The first patron saint of emergence Christianity

This week our Lent Course at St John's Seven Kings mentioned Mother Teresa's sense that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

In more than 40 communications, published (many for the first time) in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, she bemoans the "dryness," "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.

In our Lent Course, this is used to suggest that we should not rely on feelings or experiences in our following of God but Peter Rollins makes a different use of it in a recent post highlighting the difference between metanarratives and meganarratives:

"For Mother Theresa, the traditional metanarrative of Christianity was deeply questioned and often found wanting. Yet it did not stop her from living her faith in an uncompromising manner. Indeed it was her doubt at the level of metanarrative that made her faith even more awe-inspiring. For this faith was so much a part of her flesh and blood that her Garden of Gethsemene experience did not rock her Christ-like devotion to those around her. It was obvious that she lived this way not because she beleived that she would be rewarded, or because it was what her beliefs demanded, but rather because she loved with a supernatural devotion that asked nothing in return.

She could embrace doubt and unknowing while expressing an unwavering commitment to the life of faith as expressed in caring for the oppressed and unwanted. There where many times when she was a theoretical unbeliever, but through it all she was a practical believer to the very end."

This position, he argues, "may well bring us close to understanding how a healthy and dynamic Christianity will be expressed in the 21st century" and, as a result, "Mother Theresa may well be on the short list for being the first patron saint of emergence Christianity."

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Duke Special - Freewheel.