Too many Christians are reluctant to admit they have doubts about what they claim to believe. Too many non-believers think doubt disqualifies a life of faith altogether. Both are wrong. Having doubts is part of the human condition. In fact, reasonable doubt puts you in the company of faithful giants.
A case study may show you why.
A Tale of Two Women
On August 31, 1997 Princess Diana died in a tragic car crash in Paris. Five days later, Mother Teresa of Calcutta died due to complications of a long battle with heart disease combined with malaria. The world grieved for Diana. Her story led the evening news every night and her funeral was broadcast live to millions. Elton John re-wrote a song for her. Meanwhile, the news of Mother Teresa got buried under a tsunami of the princess’s flash and glitz. This said more about our cultural values than Mother Teresa ever could have said herself.
A Decade To Remember
Ten years later, on the anniversary of their deaths, the tables got turned. Suddenly, Mother Teresa was newsworthy — cover material for the national magazines. But the ten-year remembrance of Mother Teresa was not what the press has found so marketable. Neither was her 60 years of work with the poor and dying in India.
What was so tantalizingly important about her was that the press had accessed some of her private letters. These were letters that Mother Teresa had specifically requested not be made public. Instead, she wanted them destroyed. The letters revealed that she had sometimes questioned her faith. Mother Teresa, a world-renown icon of religious commitment, had undergone a “crisis of faith.” Time magazine reported …
… one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
Mother Teresa’s Unforgivable Sin
To a secular press hell-bent on de-legitimizing faith or anyone who claims to have it, that was too juicy to not shout from the rooftops. Mother Teresa became a target for their secular wrath. That was the only reason they showed any interest in her. New atheist firebrand Christopher Hitchens saw this as an opportunity to exploit. Hitchens said he despised a …
Church [that] should have had the elementary decency to let the earth lie lightly on this troubled and miserable lady, and not to invoke her long anguish to recruit the credulous to a blind faith in which she herself had long ceased to believe.
And what was Mother Teresa’s “crisis?” At various points in her life, she questioned the presence of God. He seemed unreachable to her amid the squalor and misery of life that engulfed her. God seemed missing in action. Teresa’s longing for Him was palpable:
For me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves but does not speak … Such deep longing for God—and … repulsed—empty—no faith—no love—no zeal.—[The saving of] Souls holds no attraction—Heaven means nothing … What do I labor for? If there be no God—there can be no soul—if there is no Soul then Jesus—You also are not true.
Blind Faith?
How could someone as smart as Christopher Hitchens hear those words and ridicule Mother Teresa for practicing a “blind faith”?
Read her words again and listen … Is this the babble of someone who accepts her faith without question? How could anyone not see the intellectual wrestling match going on within Teresa’s tortured head? Call it doubtful, or despairing. But please don’t call her faith “blind.”
The fact is that Mother Teresa, like any legitimately thoughtful seeker, struggled to see God in the misery of a fallen world. Yet, she still committed herself to enter that world and demonstrating His presence to others. And she did so while still being honest enough to ask herself the toughest questions of all.
She Was Not Alone
Those who are so quick to disparage both Mother Teresa on the basis of her questioning faith should know that she is not alone. Other famous believers have shared the same sentiments. I offer you four examples:
- “How long, O LORD, will I call for help, and You will not hear? Why do You make me see iniquity, and cause me to look on wickedness? Yes, destruction and violence are before me; strife exists and contention arises … Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they?
- “Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? For sighing comes to me instead of food; my groans pour out like water. What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.
- “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent.
- “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’— ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'”
The first is Habakkuk. The second is Job. The third is David. The fourth is Jesus himself.
An Agonizing Allusion To Victory
Jesus spoke those words in agony from the cross. They were the only words his human nature could muster. Those words were a call to remember David’s similar cry. I don’t make a habit of quoting the Bible at length here but this case calls for an exception. I do so because this last quote of Jesus is usually used to question not only his commitment to “the cause,” but His very divinity. How could the Son of God say such a thing?
Simple. His physical condition would not allow otherwise. He could only gasp out the first lines of a passage he knew his followers would instantly recognize. It was the opening lines of Psalm 22. Jesus is quoting David’s prophetic description from 1,000 years before. David’s words paint an uncannily accurate picture of Jesus’ actual circumstances on the cross. And it’s not pretty:
6 But I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by men and despised by the people.
7 All who see me mock me;
they hurl insults, shaking their heads:
8 “He trusts in the LORD;
let the LORD rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
since he delights in him.”
…
11 Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.
12 Many bulls surround me;
strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
13 Roaring lions tearing their prey
open their mouths wide against me.
14 I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted away within me.
15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.
16 Dogs have surrounded me;
a band of evil men has encircled me,
they have pierced my hands and my feet.
17 I can count all my bones;
people stare and gloat over me.
18 They divide my garments among them
and cast lots for my clothing.
The Passage Ends On A Completely Different Tone
23 You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you descendants of Israel!
24 For he has not despised or disdained
the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him
but has listened to his cry for help.
25 From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly;
before those who fear you will I fulfill my vows.
26 The poor will eat and be satisfied;
they who seek the LORD will praise him—
may your hearts live forever!
27 All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations
will bow down before him,
28 for dominion belongs to the LORD
and he rules over the nations.
29 All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;
all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—
those who cannot keep themselves alive.
30 Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord.
31 They will proclaim his righteousness
to a people yet unborn—
for he has done it.
This is what Jesus wanted his disciples to remember. And these are not the words or thoughts of a skeptic. They are the confident claims of a victor who holds an eternal view of a temporarily hidden God.
The Cries That Bind
It seems that when we consider things more carefully, Mother Teresa’s groaning for an absent God puts her in the company of faithful giants. Her pleading and doubt is far from an admission of a loss of faith. Instead, they demonstrate the inevitable longings of fallen and rebellious creatures.
Our yearning for a hidden God is only temporary — the result of being separated from our only Source of hope. When we recognize the futility of life without Him, that is what drives us to despair.
But we must remember that our despair is self-inflicted. God did not separate himself from us. We hid from Him first.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:7-8)
Our cries for God to reveal himself to us — to stop hiding from us — are a common lament that defines the human condition. We share the cries that bind us together with every person from the most skeptical unbeliever to the most honored of the saints. They are cries that unite us in the search to recapture meaning from what would otherwise be a meaningless existence.
From the labs of modern scientific laboratories to the editors’ desks of the “new atheists”; from the Hollywood rehab clinics and the overcrowded jail cells to the filth of the ghettos of Calcutta, the cry is always the same — and the answer to the cry is never far away. It is most certainly never hidden from our sight:
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble.
But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33