Doubts Of Mother Teresa

When Mother Teresa died, many were shocked by the extreme inner turmoil that she experienced.

From page 251

For instance we know that Mother Teresa wrote in 1958, ‘My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains … [People] think that my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing, and that my intimacy with God and union hi His will fills my heart.  If only they knew?’

In another letter, she wrote, ‘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 God does not exist.’  In response to such revelations, Ill Messaggero, Rome’s popular daily newspaper said, ‘Mother Teresa was one who for one year had visions and who for the next fifty had doubts until her death.’

Commenting on this, one priest described Mother Teresa’s’ doubts as a ‘a purification process’, adding that it is also a part of sainthood.  It’s an argument reflecting a long Christian tradition that regards the experience of God’s absence not as an enemy of faith, but rather as the very substance of greater faith and intimacy.  Martin Luther goes so far as to call God ‘absconditus Deus’ – literally ‘the God who goes missing’.  The basis for this is Christ’s own experience of forsakenness on the cross, a moment that speaks profoundly about the meaning of God’s silence.  ‘We want God to answer our prayers through powerful interventions’ admits Tim Chester, ‘but in the cross we recognise by faith the presence of God in weakness.  The silence remains silent, but we see in the cross the hidden God who is with us in our suffering.’