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Episode Summary

God is hidden. God is silent. Is saying that sacrilegious? Or could it be the very ground of Christian faith? How do we make sense of what seems like a plain and obvious fact, with the biblical record or the testimony of those who claim to see or hear God?

Maybe you’ve felt this yourself. Many people have. And if so, it turns out you're in good company. The psalmist anxiously prays, “Do not hide your face from me.”

Jesus prays, “Why have your forsaken me?”

After Mother Teresa died in 1997, some of her writing emerged that presented a very different picture of this canonized saint.

Soon after hearing God call her to the poor in 1946, God seems to have disappeared, gone silent. And she fell into a long, dark night of the soul.

Collected in the volume of letters and journal entries titled Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, she writes a raw and heartbreaking prayer, that nonetheless may feel familiar to some of us:

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love—and now become as the most hated one—the one—You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I want—and there is no One to answer—no One on Whom I can cling—no, No One.—Alone… Where is my Faith—even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness—My God—how painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith—I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart—& make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them—because of the blasphemy—If there be God—please forgive me—When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven—there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul.—I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

This passage very achingly captures the fact that the other side of divine hiddenness is human loneliness.

For more on divine hiddenness, listen to philosopher Deborah Casewell on episode 209 of For the Life of the World.

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