On Doubt
Faith & Suffering ~ Mother Teresa & The Long Loneliness
Reading & sermon preached by Reverend Carolyn Patierno
October 21, 2007

From Come Be My Light:  The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”
by Mother Teresa
Edited & with Commentary by, Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C.

[The sisters and I], we went to the outskirts of Bourke.  There was a big reserve where all the Aborigines were living in those little small shacks made of tin and old card-board. … I entered one of those little rooms.  I call it a house but it’s only one room, and inside the room – everything.  So I told the man living there, “Please allow me to make your bed, to wash your clothes, to clean your room.”  And he kept on saying, “I’m alright, I’m alright.”  And I said to him, “But you will be more alright if you allow me to do it.” 
Then at the end he allowed me.  He allowed me in such a way that, at the end, he pulled out from his pocket an old envelope, and one more envelope, and one more envelope.  He started opening one after the other, and right inside there was a little photograph of his father and he gave me that to look at.  I looked at the photo and I looked at him and I said, “You, you are so like your father.”  He was so overjoyed that I could see the resemblance of his father on his face.  I blessed the picture … and the photo went back again in the pocket near his heart. 
After I cleaned the room I found in the corner of the room a big lamp full of dirt and I said, “Don’t you light this lamp, such a beautiful lamp.  Don’t you light it?”  He replied “For whom?  Months and months and months nobody has ever come to me.  For whom will I light it?”  So I said “Won’t you light it if the Sisters come to you?”  And he said “Yes.” 
So the sisters started going to him for only about 5 to 10 minutes a day, but they started lighting that lamp.  After some time he got into the habit of lighting.  Slowly, slowly, slowly, the Sisters stopped going to him.  But they used to go in the morning and see him.  Then I forgot completely about that.  Then after two years he sent word – “Tell Mother, my friend, the light she lit in my life is still burning.”

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Mother Teresa has always been a fascinating figure to me.  At the start of my own formation, I unconsciously looked to her as a model for the kind of minister I hoped I would become.   I fancied that I although I entered seminary as a bulldozer I would leave more as a Mother Teresa-type.  “What does that mean?” you may rightfully ask.   Well, I thought that Mother Teresa was a mild-mannered bottomless pool of patience – even though something in me did understand that to accomplish what she did she had to have been a very tough cookie.  Turns out, I had no idea how tough she was.

I first heard about the book recently published entitled, Come Be My Light:  The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” from my friend, Mary Beth.   Mary Beth and I were both raised Catholic and share a fascination of the female saints.    At the airport, just about to board a plane, Mary Beth had to call me about an article she had just finished in Time magazine.  

Had I heard that for the latter part of her life, Mother Teresa had a serious crisis of faith?

What?!  I knew that had to read this book.   Her writings were compiled and lightly edited, by the Jesuit priest responsible for advocating for Mother Teresa’s canonization.  This priest also provides commentary throughout.  Before I actually read the book, I thought that this sermon would be about doubt.   But as you see in your order of service, what emerged was a story that was less about doubt than about the meaning of faith, for Mother Teresa never doubted.   Her faith was shaken.  By her own admission, hers was a blind faith.   But what sustained her seems to have been trust despite what was more accurately named uncertainty and not doubt.  It may seem like I’m splitting hairs.   But her story is, again, a nuanced one that demands an intense contemplation.    
Despite her commitment to serving humbly and simply (as the reading illustrated) her interior life was extremely complex.  

Why contemplate Mother Teresa’s faith and lack thereof?  Because her excruciating journey is instructive.  Her life serves as a model to any one who cares for those who are down trodden, down on their luck, down and out.  How we serve our guests at the Daytime Drop In Center, for example.  Quite simply, we have something to learn from Mother Teresa. 

So, I’m inviting you into a different kind of consideration than perhaps you are used to. 

Let’s begin with some context.  Here is a very brief chronology of Mother Teresa’s life.   She was born in 1910 in Macedonia.  Her first language was Albanian.  She also spoke Serbo-Croatian & English.  In 1922 at twelve years of age, she recognized a call to a vocation with and to the poor.  

On September 26, 1928 she was off to Ireland to join the Loreto Sisters having applied to the missions in Bengal.  After a five-week journey in early 1929, she arrived in Calcutta where she spent the rest of her life.  She was a teacher and a principal for the next 19 years.  In September of 1946 she discerned a call from Jesus  who asked, “Will you do this for me?” and for the next two years she dogged her spiritual director and the Arch Bishop  until she received the okay to start a new religious order, dedicated to the poorest of the poor. In January 1948 she received the green light and in August of that same year, she set out to launch the Missionaries of Charity, living and working among the poor.   Finally, in October of 1950 the Society of the Missionaries of Charity was officially established.   In 1979 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Over the next four decades, the Missionaries of Charity set up ministries all over the world.  Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997 in Calcutta at the age of 87.

