In the past month or so, since the publication of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta has been in the news quite a bit.  This new book is a collection of her letters to her spiritual advisors, and those letters reveal a side of the woman that few knew anything about.  They reveal a woman with doubts, struggles, and interior trials.  They reveal a Christian experiencing the perceived absence of God from her life. In other words, they reveal a human being.

To anyone who knows even a little bit about Scripture, or the lives of the saints, or the spiritual life, there is nothing surprising in these letters.  In fact, what would have been surprising is if the opposite had appeared in the letters:  if they revealed that everything had been just peachy for Mother Teresa throughout her life.  That would have been a surprise.

But to most of America, they were a shock.  “A demonstration of the emptiness that comes from belief in God,” cried the leading atheists.  “What could this mean?” wondered the media.  “She was a fake,” answered some.

This episode only highlighted something obvious to me and to many others: the media knows virtually nothing about faith.  It knows nothing really about Christianity, other than a few clichés.  In point of fact, most Americans, even the ones who go to church regularly, know little about faith.

Faith does not mean that nothing bothers us, or that we don’t have trials and troubles.  It doesn’t mean that suffering somehow vanishes from our lives.  It doesn’t mean that we don’t have doubts, or that we don’t ever wonder where God is in the midst of our lives.

Instead, faith becomes power for the Christian to persevere through difficulties, trials, troubles, and sufferings.  Faith is the power to endure, to trust that the Father is in charge, to do what needs to be done, what must be done, what should be done, what ought to be done, independent of how we may “feel” at any particular time.  Faith brings order to the chaos.  That’s what life is without faith.  That’s what the world is without faith.  Chaos.  Meaninglessness.

The 6^th century before Christ.  The unthinkable has happened: the Babylonian Empire has conquered Israel.  The vast majority of the Jews have been deported.  The country has been destroyed and laid waste.  That is the context of our first reading today.  The prophet Habakkuk is in the middle of that.  He sees his country destroyed.  He sees the cities and countryside strewn with unburied corpses.  He feels the pinch of poverty and of starvation.

All of us have trouble and trials in our lives as well.  Some suffer with sickness, disease, or addictions.  Some have money problems.  Some suffer with broken relationships.  The elderly sometimes feel that everything dear to them is slipping away.  The middle-aged sometimes question their life choices.  Teenagers search for meaning and identity.

The list goes on and on.  No matter what the particular trial is, it can seem overwhelming and unending.

Habakkuk gives us an example of how the man of faith responds to trial.  The response is prayer, and the reading teaches us four lessons about the prayer of faith:

            First, the prayer of faith must be honest.  “Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?  Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and clamorous discord.”  Habakkuk laments and complains honestly to God.  He does not understand what’s happening or why.  He is honest.

            Second, the prayer of faith must be a persevering prayer.  “I cry for help, but you do not listen!  I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene.”  Habakkuk’s been praying and complaining for quite a while, but he keeps at it.  He does not give up and quit praying.  He perseveres.

            Third, God is willing to answer the prayer of faith.  “Then the Lord answered me and said: Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily.” 

            Fourth, the fulfillment of the answer to our prayers may not be when or how we think it should be.  “For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.”

That’s probably the hardest part of all, the waiting, because that takes something special – humility.  We have to accept the fact that God is God and we are not.  And He therefore has a better idea about how and when things should work out than we do. 

That’s how Habakkuk prayed.  That’s how Mother Teresa prayed.  That’s how all the saints prayed.  And that is how we have to pray. 

Trial, difficulty, persecution, suffering, the feeling that the Father is absent: everybody goes through it.  Habakkuk and all the prophets, the apostles, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Liseieux, every saint, Mother Teresa, even Jesus himself, in his human nature.  And you and me.  We’re not exempt from it.  We ain’t special.

But they all made it through, and we can too.