Marney Rich Keenan: Home life

Mother Teresa's letters shake up faithful, but atheist goes too far

So I guess it wasn't enough for Christopher Hitchens to dance on the grave of Mother Teresa. Now, the celebrated atheist and author of "God Is Not Great" (Twelve Books, $24.99), says he's looking forward to the death of the evangelical minister Billy Graham.

In a recent "Book TV" C-SPAN appearance, the captious cynic described Graham as a "self-conscious fraud," and a "disgustingly evil man" who spent his life "spouting lies to young people for a living. What a horrible career. I gather it's soon to be over. I certainly hope so."

Nice guy, eh?

Less than a month ago, Hitchens, who testified against Mother Teresa's beatification and canonization at the Vatican hearings, wrote a scathing essay on Mother Teresa's crisis of faith as revealed in the new book of her letters, "Come Be My Light" (Doubleday, $22.95).

He said her years of spiritual darkness were "the inevitable result of a dogma that asks people to believe impossible things and then makes them feel abject and guilty when their innate reason rebels."

He concluded: "I say it as calmly as I can -- the church should have had the elementary decency to let the earth lie lightly on this troubled and miserable lady, and not to invoke her long anguish to recruit the credulous to a blind faith in which she herself had long ceased to believe."

Good thing he was calm: One wonders what he might have said if he'd gotten all worked up.

Hitchens sounds as if he takes delight in Mother Teresa's anguished torment. Of course, it does boost his basic tenet on Godlessness: "The absence of evidence is the evidence of absence."

I'm the first to admit that the letters, which she repeatedly asked never to be published, lest she be given prominence: "People will think more of me and less of Jesus," shook my faith to its core.

How could Mother Teresa, one of the most important and beloved religious figures in history, not believe? How could this holy woman who devoted her life to the "the poorest of the poor" doubt God's very existence? If she could not be sure, how could I? I had to read the letters in their entirety for myself.

In her book, it is remarkable, mind-blowing even, to read that she suffered for decades in "terrible darkness," especially after having a series of divine visions in 1946, in which she says she heard God, "The Voice," she calls it, directing her to serve the destitute and dying in the slums of Calcutta.

But not long after she formed the Missionaries of Charity order, she revealed the "painful interior ordeal" to her adviser.

She wrote: "So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them -- because of the blasphemy -- if there be God -- please forgive me -- When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven -- there is such convincing emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?"

The Catholic Church's explanation is that her torment is a classic mystic trait often found in the lives of saints. Her intense suffering was part of her mission: "an intimate sharing of the cross of Christ," just as Christ himself felt betrayed on the cross, crying out: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me."

Still, what impressed me most was her perseverance in the face of such tormenting doubt. Even well into her 80s and ill, she still tread in her sandals to feed the "poorest of the poor." She never faltered in her mission, never succumbed to the fear, never surrendered to her inner turmoil.

In the end, she embraced the questions and accepted the darkness as God's will. "God cannot fill what is full," she wrote. "He can fill only emptiness. It is not how much we really 'have' to give -- but how empty we are so that we can receive fully in our life and let Him live His Life in us."

But Christopher Hitchens could never grasp this selfless concept of faith. If God does not exist, I wonder, from where would he say her works of love were inspired? As one Internet commenter on Hitchens' article aptly put it: "Will someone please send me the name of the atheist religious order that is composed of atheists dedicating their whole lives to the poorest and most destitute?"

Marney Rich Keenan's column runs in The Detroit News Features section on Thursdays and in Homestyle on Saturdays. You can reach her at (313) 222-2515 or mkeenan@detnews.com.