http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/doubt/index.shtml

qb

Still she persisted in compassion.

Her ongoing works testified to her faith in God working through her.

You can check out the article here http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/mother-teresa-and-the-mystery-of-gods-absence

The article draws a comparison between her since of feeling abandoned by God and Christ in Gethsemane. That’s one of the most profound ways that Christ shared in our sufferings, and, in turn, perhaps that’s one of the ways we must suffer as Christians.

“You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve…Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be….He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

ISTqb that Mother Teresa is merely one titanic example of precisely what Lewis has shown us, and spending some time considering her example ought to have some salutary effect.

qb

Bring it on.

Here’s my take. Despite the ubiquity of Winter Christians in every church many if not most of our worship assemblies and Sunday school classes are Summer Resorts (spiritually speaking). The majority of the psalms were songs of lament and protest. Do our worship services reflect that truth?

From Walter Brueggemann’s The Message of the Psalms:

It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control”…The point to be urged here is this: The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith…