Today, I have a new sense of respect for Mother Teresa. Today, letters she wanted destroyed after her death were revealed.
The letters disclose that she doubted her faith, apparently till the day she died. She worried she was a hypocrite. She stopped praying.
She worked in the bowels of this world with the dregs of humanity, the unwanted, the unloved, the diseased, and the poor. She looked into the children’s bleak and tortured eyes and kept telling them God loves you.
Yet she could not feel this loving God or his love, she could only feel emptiness, darkness and silence.
Christians will say that having a crisis of faith is normal; we all get it but we get over it. Well, too bad you get over it because the voice that was trying to get out was your voice of reason and you squelched it.
There is a philosophy movement called SECULAR HUMANISM that upholds reason, ethics and justice but without supernaturalism. It stresses the need to work towards a better world for ourselves, our children, our fellow man and the earth we inhabit. Mother Teresa would have made a great secular humanist.
She obviously wanted to help the least of her fellow humans because she thought God wanted her to. As a humanist, she would help her fellow man because it was the right thing to do; no heavenly rewards, no sainthood.
I can understand why the light of her faith grew dark and then was gone. The idea of a personal God is appealing. The idea that a good God listens to all prayers is appealing but oh so dumb. We still don’t understand that the reason this God is so appealing is because WE created him. This is what we want in a god; we would not create a god we didn’t like!
Religious brains have been trying for centuries to reconcile the all good God with the very bad evil that plagues us; how can he allow it!
Reminds me of the recent story about a bus full of Polish pilgrims who were returning from a holy pilgrimage to a shrine somewhere in the Swiss Alps. They spend days praying their asses off. On their way back, the bus fell over a mountain side and all the pilgrims were killed.
Their families rushed to the site to offer more prayers. I thought shouldn’t you be cursing god for the terrible trick he played on them; what type of scoundrel is he. No god keeps poking us in the eye and we keep thanking him for it.
Mother Teresa had noble religious intentions but it appears that she also had a brain. I think she realized that this personal god we created did not exist because he resided only in our imaginations and in the stories our religious clerics spun. If there was some kind – any kind of superior power out there, he was not responding to her prayers.
I feel sad for Mother Teresa not because she realized her god did not exist but because she couldn’t see or feel that the good she was doing was so humanistic with its own rewards but maybe I am on to another quest to find what we really need as a reward for doing the right thing – interesting?
Anyway, I am told this revelation about her will only enhance her quest for sainthood – huh? I guess the struggle with one’s faith is somehow seen as good but I thought only if you conquered and squelched your voice of reason and she did not – at all – she died in doubt. Go figure…
The letters disclose that she doubted her faith, apparently till the day she died. She worried she was a hypocrite. She stopped praying.
She worked in the bowels of this world with the dregs of humanity, the unwanted, the unloved, the diseased, and the poor. She looked into the children’s bleak and tortured eyes and kept telling them God loves you.
Yet she could not feel this loving God or his love, she could only feel emptiness, darkness and silence.
Christians will say that having a crisis of faith is normal; we all get it but we get over it. Well, too bad you get over it because the voice that was trying to get out was your voice of reason and you squelched it.
There is a philosophy movement called SECULAR HUMANISM that upholds reason, ethics and justice but without supernaturalism. It stresses the need to work towards a better world for ourselves, our children, our fellow man and the earth we inhabit. Mother Teresa would have made a great secular humanist.
She obviously wanted to help the least of her fellow humans because she thought God wanted her to. As a humanist, she would help her fellow man because it was the right thing to do; no heavenly rewards, no sainthood.
I can understand why the light of her faith grew dark and then was gone. The idea of a personal God is appealing. The idea that a good God listens to all prayers is appealing but oh so dumb. We still don’t understand that the reason this God is so appealing is because WE created him. This is what we want in a god; we would not create a god we didn’t like!
Religious brains have been trying for centuries to reconcile the all good God with the very bad evil that plagues us; how can he allow it!
Reminds me of the recent story about a bus full of Polish pilgrims who were returning from a holy pilgrimage to a shrine somewhere in the Swiss Alps. They spend days praying their asses off. On their way back, the bus fell over a mountain side and all the pilgrims were killed.
Their families rushed to the site to offer more prayers. I thought shouldn’t you be cursing god for the terrible trick he played on them; what type of scoundrel is he. No god keeps poking us in the eye and we keep thanking him for it.
Mother Teresa had noble religious intentions but it appears that she also had a brain. I think she realized that this personal god we created did not exist because he resided only in our imaginations and in the stories our religious clerics spun. If there was some kind – any kind of superior power out there, he was not responding to her prayers.
I feel sad for Mother Teresa not because she realized her god did not exist but because she couldn’t see or feel that the good she was doing was so humanistic with its own rewards but maybe I am on to another quest to find what we really need as a reward for doing the right thing – interesting?
Anyway, I am told this revelation about her will only enhance her quest for sainthood – huh? I guess the struggle with one’s faith is somehow seen as good but I thought only if you conquered and squelched your voice of reason and she did not – at all – she died in doubt. Go figure…
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