Newspapers printed a story about a book on Mother Teresa and her religious faith near the second anniversary of her death. 
It is obvious in reading the story that secular culture cannot understand deep religious experience. They have forgotten (if they ever heard) the great saint’s stories of the “dark night of the soul” and of the difficulties of walking in the Way.
If the stories I have read are correct (and there is always reason to doubt mainstream media on religion), Mother Teresa went through a lifelong trial of faith. Her early great religious experiences were followed by a “dark night” of the soul that may have continued through most of her later life. She remained faithful, a follower of Christ, but her walk was painful and difficult and held little emotional comfort for her.
If this is a true account, then I cannot doubt that it will increase the admiration believers have for her. Secular newspapers seem unable to cope with it.
They seem shocked that a great believer could admit to great doubt.
Who would not admit to doubt? Only the arrogant or the very simple are allowed surety, in one a horrific vice and in the other a divine mercy to those to whom both much and little is given.
Mother Teresa had early religious experiences that were intense and motivated a life of service. She passionately loved Jesus and her life as a nun was a symbolic renunciation of any love, but His.
Surely, any of us who have loved in our smaller and less passionate way can easily see the risks of such a love. For those who allow themselves the great risk of a Grand Passion, there is much pain that will surely follow.
Even in an earthly love, the pain is great as betrayal (seeming or real) is worse, faults in the beloved hurt more, death looms terrible, and any separation causes aches greater than death produces in a smaller love. Some like Sheldon Vanauken, the student of C.S. Lewis, dare such a love and then face the shattering loss of it in death.
How much more fierce a great love of the Divine? How much more painful is evil in the face of the known love and power of God?
Our secular friends need make no mistake. The greatest believers are most sickened by evil. These high souls know as no one else does the great love of God and so are most disappointed in the chasm between that love and the pain of the world.
Not for them philosophic answers. The secularist forgets that Mother Teresa may have had no doubt intellectually, but deep pain at the level of experience! For the great lover of God, reason is a weak bulwark against any separation from the Beloved.
If persuaded by the kalaam argument intellectually, the lover of God may still be disappointed when He seems far off after having been close.
They must wrestle with God like Job and only when they see Him as Job did, do they know what it is they need to know. For some this seeing only comes at the hour of their death.
Any separation for one who has had such an intimate experience with God must bite worse than sickness or death. One has been forced out of Heaven and made to live on Earth. In the cries of Mother’s letters, one hears the “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” of her Lord on the Holy Cross.
Jesus Christ, who was God, knew the alienation from the Father that must have been the deepest torment of Calvary. His pain was greater than Mother Teresa’s as His love was greater and more perfect.
It was in that shared pain, I suspect, that Mother was able to move forward. It is here that we have a hint of the deepest religious experience, too awful and terrible for most of us, that the great saints find.
Even our lesser religious experiences are both a benefit and a snare.
If there is a God, then we would expect there would be religious experience. He loves us and particularly with children, the simple, and the immature, He delights to help us directly. I have seen miracles, they do happen.
Second, religious experience acts as a sign post to a reality (a deepest experience) that goes beyond the emotional experience. This emotional knowledge of the feeling intellect carries us beyond the surface to the deeper passion.
Pleasures in this life we can seek out of selfishness, but no healthy person seeks pain. Yet meaningful pain is the Way of the Cross. There every idol is burned, even the idol of superficial religious experience.
We are always tempted to build an altar where God was and then seek to capture Him there. When He is not limited in this way, we are hurt. The more we have loved Him, the greater this forced expansion of our hearts tears at us.
My friends who are atheists or agnostic perk up at this point. Are we not just clinging to something we deeply desire despite the evidence? And that is a sign that they do not understand at all. It is why they misunderstand the torment of C.S. Lewis’ book A Grief Observed.
Atheism would be a relief to the deeply religious man. It would so simple and often in despair he will attempt it. But having loved Something, the lover knows that Something is there. He cannot doubt, much as he wishes that he could. He is trapped loving and fearful that the object of his love is unworthy.
He fears that the Something has a heart that is nothing, dark as that of Zeus. His moments of professed “atheism” are really retreats from deepest fear and a kind of spiritual aspirin.
At the end of it, he is a lover locked in a dialectic with a Beloved. For most, this passage is not so difficult as it was for Mother Teresa, but then we aspire and love so little.
This is not to say that “superficial” religious experience is bad. In Paradise all our emotions will be united. If we are to grow up and become adults, then we must leave behind first things and move to higher things.
In this life, this will always end (for all but Enoch and Elijah) in the cold river of Jordan, death’s dark stream. All experience, even religious experience, can become an idol. We must say of it, “This is you, but this too is not you.”
To what do we cling at these moments of emotional doubt? The pain itself is all there is at that moment, but it is pain from the loss of Something. We almost wish it were love of nothing, but it is the Love of Something and it is gone.
We feel (deeply feel) alone, but know we are not alone. We are forced by this pain, this Divine withdrawal to move forward. In most of us, this growing up time is brief. We can handle so little!
Evidently, in Mother Teresa to whom much was given in terms of the Experience of Divine Love, much was required. Her experiences were great, but so was the temptation to idolize her experiences. Her love was so much greater than most of ours that her pain was greater still.
I cannot say more. This Way of Renunciation, to use the language of Charles Williams, that must have been her path is too sacred for much speech.
It is so far beyond me that I can hardly see the first steps on the Way she traveled, but it is a way that every Christians sees a little for it is His Way and yet not Him, the Via Dolorosa.