Faith, God: It ain't easy

Several friends have asked about my reaction to Mother Teresa's letters, nowing she was a personal hero. My first response to the whole thing was, "Yea, so? A lot of people struggle with their faith, but keep pursuing it because even though they may not FEEL it, they KNOW it to be true. They are trying to get their FEELINGS to line up with their KNOWLEDGE."
To some, that's an arguement that makes no sense whatsoever, but to me (and a few special others), it makes perfect sense. But then again, I'm weird.... hehehe

I have found an article that says it pretty well - sure wish I had written it - it's like he took the words right out of my brain. Faith is such a paradox and so very personal.



Faith, God: You know it ain't easy
1 Sep 2007, 0241 hrs IST,Jug Suraiya,TNN

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Sceptics who always thought Mother Teresa was a fraud will take 'I told you so' satisfaction from the revelation in a recently published book of 66 years of correspondence between the nun and her confessors that, despite all her talk of God, the woman who has been put on the fast track to sainthood was riddled with doubts and besieged by a chronic crisis of faith.

Using words like "dryness", "loneliness" and "torture", Teresa's letters describe a dark night of the soul, an agonising search for belief.

But far from endorsing her detractors’ charge that she was a hoax, the disclosures corroborate the bona fides of Teresa's lifelong quest for faith. For that is what faith — in order to be faith and not a matter-of-fact certainty — has to be: a ceaseless quest; never a destination but always a journey.

Despite the claims of pop spiritualists and designer godmen, faith in a transcendent — call it moksha, nirvana, God, whatever you will, or better still call it nothing at all for a name would only limit the limitless — is the polar opposite of instant gratification.

It's not Karma Cola — best served chilled — but an unquenchable thirst, a terrifying absence as of a lover lost. To paraphrase the song, those who know about faith know it ain't easy. If it did, it wouldn't be worth the arduous inner pilgrimage it demands. In the words of the gym instructor, no gain without pain, whether the sinews to be strengthened are of the body or the spirit.

Far from exposing her as a fake, Teresa's longing for an absconding God confirms her spirituality. Faith is a hard-won badge of courage, a challenge to the oft-asked question: If God is good why does He allow bad things to happen? Why does He not cure the cancer that afflicts a loved one? Why does He not prevent wars?

Why does He not give us faith, instead of letting us strive for it? Why doesn't He just provide us with clear and present proof of His existence, like a geometry theorem, QED? And the answer is because if God intervened we would not have free will, without which we would not be human but humanoid robots.

Faith is not conviction; it is the will to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary. The first syllable of 'believe' is 'be'; faith is to be. Faith is the final test, the Kurukshetra of free will. And the battle is often fought on strange territory. Including that of atheism, as mapped out by Richard Dawkins in his international bestseller 'The God Delusion'.

A renowned geneticist and champion of the theory of Darwinian evolution as opposed to the credo of 'intelligent design' as the source of all creation, Dawkins is passionate about his atheism.

Indeed, his vehement denunciation of an illusory God rings truer — has the desperate, jagged fervour of faith — than the glib hosannas of a smug and self-satisfied devotee.

An unqualified commitment to free will, atheism is as much an act of faith as a saint's tormented pursuit of an elusive divinity. Dawkins and Teresa are the inseparable sides of the same coin of the realm of faith. If the saint did not exist, the atheist would have to create her; if the atheist did not exist, the saint would have to create him. God? He doesn't really come into the picture at all.