Mother Teresa’s passionate expression of doubt is a reflection of the profundity of her faith and places her firmly in the lineage of the great spiritual figures of every tradition who were shaped by the exquisite anguish of finite human beings genuinely, fiercely and unconditionally yearning for the infinite. This window into the agonizing spiritual darkness Mother Teresa felt and the wrenching doubt she experienced about God, Jesus’ love, and prayer should invite not only deeper respect for her spiritual depth but greater reflection into the character of authentic faith, especially in these days in which faith is confused with certainty and doubt with weakness. These letters remind us that any faith that is certain is no faith at all just as any love never doubted is very shallow love.

How undermining Mother Teresa’s letters are to all fundamentalist faiths be they religious or secular. She was not some God-intoxicated mystic confidently empowered to sacrificially offer her life in service to the poorest people on this planet. Yes, we might have liked her to have been in ecstatic union with God as it would allow us to get off the hook by either idealizing her as someone with extraordinary faith, the sort of faith we normal human beings could never possess, or by seeing her as massively psychologically deluded, the sort of delusion normal human beings ought never suffer. But it appears there is no escaping Mother Teresa’s challenge.

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The answer to the question how does God allow disasters like hurricane Katrina depends on what kind of God we believe in. The question assumes a God living high up above, a Divine Puppeteer or Shepard of sheep who rewards and punishes as he sees fit.

This conventional and most common God image of the Axial Age monotheistic religions, founded in the time of the great city-states with their kings ruling from on high, is simply one very limited and partial image of God. Using this puny, patriarchal, and punitive attempt to describe our experience of God (one I admit still works for me at times) leaves us with a number of explanations of the “problem of evil” each of which captures a partial truth about our experience of Reality and therefore does speak to us at different moments.

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I live in New York City. Two friends, including someone at whose wedding I had recently been the rabbi died in the World Trade Center. The acrid smell came through my apartment windows for days and sacred ashes, which I wiped away with tears, fell on my window sills for weeks.

My children who were 13 and 10 at the time were cut off from me and my wife as they could not get home from school on 9/11 because the subways were closed. The father of one of my daughter’s playmates from the time she was a toddler was killed on 9/11. The fear we felt was unforgettable and the innocence our kids lost forever so very sad.

So what message would I like to send to religious extremists? No words at all. Simply the following chant (using an ancient melody used to chant the Biblical book of Lamentations which describes the destruction of Jerusalem) of actual final cell phone conversations of people, who in the face of terror and the dearness of the vanishing moment, showed no anger or any desire for revenge but simply and heroically witnessed a yearning to love and the faith that love ultimately swallows up death.

Click here to listen to Rabbi Kula chanting.

The difference between a cult and religion is more often than not a group's staying power. Most religions were considered cults by the dominant religious or political authorities in their early years and many founders of religions were seen in their day as dangerous charismatic leadership. Cults that make it over the long term earn the label religion sort of like how disruptive religious innovations that make it are eventually called sacred traditions. The question, what is the difference between a cult and religion tends to arise in a time of cultural (scientific, technological, political) turmoil and ferment when old ways of understanding what it means to be human are dying and new ways have not yet been born. Human beings crave assurance and meaning and at these times new religions - always permutations of and mixtures of inherited religions - arise to make sense of the new age.

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