last week the news broke about mother theresa’s excruciating “crisis of faith” prompted by a soon to be released book of her letters and conversations over 60 years with her mentors and “confessors” called “come be my light”. http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20070823/wl_time/motherteresascrisisoffaith.
i find this news very provocative. why now?? until the book is available, there is much to think about just from reading the story above. with so much talk about “faith” “communities”, what is possibly a message about faith by this revelation for our time? time to shift from believing and faith to knowing and doing? do the thing and the love will follow? the best quote from the article is this one about her tremendous suffering from christ’s “silence”:

“the tendency in our spiritiual life, but also in our more general attitude towards love, is that our feelings are all that is going on. And so, to us, the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires committment, fidelity and vulnerability. mother theresa wasn’t feeling christ’s love and she could have shut down. but she was up at 4:30 every morning for jesus, and still writing to him ‘your happiness is all i want’. that’s a powerful example even if you are not talking exclusively in religious terms.”

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