Mother Teresa, of all people,the human standard by which unconditional faith is measured, was riddled with a life of spiritual doubt, we’re told. She had been the model of selfless love that so astonished a world used to seeing the actions of villains, flawed leaders and selfish personalities.If that woman, the angel personified in our generation, held deep doubts about God and Jesus across her long life, then how can the rest of us maintain faith amid all the garbage besetting earthly life? How can it be that her golden, earnest prayers left her writing about dryness, darkness, loneliness and torture? Alas the nun from Calcutta was just another human being saddled with mortal self-doubt, unanswered prayers, bouts of depression and second-guessing. New revelations of the 1979 Nobel Prize-winning nuns tortured thoughts in letters to her confidantes and confessors are setting off what will be a long and lively debate for theologians, as well as the world of practical belief. It has the potential to be a religious bombshell. It could shake up the Christian faithful and give new fuel to unbelievers and agnostics. One more hero could be subjected to image-wracking scrutinyWe may have a crisis of hope on our hands as more comes out about what Time Magazine calls Mother Teresas Crisis of Faith. (time.com) Drawing from the forthcoming book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, published by Doubleday and compiled and edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the lengthy article sets things up for huge demand for the book.Now 10 years after her death at 87, the pint-size, selfless legend of mercy to the poorest of the poor in the holes of Calcutta and many other parts of the planet is unwittingly showing another side of herself through her letters letters she had instructed to be routinely burned by the recipients. Yeah, sure, who in their right mind would destroy communications by such a 20th century icon and historic figure? Her writings portrayed a nun, who took on an ambitious ministry to the most forgotten and abandoned humans and became conflicted. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain, Time reports.She would write, When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have set the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, on the fast track to sainthood. What is coming out is precisely some of the rich material that is being used to document that nomination package. Unlike so many who reached sainthood without the benefit of their letters, Mother Teresas books and writings and the massive amounts written about her combine to give the Vatican Mother Teresa revealed — wrinkles and all. That she was a profoundly complicated human is underscored here, and it would not seem her agonizing doubts will slow down her bid for sainthood.I had the opportunity in February 1989 to meet Mother Teresa and briefly interview her with two other Valley reporters during her two-day visit to find a home for four nuns of her Missionaries of Charity. Later at St. Simon and Jude Cathedral, she handed me three miracle medallions, one of which I wear on a chain on my neck. In all her public talks, I recall her litany of calls for others to exhibit Jesus love by helping and serving the poor, hurting and forgotten.With the news of her decades of writings made public, I wondered about Katie Ringler of Tempe, who last month embarked on a 12-month global trek retracing Mother Teresas path. She earned a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Travel Grant just before finishing studies and graduating from Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. I wrote about her project in the July 14 issue of Spiritual Life. How will the book and the subsequent worldwide debate impact Katie Ringlers conversations in places like Skopje, Macedonia, where the nun was born and in Calcutta, Rome and other cities impacted by the tiny nuns incredible ground-breaking missionary work?In the final analysis, many will point to the dark hours that beset all historical giants, including Jesus. The great figures, many of them martyred, encountered enormous resistance, faced deep doubt and sometimes abandoned ventures. In that context, she may be elevated further into endless scholarly work.Some might say that Mother Teresas letters will bring her down from her perch, in somewhat the same way recorded tapes of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson served to reduce them to troubled men with ill intentions. In any event, this is truly the start of something big in the never-ending debate over whether God is out there. For whats left if Mother Teresa laid down her life for 50 years in the slums serving the people Jesus wanted served, and she expressly said she came up empty. In the final analysis, such service is the right thing to do and provides its own transforming and human rewards outside of faiths framework.

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