Even the saints ask "Where is my faith?"

A wise friend once counseled me through periods of doubt by pointing out that the definition of a saint is one who struggles MOST, not least. I had always thought those whom we most look up to -- such as St. Francis, Mother Theresa, St. Theresa of Avila -- had secure and steadfast surety of God. So filled with love and good works, how could they have ever doubted their belief in Christ? But they did. I guess they were the most challenged.......as revealed by these new letters of Mother Theresa.

So though I continue to experience doubts and "dark nights of the soul", at least now I know that I am in good company.....

Letters reveal Mother Teresa tormented by questions of faith


Richard Owen of The Times, in Rome

Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 and was beatified in record time only six years later, felt abandoned by God from the very start of the work that made her a global figure, in her sandals and blue and white sari. The doubts persisted until her death.

Shortly after beginning her work in the slums of Calcutta, she wrote "Where is my faith? Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be a God — please forgive me." In letters eight years later she was still expressing "such deep longing for God", adding that she felt "repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal". Her smile to the world from her familiar weather-beaten face was a " mask" or a "cloak", she said. "What do I labour for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true." "I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul," she wrote at one point. "I want God with all the power of my soul — and yet between us there is terrible separation." On another occasion she wrote: "I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing."

The nun's crisis of faith was revealed four years ago by the Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postutalor or advocate of her cause for sainthood, at the time of her beatification in October 2003. Now he has compiled a new edition of her letters, entitled Mother Teresa: Come be My Light, which reveals the full extent of her long "dark night of the soul".  Rev Kolodiejchuk maintains that Mother Teresa did not suffer "a real doubt of faith", but that, on the contrary, her agonising demonstrates her faith in God's reality. "We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us . . . Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic," he said.