Less than two hours before I got this week’s “On Faith” question, I responded to a highly creative New York City playwright who is worried that “Bellevue [a mental hospital] will get me. Whom am I to tell, safely, that I heard Jesus speak to me through the crucifix on the altar of (and he named the Manhattan church)?”

What’s this? Jesus speaks to that playwright (who has only a modest record of being good news to humanity in Jesus’ name) and says not a word to Mother Teresa (despite her world-class record of being good news to humanity in Jesus’ name). What are we to think? That the playwright needed the personal experience of hearing Jesus speak, but that that Roman Catholic nun was doing just great without needing the boost of such a special personal religious experience?

Now to the QUESTION: “In her letters, Mother Teresa expressed doubts about the existence of God and lamented the absence of a personal sense of Jesus’s love in her life. Does this make you think more or less of her? To what extent is doubt a part of religious faith?”

1. I think more of her for her frank, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact, self-divested HONESTY. God gave our species the powers and wills to believe and to doubt, and she was good at both.

2. What a witness she was to storgic love, the love that does its duty despite doubts! From her teenage commitment to Christian service, she never wavered from the work. In the Bible, FAITH is directional behavior even before, and sometimes in the absence of, BELIEF. The Bible’s wisdom includes the insight that more than we believe into a new way of behaving, we behave into a new way of believing. The Bible’s authors sail by the wind of the Spirit even though their belief-boats are leaky. It’s a category-error to criticize their boats without oneself feeling the wind they felt, the wind of the Spirit, the wind Mother Teresa usually felt but sometimes—becalmed--awaited.

3. I think more of her because she didn’t think much of herself except as a SERVANT of who and what was more than herself. The “who” was God, whom she had trouble conceiving of except in his incarnation in Jesus, her Savior, Lord, and model of servanthood. The “what” was the Church, in which she lived and moved and had her being as a “member” (Latin-English for organic part) in the Body of Christ.

4. I think more of her because she didn’t sweat the small stuff, including her personal experiences and opinions. Precisely because caring for the dying was her Big Stuff, her theological opinions and even her religious experiences were, to her, comparatively small stuff. (Not that she considered Christian doctrine unimportant: for her it was fundamental in the sense of foundational.)

5. I think more of her because she MODELS, for us all, getting on with our God-assigned task of being good news to one another and to the good earth no matter the differences inside our heads. She confronted every obstacle to that task with courage, including the courage both to doubt and to doubt her doubts. And for her, Jesus said it all when he said, “Love God and everybody, even your enemies.”