There's been a lot of discussion lately about Mother Teresa, and the contents of her diary, which records forty years of doubt—coinciding with the period of her famous ministry to the poor.Some people are shocked to learn that she doubted God loved her, and even that God existed. They ask themselves whether this doesn't call into question her sainthood, even her ministry—perhaps it even threatens the Church itself. If as dedicated, as holy a person as Mother Teresa was tortured by doubt, doesn't that cast doubt on the entire faith?
It does and it doesn't.
To begin with, her plight was not at all unusual.
I spent some years as a spiritual director, counseling mostly protestant pastors about their spiritual lives, and I was directed myself, by a Benedictine monk. Pastors, priests, nuns, missionaries—people for whom faith and work and life are all combined—often have this experience, perhaps more often than not.
It's so common, in fact, that it's been long mapped out, as a standard part of the spiritual journey, going under various names: the dark night of the soul, the experience of the absence of God, the well running dry, and others. This mapping has an interesting effect—a teaching and healing effect, or a propaganda and indoctrination effect, depending on how you look at it.
I tend to stand on the edge. One effect of mapping, of naming or diagnosing the condition, is to normalize it. Often the person going through a dark night begins by thinking they are alone, that this has never happened to anyone else before, that there is something uniquely wrong with their spiritual life. When their director tells them that this is a normal stage of spiritual development, that many of the greatest mystics have gone through the exact same thing, they are greatly relieved. They still have to deal with the experience, of course, but they are freed up to do that, without unnecessary self-blame.
But another effect of the naming is to immunize. It frames this doubt, this loss of experience, as a stage in the life of the believer, as a transition in the experience of faith. In the process, it changes the fundamental question, from "Is God really there?" to "How am I going to remain faithful during this spiritual stage?"
There's nothing sinister about this switch. It's generally introduced by people who believe, wholeheartedly, that this is a spiritual stage, and that the important thing is to stay faithful. Often they have been through the same thing themselves. But it does seem to dodge a very basic question, just at the point where that question has thrust itself into experience. Usually, dodging that question is a goal for the directee, as well as for the director. But what if they are both mistaken?
So is this framing of the experience a bad thing?
I'm not sure of the answer, largely because of what happened to me, during my own dark night of the soul.
As I mentioned above, I had been—for some time—a spiritual director. As a spiritual director, I had had to help many people through their own dark nights. My approach was based on the idea that people experience God in different ways. One person experiences God in community—in relationships with other Christians. Another experiences God in solitude—in a quiet walk, or eyes closed in meditation. Another experiences God in the liturgy, or in Bible study, or in service to others.
I had assumed in my counseling that the dark night was a challenge to broaden one's experience of God. That the seeming retreat of God was really a way of saying, "I'm not just there, where you're used to looking for me. I'm other places as well." I thought, and taught my directees, that this absence eventually led to a new sense of God's presence in other ways, and that the challenge was to wait, but to remain alert, for this new sense.
I had personally experienced God primarily in prayer. When I prayed, I had a strong sense that there was someone on the other end, listening. Often I had a sense of the attitude of the listener: sometimes of mild reproach, sometimes of love, sometimes of patience—never of disapproval or of anger. No voices, no visions, just this sense of presence.
One day, I went to pray, and the listener was gone. Nothing. No one. It was quite a shock. I had no idea how long this presence had been a part of my experience—it seemed like it had always been there, been a simple fact of life. To find it missing shook me to the core.
There are two general types of knowledge about God. One is intellectual—apologetics and theology. Arguments for and about the existence of some abstract creator or some historical personage. This type holds no water in the end, and everyone knows it if they are honest. No argument proves God exists, and even if it did, it wouldn't prove that the kind of God which people actually worship exists. The Church recognizes this, which is one reason it puts so much emphasis on faith.
The other kind of God-knowledge is the knowledge that comes from experience. It's a lot harder to debunk. You can make all the arguments you like against the existence of apples, but when I'm biting into one I'm going to be hard to convince.
The problem appears when I go to the fruit bowl and find it empty. Then I go to the grocery store, and there are no apples there. I go to the orchard, only to find the trees bare—or producing peaches.
God was gone.
I had resources. I had a spiritual director who had helped many through this same experience. I had a long experience myself helping others. I was not unequipped. I had the map. I trusted. I held on with determination and blind faith. I waited and I watched.
And, sure enough, after a year had gone by, I noticed something. There was a new sense, this time not of another person listening to my prayers, but of something closer, something more intimate. It was something inside of me, and had been there for a long time before I noticed it—how long I couldn't tell, perhaps forever. The closest I could get to expressing it was to say that it felt as though God was at my center, moving through me.
This may sound arrogant, or even dangerous to some. But it really wasn't like that at all. It didn't make me feel special, or different from anyone else. It made me suspect that God was somewhere deep inside everyone. I began to notice how much the Bible talks about God being within us. I began to notice that Jesus seemed to accept the idea that people were divine. I remembered that Athanasius had understood Jesus' divinity to be a function of his humanity.
Needless to say, my theology was transformed. Eventually, I found it impossible to continue working in the Church—my differences with the world-view there were just too great. I stopped teaching, stopped attending, and lost all contact with the institution.
I didn't come out where Mother Teresa came out. In fact, she appears never to have come out at all. She bore this great burden her whole life, and forged ahead anyway. I admire her fortitude, but I don't necessarily think that was a good thing, for her or the poor. I don't believe she would have lost her concern for the poor if she had recaptured her experience of God, or even if she had lost her faith. What she did was essential to who she was—there was no virtue in her added suffering.
Ultimately, I came to believe that the whole idea of God was a heavily laden model, crammed with dangerous authoritarian ideas—like the idea that suffering is automatically good for you. I stopped calling that something inside of me "God"—at least in any traditional sense of the word. I'm not at all religious anymore, and I have lost nothing. On the contrary, I've gained immeasurably.
Would I have gained if I had simply interpreted the experience of God's absence as evidence that God didn't exist? I really don't know. I might have come to the same place by a different path, but I might have despaired and become depressed. I might have taken refuge in denial, rather than face such a difficult question head-on.
I now believe that the presence I experienced in prayer was a deeper part of myself, a part that I was denying myself direct access to, but could connect with in a limited way through prayer—by confusing it with God. I think my own dark night was a process that allowed me to accept that part of myself, to reconnect with it in a more direct and intimate way.
From my present, post-Christian, point of view, I'm tempted to say that framing experiential doubt as a part of the spiritual journey is, finally, a deception. That it's a way to dodge the real question the experience asks.
On the other hand, it was part of my journey. It's the way I got to my present, post-Christian, point of view.
