An older parishioner approached me after church last week distressed. She had read something of the struggle of faith at work in Mother Theresa of Calcutta who invested her life serving the poorest of the poor on the streets of India.

Her letters, published recently, express -- sometimes agonizingly so -- a longing for the personal presence of God in her life. For example:

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 — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."<

Some have interpreted these words (and others like them) as expressions of lack of faith -- that she obviously is not the "saint" she appeared to be.

Hardly.

I find great encouragement in these dark words. Rather than revealing a lack of faith, they reveal the depth of a faithful woman. Theresa was not a cardboard saint, no two-dimensional image of artificial perfection.

She lived a complex life in a complex world. She lived out the complexity of her own personal experience. Her letters express a breath of life fully lived even into the depths of a heart that longed to pierce the deepest mystery of the cosmos -- and failed.

But of course she failed to penetrate the depths. God dwells in inapproachable light. A light so bright, it appears as darkness. Theresa may have failed to penetrate God, but God did not fail to penetrate Theresa.

The only disappointment I find in her story is my continual disappointment of human judgment. When we move so quickly to judge, we fail to appreciate. A judgmental attitude teaches nothing.

Only as we are willing to remain open to the vast complexity of the human experience -- nurturing an attitude of appreciation for the richness and depths of reality as it is, not as we wish it to be -- only then do we become fully human, the image of God as God created us to be.

The genuine revelation of the faith of Theresa of Calcutta is not in her letters, but in her life.