Neither an extraordinary faith in some simplistic sweet and light filled new age God, nor a belief in some fundamentalist God who ultimately saves if just heeded, nor some liberal secular humanism about doing good, enabled her to endure decades of wiping leprous sores, of feeding the hungriest of the hungry or of suffering with the dying of so many. It turns out that what distinguished and motivated Mother Theresa was the depth of her doubt. She served, she bandaged, she fed, she healed, she worked, she smiled and she loved without any of the ongoing awareness of God’s presence that we assume she must have had to do what she did.

Mother Teresa’s honesty about her spiritual emptiness is uncomfortable for us because we tend to see genuine faith and love as free of doubt. But nothing could be further from the truth. A mature faith and a rich love, a genuine relationship with God or with another person (it is no accident that every mystical tradition analogizes the two relationships) is born of the grit and insecurity of life. We yearn for that place with God or with another person that can banish turbulence, anxiety, anguish, uncertainty and insecurity. But the paradox of love and faith as experienced by finite human beings is that the more deeply we love the more we risk and the greater the intimacy we desire the more vulnerable we need to make ourselves. We may try to convince ourselves otherwise with declarations to our lovers like “till death do us part” or proclamations about God’s unconditional love for us but the awesome truth about faith and love is that we can never know for sure that we are one hundred per cent loved by another human being or by God or whether we actually love another person or God with all our heart and all our might. And the more seriously we surrender to love the more we live on this razor’s edge of that doubt. Maybe this is why we need to say and to hear “I love you” so often from those whom we most love and why so much traditional prayer proclaims our love for God and why so much new age meditation invites us to feel bathed in cosmic love. We can never be certain.

What makes Mother Teresa so much more fascinating now than she was before we knew about her painful doubt is that we now know her choice to live in service of others and to mitigate suffering was a choice that she had to make every day. It was a choice to love in the grip of doubt, to do good without the certainty that doing good would make any ultimate difference, and to be bound to a vision, a call, and intuition, once had but never to be confirmed again, that love was ultimately Real. No making believe here with false dogma or prayers, no illusions of certainty, rather the pain of living with the possibility of ultimate meaninglessness and abandonment. And how could it have been otherwise for Mother Teresa? How could she have not doubted? Day in day out, caring for and empathizing with the most destitute on our planet, knowing (not just feeling) the depths of people’s suffering, and seeing the insignificance of her own actions relative to the insurmountable quality of that suffering, any posture but doubting God would have been a lie. And we are not referring here to the voyeuristic peeping Tom god who rewards and punishes that religious fundamentalists cling to or that secular fundamentalists still fight with but the ever-present, luminous, expansive, spacious, transparent, Oneness – Reality with a capital R!

For Mother Teresa it was not simply that doubt was a part of faith and love; that should be obvious to anyone who has ever loved deeply as doubt and faith are always in a dance. The messiness of doubt is a necessary path to greater intimacy whether with God or another human being and no doubt means no growth in love or in holiness. The profound teaching reflected in Mother Teresa’s “dark letters” is that: Doubt is a result of receiving guidance; doubt is a consequence of love, NOT a way of preventing or undermining it! Certainty is the enemy of compassion while doubt is an invitation to prove, with our actions, that Reality/God/Self/ Kosmos, whatever we name that which we have all yearned for, if not tasted, is fundamentally Loving.

Mother Teresa connected her feeling of spiritual abandonment into an act of ego abandonment and it gave her unique access to the meaninglessness, loneliness and suffering in life that most of us will do anything – drugs, shopping, watch television, celebrity worship, meditate, worship God – to avoid feeling. That access, that identification, compelled her to impose compassion upon the suffering, solidarity upon the loneliness and love upon the meaninglessness. In this respect, Mother Teresa is in her extreme devotion and doubt an absorbing contemporary model. For so many of us devotion requires certainty and doubt undermines devotion. The paradox of faith, as illuminated by Mother Teresa, is that to all appearance God is indeed absent, contrary to our religious fundamentalist’s dogmatic assertions, and yet there is a possible faith, contrary to our secular fundamentalists, that can supply what is lacking even in faith - a faith that combines active and engaged devotion to healing people’s pain and unflinching and honest doubt about whether such action makes any ultimate difference. From this sacred contradiction may well flow the sort of joy that must have been the reason for Mother Theresa’s ever present smile. The joy my tradition calls “simcha shel mitzvah” the joy of doing that which one knows one must do. Perhaps, what the world needs these days in which certainty not only undermines our search for the truth and our capacity to love but threatens us with destruction is Mother Teresa type doubt – a sacred doubt that births humility and compassion that paradoxically proves faith more than any creed or dogma.