Mother Teresa’s life was a paradox on a grand scale. She was a woman who, in response to God’s call to a particular way of life, had given up everything and lived a heroic brand of poverty. Yet in embracing powerlessness, she became an incredibly powerful, vocal advocate for the ‘poorest of the poor.’ In an age of media glamour, the cult of the young and the body-beautiful, her crinkled face often gazed at us from our television screens and newspapers asking us to see the world in a more realistic manner, challenging the hedonism of our Western lifestyles.

If only they knew
We thought that this woman of indomitable courage and wisdom was carried along on a blissful sea of God’s grace and that nothing could disturb her. Some even thought that her sainthood would be irrelevant, because her ‘steadfast faith’ appeared to be so far removed from the daily struggles and doubt which we ‘normal people’ experience in our faith journeys through life. We didn’t for a moment associate her journey of faith with struggle, doubt and darkness. Yet, she tells us herself, in her diaries, that because she was “forever smiling”, people thought “my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew.”

She gives us a glimpse of what she meant by: “If only they knew”. In another letter, she wrote: “The damned of Hell suffer eternal punishment because they experience the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God, and that he does not really exist.” What an extraordinary journey this woman went through and what an example she is of what it means to journey with faith rather than with certainty. These doubts were with her all the years she worked for the poor in Calcutta and preached her message of love to the world.

Absent but present
The great paradox is that this God who was absent from her feelings and emotions, worked so powerfully through her life and actions. All of us, at some stage or other, experience this absence of God and we wonder is he out there at all. The promise is, that Emmanuel (God with us) is always present with us, yet sometimes we don’t experience that presence at an emotional or feeling level.

That great spiritual writer C. S. Lewis had the experience of God’s absence after the death of his wife. He graphically describes his experience as follows: “Where is God?... Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away... There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. What can this mean? Why is he so present in time of our prosperity and so very absent in time of trouble?”

Not all prayer is ‘nice
These questions always seem to have been part of the human experience when relating with God. Even Jesus, as he hangs in torture on the cross, underlines this basic human experience, when he cries out: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? (Mt 27,46) Implicit in this cry of desperation is the belief in a God who has promised to be faithful. Sometimes the circumstances of our lives can make life almost unbearable and we may cry out with a “prayer of desperation”. This can be very genuine prayer. It is a mistake to think that all my prayers must be “nice” or that I can only contact God when my feelings are of praise, awe or joy. God meets me equally in all the circumstances of my life, whatever they may be.

Maybe it is through those journeys of desperation or powerlessness that we arrive at a deeper understanding of who God is and who we are. Perhaps it is only then that we finally pray for the help to surrender wholeheartedly to God and are finally able to say with sincerity: ‘Father into your hands, I commit my spirit.’

No prayer unanswered
When we go through periods of despair or doubt, it is important not to give up praying, even if we think there is a doubly bolted door blocking us from God’s presence or that we are simply talking into an echo chamber. The wisdom of the ages tells us that our prayer never depends on our feeling close to God; he is always close to us and no prayer is left unanswered, because he is a God of unconditional love. A love that logic will never fully comprehend.

The prophet Habakkuk, thousands of years ago, seems to have gone through an experience where, even though the barrenness of everything round about him speaks of the absence of God, he is still able to proclaim his belief that God is present despite appearances to the contrary:

Though the fig tree does not blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will exult in the God of my salvation. (Hab. 3:17-18)

God in the poor and abandoned
Mother Teresa, like the prophet Habakkuk, had trusted God in the darkness. She trusted that the God she had never seen, was somehow to be found in the poor and abandoned for whom she worked so tirelessly. In their faces, their hunger, and their sufferings she saw the face of the suffering powerless Jesus. In turn they came to see the face of the God of compassion, who did not abandon them, in her. This, as followers of Jesus, is the faith to which we are all called.