Doubting Teresa

Tonight I read an interesting article in Time magazine about how Mother Teresa spent most of her adult life questioning her faith and doubting a great many things about her religion. Here it is if you care to read it. A "crisis of faith" they call it. The source of this new information about MT is correspondence she wrote to confessors and superiors where she expressed great despair at what she perceived was the absence of God's presence in the world. Her writings are compiled in a new book that is coming out called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. Some of the quotes attributed to her are quite remarkable. In these letters, she calls her experience of God's absence a "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture." She compares it to hell and even says at one point that it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and God Him/Her/Itself.

But what of the perpetual smile we saw on her face? A facade, she says. She calls it a "mask," a "cloak that covers everything." People would think her a hypocrite if they knew the truth she tells one confessor. Pretty amazing stuff. When she was alive, she asked for her letters to be destroyed. We're lucky that her wishes were ignored, so we can now obtain a larger understanding of this woman, who is on her way to sainthood.

Atheists like Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens are making fun of these revelations about MT, saying that it shows that even an incredibly devout believer like Mother Theresa eventually came to believe that religion was a crock. (As an aside, I can't fucking stand atheists. I'm no fan of organized religion, believe me, but in a way, atheists are even more annoying than religious fundamentalists. They only believe what their eyes tell them. We live, we die, that's it. They don't explore, they don't question, they think they know it all. They fail to recognize that there's a lot about the universe and our own perceptions that we don't understand. We still don't completely understand Black Holes, electromagnetic energy, or even how our own brains work, among other things. Yet, the smugness with which the typical atheist conveys his or her beliefs is a hair's breath away from that of the wild-eyed, hit rock bottom in life but then drank the Kool-Aid and lived to tell the story, Born Again Christian. (Aside within an aside, have you heard that Michael Vick "found Jesus"? Almost just in time, too!) Atheists don't know if they're right any more than anyone else. So why the hell do they act like they know it all? They don't know a goshdarn thing.)

Back on topic, I don't agree with the simplistic conclusion-jumping about Mother Teresa. It's too convenient, though I can certainly see why it might appeal to atheists. I say take any True Believer -- take George Bush, or Pat Robertson, that crazy fuck, or maybe Billy Graham -- and drop them in the putrid stink of of a poor, decrepit Calcutta for six months and see if they don't question the existence of God or the cruelty of life in this world. Let them hold the heads of the dying and diseased, assuming they're even capable, for even a few days and see how long their faith lasts in its current form. It's EASY to believe in God when you're living in the lap of luxury in the First World. All you have to do is go to church or synagogue or mosque once a week (actually, I have no idea how often Jews and Muslims go to their respective places of worship -- I do know that the most devout among them pray several times a day); be nice to your neighbor, at least until you've left the church parking lot, and that's pretty much it. Maybe you hit the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, in between card games, at least that's how it worked in my family. Maybe you write a check or two to a charity once in awhile. But that's IT.

Mother Teresa LIVED her faith. Big difference. People down South ask: What Would Jesus Do? Mother Teresa DID what Jesus would do. She went to one of the poorest shitholes on the entire planet and stayed there most of her adult life, catering to, and living among, the poor, the sick, the least among us. No cable t.v., no automobile, no computer, no sex. YOU try doing that. I know I couldn't. She DID what Jesus would do and to her, it wasn't just a fucking bumper sticker on a Ford Taurus. Think you'd find Jesus in the United States if He were here? Think He'd be hitting the iHOP for pancakes after church on Sunday? Please, wake the hell up. How many rich people do you see Jesus hanging out with in the Bible? There's the guy He talks to about getting a camel through the eye of a needle and that's pretty much it, as I recall. But don't quote me, I haven't cracked a Bible in ages. I think the camel guy was a lawyer too, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, the irony!

Anyway, I'm way off track here, but I think the point is, anyone who has ever undertaken a spiritual journey, regardless of what they believe, at some point comes to question their beliefs. Even Jesus did. It's human to do so, especially when you see the hell that we are living in close up, like Mother Teresa did. This doesn't make their beliefs any less valid than that of an atheist or anyone else, in my view. All it does is show that even the most devout person is a human being who can feel despair and lament the suffering that exists in the world. Questioning one's faith or belief system doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. It may just mean that we don't understand God's way of thinking. And seriously, how the hell could we? It's laughable that people actually think that they can understand how God thinks. If God exists, it's fair to say that the miniscule capacity of our tiny brains as compared to the Mind of God is the equivalent of a single grain of sand on a beach the size of the universe. So how can any human being presume to understand how God thinks? It's absurd.

Questioning one's faith could also mean that God exists, but He/She/It was never responsible for creating this fucked up world; we were. We just don't completely understand how we did it and how we screwed the job up so badly.

Anyway, knowing that a devout woman like Mother Teresa had doubts, and truly experienced the pain and suffering of the people for whom she cared most of her life, make her far more human than I ever thought she was. She was a real person, with real feelings and real worries. And her continued ministering to the poor, the sick and the dying notwithstanding her internal conflicts and loneliness are truly remarkable. To me at least, Doubting Teresa is even more impressive than Mother Teresa.