You may have noticed that we are featuring the psalms this morning: Choral music based on Psalms 23, 108, 101. Hymns based on verses from Psalms 81, 90, 68 and 105. And two readings: Psalms 30 and 81.

As we like to say at Old South, Christianity is not a spectator sport. In the interests of getting everyone off the sidelines and into the game, so to speak, I now invite your participation.

Let’s test ourselves and find out how familiar we are with the biblical psalms. I will give you half of a first line of a psalm and will ask you to complete that first line by just shouting it out.

The Lord is my shepherd, I …

shall not want (23)

I lift up my eyes to the hills, from …

 whence cometh my help? (121)

God is our refuge and strength, a …

very present help in trouble (46)

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place, for …

all generations (90)

I was glad when they said unto me, let us …

go into the house of the Lord (122)

O, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his …

steadfast love endures forever (136)

My God, my God, why …

hast thou forsake me (22)

Well done! We struggled a bit but there are enough of you who do know the psalms. Did any of you notice what I think I noticed: that the people who know the psalms best are, shall we say, of a certain age?

I did not grow up learning the psalms … and neither did my parents … but my grandparents did and their parents before them. It was not long ago that an intimate acquaintance with the biblical psalms was an integral component of a pious life.

Our Puritan forebears – those who gathered this church – knew the psalms inside and out. They prayed them, recited them, sang them and memorized them. The psalms were so necessary to the spiritual lives of the Puritans that the first book they published in this land was a book of psalms … psalms for congregational singing and for devotional meditation.

Because of their intimate acquaintance with the psalms, I doubt our Puritan forebears or my grandparents or great-grandparents would have been surprised by the news we heard this week about Mother Teresa. Newspapers, magazines, radio and TV programs have all run stories exposing the interior spiritual agony of Mother Teresa … what she and others have called her “long night of the soul”: her profound experience of the absence of God.

I very much doubt that our Puritan forebears would have been surprised by this news. The spiritual lives of our forebears were informed by the biblical psalms and the psalms express all and more of what plagued Mother Teresa: an acute sense of the absence of God; despair over the futility of life; anger at injustice; hatred for enemies; inconsolable grief at the loss of loved ones.

Figuratively speaking, the psalmists rail, rant, stomp their feet, pound their fists, shrug, groan and weep. But they also laugh, dance and love. They express thanksgiving, joy, hope and praise.

What is so remarkable about the psalms, is that they often express these enormous mood swings within the confines of a single verse. They do not trust God … but they will again trust God. They are in pain … but joy will appear. They are being overcome by their enemies … but rescue is on the way!

The mood swings and acute sensibilities of the spiritually advanced have been a subject of much scholarly investigation. In his now classic study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James documented the interior spiritual lives of those for whom religion is not “a dull habit” but an “acute fever.” James, a psychologist, studied those whom he described as religious geniuses. His study included St. Paul, Augustine, Martin Luther, John Bunyan, Tolstoy and George Fox.

James concluded that these religious geniuses all exhibited to one degree or another, symptoms of nervous instability. They were subject to abnormal psychical visitations: trances, visions and voices. They were creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. They experienced long bouts of melancholy and often led discordant inner lives.

You may recognize that these are symptoms often associated with pathology. These are the very sort of symptoms Mother Teresa described in her letters and papers.

But William James says about people like Mother Teresa, that it is precisely these pathological features, combined with an innate religious genius, which gives such people their religious authority and influence.

Yes, the line between insanity and religious genius is a precariously thin line … but there is a line.

William James’ lectures are long, complicated and nuanced. They are filled with stories, quotations and a scholarly integrity and brilliance that I cannot do justice to this morning. Suffice it to say, what we have recently learned of Mother Teresa, is a phenomenon well represented in the literature of religion and psychology.

I believe there is a lot we can learn from this news about Mother Teresa ... although there remain vast differences between her and most of the rest of us.

First, the differences:

Mother Teresa was a Roman Catholic. In Roman Catholic theology there is a heavy emphasis on suffering. Christ is perpetually represented as languishing on the cross. In every Roman Catholic church there are crucifixes. Jesus is forever nailed to the cross: bleeding, suffering, dying.

Contrast that with our church where the cross is empty. We do not deny the crucifixion or suffering of Christ, but we choose to display an empty cross and so emphasize Christ’s triumph over death.

Mother Teresa was steeped in a theology of redemptive suffering.

Also, Mother Teresa was likely a religious genius, at least as defined by William James. She was both spiritually brilliant and spiritually driven.

Finally, Mother Teresa was a nun … a woman who vowed to forgo the sort of comforts and joys many of us take for granted. She took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and lived as if married to Christ.

Early in her religious life Mother Teresa described her ardent love for Christ and her experience of his presence and love for her. Later, however, this intense and intimate experience of Christ left her.

Even for those of us who are less ardent in our religious life, the Christian life does bear similarities to married life. It often begins with an intense feeling, an experience of God – something sensual, exciting – but it does not always last. Like many marriages, it begins with an experience of the heart … but may need to be maintained as an act of the will.

Perhaps this is the great secret that should never have become a secret … a secret the letters of Mother Teresa have revealed. That secret is this: for most of us – both the religiously brilliant and the less than brilliant – Christian faith is an act of the will.

We choose to live in relationship with God, whether or not we hear God’s still speaking voice, or see God, or know God at first hand. We choose to embrace lives lived for others rather than lives lived for self alone. We choose to hang around in the company of Jesus and Paul, Martin and Teresa, Augustine and Mary. These are acts of the will … decisions to commit to a certain life among many choices.

As I have talked with colleagues in these past few days about what we have learned of Mother Teresa, most of us feel some relief at the news of her inner struggle. After all, this woman ministered in the streets of Calcutta; she cared for the poorest and most ill, the desperate and the despised, those whom others dreaded for their diseases and for the dis-ease and dis-comfort their plight caused the rest of us. If Mother Teresa had not experienced the absence of God in such god-forsaken places and people, then who could have believed her own sincerity and integrity?

Christ, echoing the pain and plight of the psalmist cries out: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This is life and faith … a cry in the dark, yet a cry none-the-less. It is a cry that simultaneously affirms the absence and the existence of God. It is a cry of desperation, but also of hope.

I invite you at your leisure to find a quiet moment, open the Bible to the psalms and spend time there, in the company of those who understood the complexities and trials of the life of faith.

 

I hope that you too, will feel the freedom of the psalmist to cry out to God: to rail, rant, stomp your feet, pound your fists, shrug, groan and weep. But also to laugh, dance and love … to express thanksgiving, joy, hope and praise.

This is the Christian life. It is at once an act of faith … and an act of the will.

Amen