Mother Teresa’s spiritual experience was rare & deemed to be mystical in nature.  She came of age prior to the emergence of the western emphasis on psychology as a social science.    I dare say that if today a young nun were to emerge in our midst claiming to be inspired by the same sense of call, she would be handed a diagnosis rather than an opportunity to flourish. (Although my friend Fr. Larry told me that that isn’t necessarily true – and certainly not universally true.) Indeed, in 1961, and so early in her longing and loneliness, one of the priests who was charged to serve as her spiritual director (there were three through the course of her life) asked, “Was she on the right path or had she become the victim of a network of illusions?” (page 209)  As I read about her years of torment, I found myself wondering, “Was she depressed?  Did she have an anxiety disorder?” -  armchair psychotherapists that we all can be at times.  There are plenty of aspects of her zealous life that beg questions, one of which was her utter lack of what we understand today as boundaries.  So yes, I wondered about Mother Teresa’s boundaries.   Specifically, how her seeming lack of boundaries may translate in the ministry we offer through the Homeless Hospitality Centers various ministries.

Here is a point worth considering.   From the start, Mother Teresa insisted that the order be intimately engaged with the people who they sought to serve.  This commitment meant giving up a more comfortable life and instead living in Calcutta’s slums.   We can only imagine the health and safety risks these women accepted.  Currently I also happen to be reading Dorothy Day’s autobiography entitled, The Long Loneliness.  Day observed:

If you live in great cities, if you are in constant contact with sin and suffering, if the daily papers print nothing but Greek tragedies, if you see on all sides people trying to find relief from the drab boredom of their job & family life in sex & alcohol then you become inured to the evil of the day …

Mother Teresa lived in one said “great city” and most certainly was in constant contact with human distress, yet she never got accustomed to it; she was never inured.   Rather, each time she encountered the suffering poor, it made a real impact on her.  Throughout her life, she would repeat, ‘I have never seen so much suffering.’   Quite a statement coming from one such as her. 

Whereas we tend to be concerned about over-identification, Mother Teresa used “complete identification with ‘her people’ with their misery, loneliness, and rejection.  … [Finally] her interior darkness gave Mother Teresa the capacity to comprehend the feelings of the poor.   (p. 233)

What would that look like?  I sit with guests from the Drop In Center pretty frequently … hear their stories … listen.  I do the laundry for the evening showers we offer – as do other All Souls volunteers.  But I’m quite sure that I don’t engage in complete identification.   I certainly haven’t given up my comfortable life, albeit when my family gives thanks before our meals we hold up those who are not so fortunate to have food, family, and shelter. 

What would that mean?  What would that look like if I tried to live in such a way as that?   And how could any of us attempt to do so without standing upon a foundation of trust – for some, of faith – that fueled our strength?

And yet, that is exactly what Mother Teresa did.   She disclosed that she felt a divine absence as soon as her work in the slums began.  In 1953 she wrote the following to the Arch Bishop:

Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work & that Our Lord may show Himself – for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.  It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’  Ask our Lord to give me courage.  (p. 150)   

To which the Archbishop responded thus:

Guided by faith, by prayer, and by reason, with a right intention you have enough.  Feelings are not required & often may be misleading.

What??  “Feelings are not required & often may be misleading.”  What did this statement mean?  In the Coming of Age class just this past week the youth and I and mentor, Teresa McShane had a wonderful conversation about faith spurred on by the reading that accompanied the chalice lighting.  The reading began,

And now, may we have faith in life to do wise planting that the generations to come may reap even more abundantly than we. ...
Singing The Living Tradition, #693 , V. Emil Gudmundson

In the time that I share with the youth, I try to model for and engage with them in theological dialogue and debate.  Our discussion on faith then posed the question – what is it?   Their responses focused on feeling.   I was remembering this conversation especially as I read Come Be My Light.

Mother Teresa’s struggle was so much about feeling – specifically her feeling of loneliness, desolation, all stemming from her perceived separation from God.   She took great comfort in and instruction from the Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross who wrote the following of one’s longing for God:

The flame called the moth but the glass pane was there.
How many have died not in the fire but in the cold,
crazed in longing

Is the fate of any heart to not reach you?

