Mother Teresa has become a poster, a fridge magnet, a motivational quote printed over a sunset. It is worth remembering what lies beneath: half a century without feeling God. When her intimate letters were published in 2007, many were scandalized, and that scandal did not reveal the doubts of a saint, but our own idea of God. It is the idea that theologian Ulrich L. Lehner dismantles in God Is Not Cool, published in Spanish by Homo Legens with a foreword by Scott Hahn.
Every September 5 the Church celebrates Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and this year the date arrives loaded. The day before, September 4, marked a decade since Pope Francis proclaimed her a saint before a packed St. Peter’s Square. Ten years are enough for a figure to become a poster. And yet, what we now know about Mother Teresa makes her almost unbearable to the dominant religious sensibility. Because the woman the whole world admires spent half a century without feeling God.
It is not pious exaggeration. When her intimate letters were published in 2007, collected in Come Be My Light, many were scandalized. In them, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity confessed to her spiritual directors a dryness that lasted almost fifty years: “Where is my faith? Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness.” And on another page: “the silence and the emptiness are so great that I look and do not see, I listen and do not hear, the tongue moves but does not speak.” The saint of smiles, the one who gathered the dying from the gutters of Calcutta, prayed, served and loved in a closed night, without the consolation we take for granted that God owes his best friends.
Some—Christopher Hitchens, one of Mother Teresa’s greatest detractors, first among them—read those letters as the confession of a closet atheist who had lost her faith and continued by inertia. It is a crude reading that confuses the absence of feeling with the absence of faith. Mother Teresa did not stop believing: she stopped feeling. And the difference is everything. She kept kneeling before a God who did not answer her, precisely because her faith no longer depended on the answer. Mystics have been mapping that territory for centuries; the novelty is that today we barely retain categories to understand it, because we have reduced religion to an administration of pleasant emotions.
The scandal, at bottom, was revealing, though not for what many believed. It did not reveal the doubts of a saint: it revealed our own idea of God. We had grown accustomed to thinking that true faith is recognized by how good it makes us feel, and that a God who truly loves dispenses, in exchange for devotion, a constant dose of inner peace. Under that logic, Mother Teresa in the dark is a failure. Under the logic of the Gospel, it is exactly the opposite: proof that one can love God for Himself, and not for what He dispenses.
It is worth naming the idol. Theologian Ulrich L. Lehner has done so without mincing words in a book whose title is already a slap: God Is Not Cool. His diagnosis is that contemporary culture—and a good part of catechesis and preaching—has manufactured a “nice” God, a kind of divine therapist to whom one turns in bad moments and forgets in good ones. A psychiatrist God, he writes, or worse still, a vending machine: you insert some coins—some prayers—and wait for the product. Comfortable, predictable, painless. And completely incapable of changing a life.
That designer God even has a technical name among sociologists of religion: “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The belief, widespread among young people raised in believing environments, that there exists a benevolent God who above all wants us to be good people and be happy, and who does not demand much in return. Lehner heard it on the lips of his own university students, Sunday-Mass Catholics convinced that God is, above all, agreeable. His conclusion is devastating: “Why change your life for a God like that? He has no demands.”
Against that amiable ghost, Lehner recovers the God of the Bible, who is anything but manageable: the one who speaks from a burning bush, the one of thunder and terror, the one who drags Abraham toward the unknown and orders Moses to remove his sandals on holy ground. A God “terrible, absorbing, sometimes terrifying,” and precisely for that reason capable of transforming us. He borrows a phrase from The Chronicles of Narnia that sums up the entire book: speaking of Aslan, the lion who figures Christ, Mr. Beaver warns that “he is not safe, but he is good.” There lies the whole difference. The true God is not safe. He is good, which is something infinitely more serious.
Mother Teresa knew it in her own flesh. St. John of the Cross, whom Lehner cites, had written it centuries earlier: “If you think you can find God in the comfort of your room, you will never find Him.” The dark night is not an accident on the path of the saints; it is often the path itself. God is silent not because He abandons, but because He purifies; He withdraws sensible consolation so that love may be love and not business. The religious sister kept gathering the dying for decades without receiving in return even a glimmer of the sweetness that had been promised her as a novice. And she kept on. That perseverance in the void is, perhaps, the greatest miracle of her cause, superior to any healing, because it did not rest on any feeling.
It is hard to imagine a more uncomfortable testimony for our time. We live surrounded by a spirituality of well-being that has even colonized the temples: meditation apps, self-care retreats, a soft Christianity that promises serenity and carefully avoids the word “cross.” It is the religious version of consumption: one chooses what comforts and discards what demands. The problem—Lehner intuited it and Mother Teresa proved it with her life—is that a God who only serves to feel good ends up serving for nothing. Whoever says they believe in “something” and does not set foot in a church has not lost faith in a demanding God: they have lost interest in a boring God.
Hence the anniversary of these days is much more than a commemoration. Ten years after her canonization, Mother Teresa challenges us not so much by what she did—which was immense—but by how she did it: in love with a God who did not pay her in emotions. Her dark night is an antidote to the therapeutic caricature. It reminds us that holiness does not consist in feeling God, but in being faithful to Him when He is not felt; that adult faith is not the one that asks God to make life more bearable for us, but the one that allows God to make our life greater.
That old German priest whom Lehner evokes in his book prayed, on the eve of his ordination, in Germany in 1936, a prayer that Mother Teresa would have signed: “Lord, take all that I am, but please, do not give me a boring life.” God granted it to him in abundance—war, prison, a Soviet gulag—and the man died without having been bored for a single second. It is the password of the saints. They do not ask for comfort; they offer surrender. They do not seek a God who is cool: they seek the God for whom it is worth living.
This September 5, between the sweetened poster and the fridge magnet, it is worth rescuing the true Mother Teresa: the one of the endless night, the one who loved in the dark. Her entire life was the refutation of a lie that today is preached all too often from both sides of the altar. God is not there to make us feel good. He is there to make us saints. And those, as she discovered in fifty years of silence, are two very different things.
God Is Not Cool. Rejecting the theology of pop culture and discovering the God for whom it is worth living, by Ulrich L. Lehner. Foreword by Scott Hahn. Translation by Helena Faccia Serrano. Bibliotheca Homo Legens.