But Mother Teresa’s heart-wrenching self-examination is entirely familiar to thoughtful Christians. For instance, her insistent theme that she is being forsaken by God recalls Christ’s plaintive cry on the cross, “Why have You forsaken me?” From Augustine to Luther to John of the Cross, there is a whole body of Christian literature that sounds exactly like Mother Teresa. In John’s Dark Night of the Soul, for instance, the initial exhilaration of conversion is followed by a “dark night of the senses” that is “bitter and terrible to taste.” Even so, this suffering is nothing compared to what follows, the “dark night of the soul” in which “the soul feels itself to be perishing and melting away, in the presence and sight of its miseries, in a cruel spiritual death, even as if it had been swallowed by a beast and felt itself being devoured.” John interprets these travails as the purification of the sinful part of man, so that he is ready for the holy eternal embrace of God.
From Christian classics like these we learn 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 that 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.