Come Be My Light

The cover story on a recent issue of TIME, is about a book called Come Be My Light, which is a collection of letters written between Mother Teresa and her confessors and superiors over six decades from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Teresa had reportedly, requested the Church to destroy all her correspondences, as they might make people to concentrate on her rather than Him. But the Church refused to do so as all the correspondences are preserved and reviewed in course of beatification and canonization.

The letters indicate that for a large part of over 50 years, she found dryness, darkness, loneliness and torture, and couldn't find any evidence of God speaking to or directing her. In 1946, during the break she took from teaching with the Loreto Sisters, to Darjeeling, she claimed that God directed her to the service of the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. After this, she left the Loreto Sisters to start the Missionaries of Charity.

But soon enough her flip-flops had started and continued as late as 1995, two years before her death. The content of these letters seem more or less the same with only the recipient changing as her confessors died.

I feel that Truth is the nearest and the cleanest form of God that one can ever find on earth. With due admiration to the great work done by Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, if she is not convinced of the existence of God herself, why should she go around the town claiming to do service to the poorest of the poor to fulfill God's will. Rather she could have just done things to ameliorate poverty for the sake of it than trying to answer some call which never existed in the first place.

Being an agnostic who goes to temple at times, I have always felt that, there has never been anyone on earth who has been convinced throughout his/her life of the existence of God. Similarly a dozen holes can be punctured into an argument put forth by an atheist to disprove the need of a God. A theist has his own moments of darkness when he doubts the existence of God and an atheist has his equal share of moments, when he feels his rationality crumbling down.

May be, only when the entire world accepts their shares of doubts, on either side of the debate, will God show up, for He knows that day is never going to come.