{"id":478,"date":"2007-09-10T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-10T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/beyondblue\/2007\/09\/mother-teresas-lesson.html"},"modified":"2007-09-10T10:30:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-10T10:30:00","slug":"mother-teresas-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2007\/09\/mother-teresas-lesson.html","title":{"rendered":"Mother Teresa’s Lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been so many wonderful articles published in the last two weeks about Mother Teresa because of the release of a new volume of her writings that reveal decades of agony<\/a>.
\nThe Washington Post piece, “The Torment of Teresa,”<\/a> was one of the most poignant for me. To read the entire article by Michael Gerson, click here.<\/a> I love the following excerpt, in general:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Eventually, on the evidence of the letters, Mother Teresa made peace with her darkness, identifying her own anguish with the suffering of her Savior and the suffering of the poor. “Now it does not really seem so hard,” she eventually concluded. But she never regained the subjective religious experiences of her youth. “If ever I become a saint,” she said, “I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ ”
\nThere are lessons in this complicated spiritual life — that holiness has more to do with obedience than spiritual feelings; that faith can coexist with suffering and doubt; that sainthood can be harsher and more difficult than we imagine.
\nBut Mother Teresa’s sense of abandonment raises a deeper issue. Assuming, for a moment, that she was not self-deluded in her calling, what kind of God would set such a difficult path — ministering to lepers and outcasts for a lifetime — and then withdraw his presence? Mother Teresa herself seemed to struggle with this unfairness: “What are you doing My God to one so small?”
\nThere is no easy answer here, but the question is central to the Christian faith. Other noble religious traditions promise serenity, detachment from striving and release from the suffering of the world. Christianity, in contrast, teaches that grace is found in the worst of that suffering, and through a figure who despairs of God’s presence in his parting words. This anguish is not convenient — “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” is hardly the best religious marketing slogan. But for millennia this abandonment has offered hope that God might somehow be present even in shame, loneliness and betrayal, even on the descending path of depression, even in the soul’s hardness and doubt, even in the silence of God himself — and that all these things may be the preface to glory.
\nThrough her pain-filled letters, Mother Teresa offers this assurance: Even when all we have to offer is ashes, and all we feel is emptiness, something beautiful may come of it in the end. But her decades of lonely sorrow are not an easy source of comfort. And Graham Greene might have been speaking of this abandoned mystic when he wrote: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been so many wonderful articles published in the last two weeks about Mother Teresa because of the release of a new volume of her writings that reveal decades of agony. The Washington Post piece, “The Torment of Teresa,” was one of the most poignant for me. 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