I’ve been through some tough times in my life and I wish I could say I was always comforted and lifted up by my faith in God or a higher power but that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth is many times in my darkest hour I was filled with such despair and such emptiness that I felt nothing but alone. I can vividly remember praying unceasingly for answers and hearing nothing but a deafening silence. I told friends that God had turned away from me and I was alone in my despair. I’ve only had fleeting thoughts of suicide because deep in my being I knew that I had an obligation to get up and keep moving for my son if not for my self. But I do understand completely a crisis of faith, a feeling of being abandoned when you need guidance and encouragement the very most. One of my favorite retorts to that old saw, “God never closes a door without opening a window,” is ”But first he lets you stumble around in the hallway.” I’ve been stuck stumbling around in that rhetorical hallway for what seemed like years at a time. I always thought my dark times were a testimony to my weak faith. Obviously if I were a true believer and a true follower of God, I would never have experienced these moments of despair and doubt.

It came as a huge relief to me when I learned that Mother Teresa of all people had her own crisis of faith, which lasted decades. This candidate for sainthood once wrote to her spiritual advisor, “Jesus has a very special love for you. (But) as for me-The silence and the emptiness is so great-that I look and do not see, -Listen and do not hear.” Those words have such resonance with me, I have walked that lonely, dark path and to know that one of the holiest of holy servants of the Catholic Church felt this same pain is somehow comforting to me. I naively thought that nuns and priests are so filled with the Holy Spirit that their moments of doubt could only be fleeting and easily dealt with. Now I know thanks to a new book entitled “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” which consists mainly of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over the course of 66 years, that even this icon of Catholicism and sacrifice was often filled with doubt and spiritual pain. David Van Biema of Time Magazine reports that Mother Teresa details the “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. “She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or a “cloak that covers everything.”

It is astounding to be privy to this very personal and quite relatable crisis suffered by someone we all thought we knew and understood. Suddenly Mother Teresa is a real-live person instead of a saintly servant to the poor. It only makes me admire her more because despite her doubts she got up every day and did her thankless work year after year. She lived her faith despite her pain. This revelation is helpful to me because it alleviates the notion I once held that doing the right thing and standing up for your convictions will result in worldly or at least spiritual rewards. Instead I now realize that doing good and living your faith is just that and nothing more. There’s no immediate or long-term reward for standing up for the poor or raging against injustice. You do these things because they are right and you believe in them not because you’ll get a better seat in heaven.

Even though she is dead, Mother Teresa continues to teach and help others. In Time, Van Biema quotes The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at Ave Maria University in Florida as saying about “Come Be My Light,” “It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone.”

One thing I have learned is that as the gospel song says, “Joy cometh in the morning.” The sun will rise, life will continue, and joy returns. The road gets rough, the hallway gets dark but somehow we persevere and get through the hard times. In the absence of spiritual faith we must find inner strength and belief in our selves. That’s the real struggle, to believe that somehow things will get better and you really do have the strength to get through the crisis at hand. I find strength in the Alcoholics Anonymous credo, one day at a time. Sometimes it’s one minute or one hour at a time.