Honest doubt can help you grow in faith

So Mother Teresa doubted! Wow. I found this out today while I was on the Internet. The woman whose faithfulness and dedication to God’s work inspired the world, no matter what the religion, had faith struggles. I don’t know why this surprised me so; everyone who seeks more than a cursory relationship with Christ has crises of faith. I guess it surprised me because she didn’t seem to be anything but an incredible woman of God and a tireless worker for his kingdom.

Mother Teresa’s diaries have just been made public, against her wishes to keep them sealed, and within them is revealed a different side of the woman who led an order of the Sisters of Mercy with a stern hand. It’s a side that makes me simultaneously sympathetic with her because she must have felt quite alone in that struggle — and hopeful.

I’m hopeful because a woman whose admirers are campaigning for her canonization brings me a measure of grace. I’m hopeful also because this could inspire theological discussions among today’s Christians and maybe help us all to see God’s face in the face of suffering. With the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, it must have been particularly difficult for Mother Teresa to sustain faith in a gracious God while looking at so much suffering.

Faithfulness to God is more complicated than we often acknowledge. We often have the notions that professing Christians have no more doubts, no more struggles, and no more pain. We trick ourselves into believing that for every struggle there is an easy answer.

Bishop William Willimon, when he was the dean at Duke, told about a time when he went to a happy but less-than-inspiring worship service. If I can recall his words, he said something like, “There we were bouncing along praising God and I thought to myself, ‘there is someone here who just learned that his/her cancer has returned. There is someone here whose teenager is involved with drugs.’” It’s not that Willimon opposes praising God, but that he wishes to address God’s presence within the very real tragedies in our everyday lives even when we’re not sure we want to be on speaking terms with God.

I recall a woman I visited when I was a hospital chaplain. Her friends, in a desire to help her claim her faith, told her that the reason she was not being delivered from her illness, which was congenital, was because she didn’t believe enough, or she didn’t have enough faith in God. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t think of a more unkind thing to say to a person in physical, spiritual, and emotional pain.

I helped her remember that not all David’s psalms were praises and that Job kept suffering despite his maintaining integrity. The people in the early church were persecuted and suffered, too, and it was because of human opposition and not because they were not being faithful enough. Likewise, it was her inheriting genes with this trait, and not her lack of faithfulness that was causing her pain.

I hope those friends are hearing about Mother Teresa’s struggles and are re-thinking their position.

Honest doubt goes hand in hand with growing in faith. When we doubt, we seek, and Jesus promises that where we seek we will find. And what we find on the other side of doubt is a deeper relationship and a deeper belief in God.

One warning, however. This is for honest doubt. There is such a thing as dishonest doubt. Dishonest doubt is the kind of doubt that chooses not to seek, that doubts with a closed mind. It’s the doubt of laziness and a self-serving attitude.

Honest doubt, by contrast, is actually another side to faith. It’s the kind of doubt “Doubting Thomas” had: the kind that doesn’t believe everything he’s told without question. Jesus tells him that those who believe and do not see are blessed, but I think we can be too hard on old Thomas.

For example, I get lots of forwarded e-mails. Many of those e-mails have quotes from famous people. While a few of the quotes are true, so many of them are false that I’m not inclined to believe any until I check it out with Snopes. That’s what Thomas was doing, ancient-style. He hadn’t been around the first time Jesus appeared; what the other disciples saw may or may not have been Jesus. It might have been someone trying to trick them.

The ending of the Doubting Thomas story is what we strive for: to be able to worship and exclaim, “My Lord! And my God!”

Getting beyond doubt, however, is possible only by persevering in faith. In Mother Teresa’s own words, “God has not called me to be successful; he has called me to be faithful.” A successful Christian is not one who has no problems or suffering in his or her life; a successful Christian is one who gives his or her suffering to God even when God seems to be far away.

May we all seek a faith that doesn’t just sustain us through trials, but that grows into God through the struggles.