Comedian Bill Maher is working on a film called "Religulous" that is already being called the most irreverent and anti-faith film to ever have been made, and this without anyone having seen it yet. Maher has long been a critic of religious faith and is bringing his philosophy to a movie theater near you in the coming year. If he means to take a swipe at faith, though, he’ll have to stand in line.

It’s been a tough couple of years for the faithful. When revelations of Mother Theresa’s struggle with a nagging sense of God’s absence surfaced in an article in Newsweek, atheist du jour Christopher Hitchens was ready to exploit the opportunity and responded with his own Newsweek article that suggested that Mother Theresa, like all people of faith, are at best well-intentioned, but delusional nonetheless. He suggested that Mother Theresa’s sense of the absence of God’s presence ought to have been for her (and the rest of us) proof of the absence of God. Hitchens is an intelligent man, but I couldn’t help but feel like he was stacking the deck a bit. Mother Theresa is of course gone now with no opportunity to respond to his assessment of her. I thought it a bit rude that he would target such a kindly old lady, no matter how much he tried to dress up his words with niceties.

I heard another atheist on NPR not too long ago talking about his new book. I remember thinking that the man sounded almost too pleased with himself, proud that he had come to his atheism by not being afraid to ask the hard questions about existence. As I got dressed that morning, I thought to myself that this man hadn’t even begun to ask the hardest questions. The hardest questions, I believe, are waiting for us inside belief. It would have been much easier for Job, for instance, if he hadn’t had to factor God into the equation of his calamity. In other words, if Christian faith looks preposterous from the outside, then it can look even more so from the inside. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does senseless violence and unchecked greed seem to rule the day? The scriptures say the meek shall inherit the earth, and few things seem harder to imagine than this. To muster up such faith as Christianity asks of us is no small thing.

I often think atheism would be a kind of comfort in that it would be easier to not believe. In some ways atheism is a retreat from engaging the inequalities of the world. Ah, but so is religiosity. In fact, it just occurs to me as I write to wonder if religiosity (in the worst sense of the word) is another more subtle form of atheism. The worst kind of religiosity holds as its object of devotion not the true God but rather an idol of our own making, often made in our own image – a god who sides with us on the issues and theological points of our preference.

At any rate, genuine faith is no such comfort, at least not in the way of an easy kind of comfort. On the contrary, it is quite demanding. Esteemed author Madeleine L’ Engle expressed it well in a recent issue of Newsweek:

NEWSWEEK: So to you, faith is not a comfort?

MADELEINE L'ENGLE: Good heavens, no. It's a challenge: I dare you to believe in God.

NEWSWEEK: Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.

MADELEINE L'ENGLE: Then they're not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.

(May 17, 2004 Newsweek)

Faith, in other words, is an unflinching engagement with the world around us. It doesn’t allow us to retreat to the comfort and ease of unbelief. Instead we are called to live in the tension between what we see with our eyes and what we are called to see by faith.

Author Frederick Buechner challenged believers to read the morning paper with its list of tragedies and injustices before making proclamations of God’s goodness and sovereignty; meaning that the only faith that is worth much of anything is the kind that knowingly sees the worst of the world and still says: "blessed be the name of the Lord." This kind of faith is not for the faint of heart.

I envy the atheist in some ways. He’s found an answer. The search for truth is over. The true believer’s search, on the other hand, is always being sussed out as he or she works out their salvation with fear and trembling, often suspicious that they may be a fool, but hopefully in the end not a damned fool.

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for," we are told, and that’s about the best proof we’re likely to get: hope. Like a trail of breadcrumbs there are just enough moments of grace, of a sense of God’s presence, to lead us on and keep us hungry and hoping for more. Little envelopes of light that come to us in unexpected tears, or laughter. Hints at divine providence. Whispers of grace. I have numerous stories of an unexpected check in the mail just when we needed it, or a divine appointment, being at the right place at the right time. I’m willing to bet that you, the reader, have similar stories.

Admittedly there are other times when it feels like our prayers no sooner leave our lips than they fall flat on the floor and we are left with a numbing sense of isolation. Still we soldier on through our own dark nights of the soul, opening up the little envelopes of light from time to time. Remembering. Hoping - since for all of the demands of faith, it also offers a very real comfort. Jesus says "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled…" The faithful know what it means to hunger and thirst this way and feel the deep yearning in those words. My own spirit hungers and thirsts for God’s visitation. The dark and lonely landscapes of my soul have known times of being greened by the warm coastal winds of hope, and even in repose the desert remembers when it was last stirred to life, and waits in hope.

Where Hitchens may have seen Mother Theresa’s admissions of doubt as a shocking scandal, I was not terribly shook nor surprised by them. Some of the most faithful people I know are no strangers to doubt. I struggle often with doubt myself, and have come to regard such struggles as part of a vibrant and rigorous faith. I think often of the words of Buechner again who said, "Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith. It keeps it alive and moving."

What would Mother Theresa offer in her defense to people like Hitchens and Maher? I doubt she’d say much at all but rather continue in her long obedience in the same direction, bringing a cup of cold water to the thirsty, feeding the hungry of Calcutta, all the while feeding a hunger in herself – a hunger that would not be filled but was a tell-tale sign of a Truth that held her firmly even when she had little strength to hold on herself.

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