A Different View of Mother Teresa

It is hard to understand how Mother Teresa, in the last 50 years of her life, could not feel the presence of God, "neither in her heart or in the Eucharist", yet she said that Christ is everywhere. She called her smile a "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything," and she wondered if she was engaged in verbal deception and hypocrisy.

Simplistic explanations, that she has given up God, or that it is normal for people and saints to have dark spiritual moments, do not tell the whole story. How could she be in dark spiritual moment for so long, and how could she have the strength to go on with her work of helping the poor and the dying if she had lost her faith?

It is known that leaders, and Mother Teresa was one, often can see, and understand further than their followers. This includes cases when the leader knows that a change of direction is due. Anwar Sadat was such a leader who saw the necessity of making peace with Israel, and did so, even though he knew that many Egyptians and Arabs would consider him a traitor.

But Mother Teresa did not want her doubts to be publicly known (she asked the letters to be destroyed). She continued to wear her "mask". I can't think that Mother Teresa lacked intellectual integrity and courage to openly publish her doubts. The reason must be something else.

In other cases, such as in the Soviet Union during the heyday of communism, some leader had "revisionist ideas" but they often had to hide their ideas for fears of being chastised and fall from grace.
Again this could not be the case with Mother Teresa, she was not in any danger at all.

Could it be, that she had discovered the "God delusion" but not the "Self delusion"? Was she too much attached to her work, her success and fame? Reading from what people wrote about her character, I don't think this was the case either.

More plausible is that she had seen that "all in empty". Even her work was "empty". Yet she continued her great work to lessen suffering in the world, without hoping for rewards, earthly or otherwise. What she did was like the Tonglen "abandon all hopes of fruition", and Wu Wei action/inaction. She must have seen that helping people in their suffering is all that matters, even when there is no God to reward her. All her beliefs or non-beliefs, faith and religion do not matter in comparison with the actual work of compassion.
In this light, her already great work looks even greater.

The long periods of her agony, indicates that it was not easy for her to come to terms with "emptiness", or the "vanity of all vanities".

'Vanity of all vanities, all is vanity, what profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun' The Book of Ecclesiastes

Links:

• Time article "Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith"

• Mother Teresa's struggle to find God revealed in new book

• Mother Teresa doubted existence of God until her death

• Mother Teresa’s turmoil laid bare
  

• Book: "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light", edited by Kolodiejchuk'

• Mother Teresa Background Information