loves me….Nothing touches my soul.” She talked of “an empty place…in my heart there is no faith.” She felt a “terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—God not being God—of God not really existing.” Decade after decade, the darkness lasted, even as she continued in her service. But decade after decade, the longing for faith lasted. In fact, the longing seemed to get stronger as the darkness grew deeper. “I talk of you [Jesus] for hours—of my longing for You.” Through all this time, she kept opening houses for the poor, serving the poor, and suffering for them.
During these years her interior life was marked by, as one of my students, Daniel Gordon, put it, “longing in absence.” In 1961, an Austrian Jesuit, the Reverend Joseph Neuner, told her she was experiencing the dark night that all spiritual masters must endure, and that the only response was even more total surrender. For reasons that are hard to understand, the lesson hit Mother Teresa with tremendous force. “For the first time in 11 years—I have come to love the darkness,” she wrote. According to a biographer, her darkness came from a deep identification with those she served. The poor endured the feeling of being unwanted. She now was called to take on and share their burden. She wrote that “even in darkness the path is sure.” She continued, “I just have the joy of having nothing—not even the reality of the presence of God.”
As Gordon writes, meaning can be found by the attitude one takes toward unavoidable suffering. Once Mother Teresa understood the meaning of her suffering, it began to feel like a kind of mission. Her faith was not a balm to her; it was often a dark sadness, but she kept her commitment to her faith even after it left her, and enduring this darkness and sharing in the suffering of the poor put her in membership with Jesus.
In other words, a commitment to faith is a commitment to stick with it through all the various seasons of faith and even those moments when faith is absent. To commit to faith is to commit to the long series of ups and downs, to intuitions, learning and forgetting, knowing one sort of God when you’re twenty-five and a very different God at thirty-five, fifty-five, and seventy-five. It means riding out when life reveals itself in new ways and faith has to be reformulated once again. To commit to faith is to commit to change. It includes moments of despair, or it is not faith.
By the time he was twenty-seven, Frederick Buechner already had two published novels under his belt. He moved to New York to try writing full-time, but it did not go well. He grew depressed and thought about other careers—maybe advertising. For no clear reason, he began attending a Presbyterian church on Madison Avenue, even though he found that most clergy preach out of their shallows, not their depths. One day, he listened to a sermon comparing the coronations of Queen Elizabeth and Jesus. The preacher said that Jesus was not crowned amid splendor, but “among confession and tears and great laughter.”
Buechner writes that at the sound of the phrase “and great laughter,” “for reasons I have never satisfactorily understood, the great wall of China crumbled and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue, at 73rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face.”
Buechner came to experience faith as a quest for what he has called a subterranean presence of grace in the world. He came to experience it as a vague sense that life isn’t just a bunch of atoms haphazardly bouncing against one another, but a novel with a plot that leads somewhere.
Later in life, Buechner found himself amid young Christians who spoke confidently about God as if they talked to Him all the time, and He talked back. God told them to pursue this job and not that one, and to order this at the restaurant and not that. He was dumbstruck. He wrote that if you say you hear God talking to you every day on every subject, you are either trying to pull the wool over your own eyes or everybody else’s.
Instead, he continues, you should wake up in your bed and ask, “Can I believe it all again today?” Or, better yet, ask yourself that question after you’ve scanned the morning news and seen all the atrocities that