The God question as we all know is irelevent to morality

G

“Holy Saturday is the name that is given to that 24-hour period nestled between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, between crucifixion and resurrection.

It is a day that speaks of the absence of God and is as much a part of the Christian experience as the day before and the day after. It is the moment when we experience the depth of Christ’s cry on the cross ["My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"], the moment when we feel abandoned by God and utterly alone in the world. This day is never as far from us as we would wish, for there are times when we all are unsettled by the feeling that we have been abandoned and that everything we believe may be nothing more than empty words and hopeless dreams. This is the horror of the cross, not the blood and suffering of an innocent, but the removal of God.

Holy Saturday ridicules the idea that the feeling of God’s absence is reserved for those who are irreligious, for in reality it is only the religious individual who can really know this absence. This is analogous to the experience of waiting for one whom we love in a cafe. The later they are, the more we experience their absence. Our beloved is absent to everyone in the room but we are the only one who feels it.

Who among us does not find ourselves dwelling from time to time, or perhaps at all times, in the space of Holy Saturday? Yet this day is rarely spoken of and the experience is often seen as one to be avoided or merely tolerated rather than embraced.”

Mother Teresa had a full life and I think it was reasonably happy. MLK Jr did great things too, but he also studied Gandhi. What of it? So, they sometimes had doubts and questioned their beliefs. Gene Roddenberry, a Humanist, had a good heart too. Margaret Sanger, an atheist who fought for women’s reproductive health and was a humanitarian. Who really cares about their labels- whether given or self-described?

IMHO, it is not what is in the head, it is what is in one’s heart that really matters and quite honestly, Mother Teresa had a big and caring heart. Beyond that, it doesn’t matter to me if she was a believer or not. Let whoever wants to label her label her what they want. It’s how she lived her life that really matters to me.

That makes her pretty close to being a closet atheist in my book.

I haven’t read the letters and I can’t find any good details online. Can anyone confirm whether the core of MT’s doubts were actually about God’s existence – or even that her struggles were primarily about intellectual “doubts”? There are many ways to struggle with one’s faith, and intellectual questions about God’s existence are rarely the #1 issue for most believers in my experience. The little snippets that I’ve read about MT’s struggles seem more about her questioning God’s calling or spiritual/emotional presence in her life, not specifically about whether or not he exists. But I could be wrong as I haven’t read the whole book.

olvlzl, you’re reading it, what are you finding?

She continued to follow her deepest convictions even when her feelings said otherwise. That is the behavior of an honest & respectable human being, and the precise opposite of hypocrisy.

Well said Keith.

Mother Theresa gave herself throughout her life to the poor and to Jesus. When you serve the poor in as self-sacrificing a way as she did, you burn out. Her life of self-sacrifice suggests that she regularly chose to follow Jesus and give herself for others even when she did not feel like it. That she did not feel like it that often is precisely why she is saintly. She served others even when things were tough. For guys like Hitchens, or Dennett, or myself to use her heartfelt letters to promote our own agenda while we sit in palaces is a joke. We are not in position to accurately judge her, because we have not walked anywhere near her shoes.

Perhaps I’m too easily bothered, but I find it grossly offensive to hear her struggles used as evidence that she was some winking hypocrite. She conitnued to follow her deepest convictions even when her feelings said otherwise. That is the behavior of an honest & respectable human being, and the precise opposite of hypocrisy.