In Christopher Hitchens’ wickedly iconoclastic book THE MISSIONARY POSITION, Mother Teresa is portrayed as a self-satisfied dogmatist who never entertains any doubts. She is a “true believer” of the fanatical type. In his latest book GOD IS NOT GREAT, Hitchens is at it again, depicting believing Christians like Mother Teresa as no different than Islamic terrorists. Not only are all believers extremists, in Hitchens’ caustic analysis, they are also poseurs who claim to know what cannot be known.
The latest revelations about Mother Teresa, drawn from a new book and featured in TIME magazine, completely explode the Hitchens portrait. Mother Teresa confessed to a spiritual adviser that within her heart “the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” In one of her letters, addressed to Jesus, she wrote, “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love — and now become as the most hated one… You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved…So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be a God — please forgive me… I am told that God loves me, and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
TIME interprets these anguished ruminations as a “startling portrait in self-contradiction,” as if Mother Teresa was one thing in public and another in private. Hitchens cannot resist further digs, and he makes a complete about-face in his reading of Mother Teresa. Once he viewed her as an inflexible dogmatist; now he portrays her as a secret unbeliever who knew that “religion is a human fabrication,” comparable to the latter-day Communists who paid lip service to the official ideology but couldn’t abide it any longer in their hearts.
Here we see how atheist prejudice results in a complete breakdown of reason. Hitchens cannot bring himself to say, “I thought she was a self-satisfied dogmatist and I was completely wrong about it. I have to try to understand her all over again.” TIME cannot get beyond its cognitive dissonance that a passionate Christian may harbor doubts and anguish over a long period of years.
But Mother Teresa’s heart-wrenching self-examination is entirely familiar to thoughtful Christians. Here let me just note that it was Christ on the cross who cried out to God the Father, “Why have you forsaken me?” From Augustine’s CONFESSIONS to John of the Cross’ DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, there is a whole body of Christian literature that sounds exactly like Mother Teresa. What this literature shows is that, contrary to atheist propaganda, believers don’t claim to “know” God. That’s why they are called “believers.” To be a believer means, “Even though I do not know, I have faith.” Nor do believers, however devout, experience God on a constant basis. There is a big chasm between the terrestrial and the transcendental, and a terrible silence usually separates the two. A glimpse or foretaste of eternity, this is all that we get, if we’re lucky.
The greatness of Mother Teresa is that even when she was deprived of the spiritual satisfactions of feeling God’s presence in her life, she did not waver, she soldiered on. She was not deterred in her mission. And what she didn’t have by way of feeling, she compensated for by way of will. In doing so she teaches us all something about love: it is not merely a sentiment, to be set aside when feelings come and go, but rather a decision of the will. That she did what she did in exchange for the love of God is astounding enough. That she did it all even when this love was invisible to her — if this does not constitute saintliness, I don’t know what does.