When I started reading David Van Biema's essay in Time on Mother Teresa titled "Crisis of Faith" I confess I expected the worst. Here, I feared, was a hit piece that would expose the sainted Teresa as a spiritual fraud and hypocrite. I was happy to discover about half way into it that it was really no such thing. It was, on the contrary, a portrait of a deeply committed, but deeply anguished, human being.
Here's a summary: Letters have come to light that Teresa wrote to spiritual mentors and confessors throughout her life which reveal that beginning shortly after she initiated her ministry to the poor in India she was beset by a sense of the absence of God. She longed to feel God's presence in her life and work, but almost never did. Instead she experienced for almost her entire adult life a persistent spiritual dryness, emptiness, and doubt.
Nevertheless, she persevered for over fifty years right to her death. She resolved to live her life for God whether she felt His presence or not. She learned from her experience and from her correspondents that faith isn't a feeling. It's not a matter of living moment by moment with God's presence manifest in our hearts. It's living with, and for, God regardless of how, or what, we feel. Faith is a commitment, it's not a feeling.
For Teresa that meant a lifetime of anguish and perplexity as she puzzled over why God seemed so remote and inaccessible. Like Christ on the cross she felt that God had forsaken her, yet she refused to let her feelings rule her will. She lived for Christ and hoped and trusted that all would someday become clear.
Every believer experiences what she experienced although perhaps not so acutely or for so long. It was, perhaps, her particular cross. That's part of what made her such a remarkable woman and what made her faith such a marvelous example for the rest of us. Faith based on a constant feeling of God's presence is not faith at all. It's not trust at all. It's a kind of infatuation. The true "knights of faith," as Kierkegaard called them, are people who live as God wants them to live regardless of how they feel.
Everyone who aspires to understand the idea of "faith" should read Van Biema's article to the end. It's worth the time.
RLC