No, no, that is not the fate
of any soul.

St. John of the Cross
(From Love Poems From God - page 309)

Note these excerpts from her writings and correspondence: 

The biggest and the hardest to bear was this terrible longing for God. (p. 246)
The life within me is harder to live.  To be in love & yet not to love, to live by faith and yet not to believe.  To spend myself and yet be in total darkness.  Pray for me.  (To Fr. Neuner)

So, what could this mean – this idea that feeling faith was not necessarily the point?   What could we learn from such an idea?  

The editorial in the October 2nd issue of The Christian Century commented thus,   

While she restored the hope of countless others with her radiant joy in service, her own hope often lay in ruins.   … News of Mother Teresa’s struggles is not so much disconcerting as consoling.  For who among us has not also felt, at times, a hole where God should be?   …  Though Mother Teresa longed for joy in her faith, she knew that her feelings were not the point. 

There it was again – “… her feelings were not the point.”   What was the point, if NOT her feelings?   How does faith fit within such a context? 

Finally, in an essay entitled, Godforsakenness, I was made to understand.  John Kavanaugh, another Jesuit priest, wrote in the online magazine America (10.1.07)

Mother Teresa was living with a great loss of certainty – about herself, about her relationship to Christ, about her fate, about her very God.  The feeling (this preacher’s emphasis) of not having faith is quite different from not (again) having faith.  Otherwise it would not be so harrowing to the believer, who cries out with nothing but trust.
It would be good if all of us, believer and nonbeliever alike, could learn once and for all that whatever faith is, it is not a crutch.  Sometimes in faith, you have nothing to lean on.  Nor is the ‘feeling’ or consolation of faith something we can conjure up on our own.  If anyone had such powers of conjuring it would be Mother Teresa.  So much for feel-good religion – that ‘opiate of the masses.’  Morphine is much more effective. 
The real story, the deepest subtext, in Mother Teresa’s ‘dark night’ is not that God was purifying her.  God was actually giving her her heart’s desire. 

So there we have it.  Herein is the great lesson.  Mother Teresa was undeterred by these feelings – feelings that haunted her for 45 years.  Forty five years.  She continued in her work – as is said in 12 Step philosophy – “as if.”   As if she believed.  As if all was well.   As if she still claimed the steady and felt companionship of her God.   “It was the fruit of her lived experience, an act of the will that went against her feelings.”  (P. 225) As for the “deepest subtext” that Kavanaugh references, we’ve gotten ourselves a second sermon.  It’s too big to cover here and now.  Stay tuned. 

For now, and for today, here is what we may take from her example – believers & non-believers alike, agnostic, atheist, theist – Unitarian Universalists all.  Indeed, Mother Teresa lived her life by faith.  Not a feeling of faith, for I have come to understand how deceptive and distracting that can be, but on the acceptance of faith.   Not as a crutch, an opiate.  But as a lived “Yes.”  She said “Yes” to life, to her work, to her call. 

She wrote,

Pray for me that ‘No’ does not pass through my heart and lips.  From the first [day] to this day – … my new vocation has been one prolonged “Yes” to God – without even a look at the cost.  (Introduction & p. 268)

I keep a rock on my desk.  On it is engraved the word, “yes.”  This message now takes on a new meaning.  Now I understand that “Yes” may well be the foundation of faith – a faith that serves the world by hands moved to heal and hearts that courageously respond to suffering.

Mother Teresa’s brilliance was that she convinced so many that we are all capable of saying yes and doing exactly what she did.  We are capable of making a bed, cleaning a room, blessing each other, listening to each other.   Unlike saints from St. Paul to Rev. King in whose shadow we often feel less than capable, Mother Teresa gave meaning to the hymn that says, “If you cannot sing like angels / if you cannot speak before thousands / you can give from deep within you / you can change the world with your love.” 

We hold close the image of her visit with a sickly man, living in abject poverty and loneliness to whom she offered the light of her love – simply, purely and with great practicality.

At last, it was not the suffering she endured that made her a saint, but the love with which she lived her life through all the suffering.  Her legacy is one of faith, if not certainty.  That everyone is capable of achieving holiness, not in spite of the mystery of suffering that accompanies every human life, but through it.  (p. 337)

Turns out this sermon has nothing to do with doubt.  Instead, it serves as encouragement to embrace uncertainty and struggle with the meaning of faith.  Not as the opiate of the masses, but rather as a way of saying, “yes” to life with all the suffering it holds – “yes” to joy and “yes” to love.

Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

Amen.

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