{"id":173,"date":"2007-08-30T11:53:45","date_gmt":"2007-08-30T15:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/2007\/08\/30\/faith-v-reason-in-mother-teresas-dark-night\/"},"modified":"2007-08-30T11:53:45","modified_gmt":"2007-08-30T15:53:45","slug":"faith-v-reason-in-mother-teresas-dark-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/faith-v-reason-in-mother-teresas-dark-night","title":{"rendered":"Faith v. Reason in Mother Teresa’s Dark Night"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"teresa.jpg\"<\/a>“If anyone is in heaven, there is no question Mother Teresa is there,” is\u00a0a sentiment shared by millions of Americans, believers and non-believers alike.\u00a0 Yet her own words suggest it was not a sentiment Mother Teresa herself believed.<\/p>\n

A new book just out from Doubleday, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light<\/em>,\u00a0reveals a previously unknown side of Teresa through her private letters\u00a0written over a period of 66 years.\u00a0It should be noted this book\u00a0was not produced by her detractors but rather by those seeking sainthood for the venerable nun. The letters sound what Time magazine calls “…a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight…” In the letters, written mostly to confessors, Teresa candidly – and at times tormentedly – expresses not only serious doubts about her faith, but seems resolved that she possesses no genuine faith at all.<\/p>\n

An\u00a0evangelist for Atheism, Christopher Hitchens, uses Teresa’s inner turmoil as\u00a0revealed in her letters to invalidate\u00a0any and all belief outside of what can be validated by human reason.\u00a0He writes in a recent piece for Newsweek<\/em>,<\/p>\n

Now, it might seem glib of me to say that this is all rather unsurprising, and that it is the inevitable result of a dogma that asks people to believe impossible things and then makes them feel abject and guilty when their innate reason rebels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hitchens may be right. If all we have is our innate reason to validate for us what otherwise seems impossible, then indeed our efforts are futile, resulting in a chaos of soul like that demonstrated in Teresa’s letters. But the ability to believe impossible things – like the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and ultimately in our own resurrection – results not from innate reason, but from faith.\u00a0 And that faith is not of ourselves, it is the gift of God.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Faith does not come from our making sense of things, from our ability to reason things out.\u00a0Faith is not positive thinking. Faith is not doing more good things in the hopes that by doing so faith will come. Faith is the free and unmerited gift of God granted to those who truly hear His word.\u00a0“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Faith germinates in the soul when\u00a0the soul receives with meekness the engrafted word which is able to save it. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith begins where reason ends. Faith assures us precisely because our reason doesn’t. In the words of the hymn writer Edward Mote, “When all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay.”<\/p>\n

In spite of his agenda to demonstrate the futility of belief, Hitchens has made an astute observation when he says,<\/p>\n

It seems, therefore, that all the things that made Mother Teresa famous\u2014the endless hard toil, the bitter austerity, the ostentatious religious orthodoxy\u2014were only part of an effort to still the misery within.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hitchens again is right. It would appear from her letters that when everything around her was giving way, Teresa\u00a0opted to work harder rather than to trust more.\u00a0Teresa is evidence that no amount of effort on our part can “still the misery within,” granting\u00a0us assurance of a relationship with God. After all, who among us has worked harder and yet had less assurance than Teresa? Assurance comes not from what we do but from faith in what Christ has done.<\/p>\n

Jesus himself said, “Many shall say to me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? and in your name have cast our devils? and in your name done many wonderful works?’ And then I will profess unto them, ‘I never knew you.'” (Matthew 7:22-23). Could it be that Teresa is among the “many” who did “many wonderful works” in the name of Jesus but were trusting in their works to vindicate them in the end rather than the One they were working for?\u00a0Do Teresa\u2019s letters suggest that she could be among those who will hear Jesus say, “I never knew you”? You are aghast at the thought, because such a sentiment is so contrary to the conventional wisdom that says Teresa, of all people, is in heaven because she served the poorest of the poor and gave up her own life in doing so.\u00a0But that’s precisely the point.\u00a0\u00a0 If anyone is heaven, it won’t be because of the many wonderful works\u00a0they did\u00a0in Jesus name. It will be because they received faith as a gift from God,\u00a0a faith that sustains in the midst of doubt, a faith that gives evidence of the reality of our relationship to Christ even when our innate human reason suggests \u2013 as it evidently did in Mother Teresa\u2019s case \u2013 that the prudent course is to abandon all hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If anyone is in heaven, there is no question Mother Teresa is there,” is\u00a0a sentiment shared by millions of Americans, believers and non-believers alike.\u00a0 Yet her own words suggest it was not a sentiment Mother Teresa herself believed. A new … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}