Crisis of faith — Sino Francisco

I still need to catch up on ten pages or so of blog entries from friends so I’ll be brief.

Read an enormously interesting article on Time magazine on the upcoming book which posthumously publishes Mother Teresa’s confession letters. The letters detail her 50+ year inner crisis of faith from someone who I think most people would consider as the most spiritual and saintly modern-day person next to, perhaps, the current Dalai Lama. It’s not just a “I wonder if God exists” kind of normal doubt, it’s a full-blown lifelong nihilistic, existentialist fiasco that rivals Dostoyevsky in depth and complexity. When we imagine such historical icons as Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or Adolf Hitler, we tend to simplify their human aspects into cliched sketches that don’t give us the true portrait of their lives. After reading how painful her own plight (whether psychologically self-inflicted or not) was, it makes her a fascinating person to me rather than just a cookie-cutter template of saintliness that many people want to make her out to be. It makes the story more interesting. She recorded surprisingly moving and lyrical conversations between herself and Jesus expressing her inner doubts:

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone … Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— Mother Teresa, addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated

The article reminds me of what I consider to be a fantastic movie and book, The Last Temptation of Christ, which reimagined the Passion play where Jesus is an actual man with his own doubts and desires rather than the impossibly perfect deity that most organized Christianity would like to make him out to be. It was wildly controversial when it was released, but I think it can rightfully be considered as a deeply spiritual and genius work now 20 years later – much more so than Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ which equates masochism with true faith. Then again, an argument could possibly made here that Mother Teresa’s continued good works despite a lifelong of guilt and doubt is her own form of self-flagellation. Fascinating stuff to me…

I’m not religious any more although I was raised Southern Baptist (I AM from Maryland, after all). Nonetheless, I can appreciate the moving storyline involved in an individual’s lifelong spiritual quest like the one uncovered here.