her faith was more profound than even she realized. That she suffered doubt and felt God was absent did not betray her love for God, nor does it betray mine.
The problem is that believers are uncomfortable when others wrestle with God, and the only thing they can think to do is resort to the “go team”/”depend on God” rhetoric. The best thing one can do for another then is to practice “ministry of presence” which is far more comforting; clichès only serve to heap on the guilt which is not from God!
Mother Teresa wrote in one letter from September of 1979, “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” How many people across theological lines have secretly felt the same and feel guilty about that already because they know better?
I shall not dare to equate my own suffering with what she witnessed and dwelt among for half a century. I am no selfless person who has given up everything to care for the poor, sick and dying while maintaining a faith that is not of this world. Nevertheless, I feel less ashamed of my current state now that I know I’m not alone.
I think more people should feel free to experience their human emotions. I’ve been in Christian ministry for close to 20 years and managed to deny my feelings for 17 of them. It is very unhealthy to do that, and not what Jesus wants for me, His daughter.
Knowing that others have also experienced the “dark night of the soul” is comforting, and I believe that comfort comes from my Lord. I am where I am — in the valley right now — and if God is to be believed, then He walks with me, this post-modern-leaning Christian, in my soul’s dark night. I am convinced that I know too much to turn back to the life I knew before Him. Daybreak shall come.
© Alexa Lopez 2007
