I bought the latest issue of TIME
magazine. Very interesting coz it gives u an insight into the faith
of faithful Christians like Mother Teresa. Part in BOLD ORANGE is
for Mr. Earth and other Atheist guys:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html
Her secret letters show that she spent
almost 50 years without sensing the presence of God in her life.
What does her experience teach us about the value of
doubt?
Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and
the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do
not hear.
Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September
1979
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went
to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in
sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu
received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In
her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had
grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global
beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the
world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say,
'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in
dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one the
naked one the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what
"you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and
bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she
suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the
world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere
"Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the
smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual
confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being
made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different
Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she
assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the
emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, Listen and do
not hear the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I
want you to pray for me that I let Him have [a] free hand."
.........................
But for most people, Teresa's ranking among Catholic saints may be
less important than a more general implication of Come Be My Light:
that if she could carry on for a half-century without God in her
head or heart, then perhaps people not quite as saintly can cope
with less extreme versions of the same problem. One powerful
instance of this may have occurred very early on. In 1968, British
writer-turned-filmmaker Malcolm Muggeridge visited Teresa.
Muggeridge had been an
outspoken agnostic, but by the time he arrived with a film crew in
Calcutta he was in full spiritual-search mode. Beyond impressing
him with her work and her holiness, she wrote a letter to him in
1970 that addressed his doubts full-bore. "Your longing for God is
so deep and yet He keeps Himself away from you," she wrote. "He
must be forcing Himself to do so because he loves you so much
the personal love Christ has for you is infinite The Small
difficulty you have re His Church is finite Overcome the finite
with the infinite." Muggeridge apparently did. He became an
outspoken Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in
1982. His 1969 film, Something Beautiful for God,
supported by a 1971 book of the same title, made Teresa an
international sensation.
