If you have never known a scintilla of her story, you were probably conceived in a fairy tale and never touched down on Planet Earth.

The recent revelation of Mother Teresa’s spiritual doubts have shocked many of the faithful and vindicated some of the faith-less. A recently published book cataloging 66 years worth of correspondence between the Nobel Prize-winning nun of Calcutta and her confessors, titled “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” chronicles her deep struggle with doubt throughout her entire ministry. A Time magazine preview in the Sept. 3 issue describes her sense of God’s absence this way:

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“[It] seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 – never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.” Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. “I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God – tender, personal love,” she remarks to an advisor. “If you were there, you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.’”

Some, like the writer Christopher Hitchens, sympathize with her doubts and find solace in unbelief rather than belief. “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” he likes to say. But many draw other conclusions.

Doubt and faith are a common law couple that live together their whole lives long, often without the church’s blessing. They cohabit in every believer and nonbeliever alike, whether either wants to admit it or not. Nonbelievers, like Hitchens, claim to have no faith at all, but even their trust in the dependability of natural law or the authority of their own conscience is a kind of faith in something, if not Someone. Believers, like the diminutive “Saint of the Gutter,” who wrestle with doubt wonder if they are being hypocrites.

I would argue they are being ruthlessly honest. I wish Teresa had felt free to express her doubts publicly during her lifetime. She had hoped those letters would be destroyed for fear of making herself, instead of Christ, the object of concern. Her expressed doubts, however, drive us to consider whether Christ is himself any help in our doubts.

A man hoping for his son’s healing approached Jesus one day pleading for his boy. Jesus asked if he believed. “I believe,” he answered, “help thou my unbelief.” That man speaks for all of us, still.

Doubt is not the absence of faith; it is an element of it. As Frederick Buechner put it: “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” As long as you doubt, your faith has room to search and probe and wonder and stretch. Faith needs doubt the way fire needs oxygen.

The day doubt dies, so do you. And then, oddly enough, faith dies, too – only to be resurrected as true and intimate knowledge of the One who knew us first and loved us through it all. Until then, doubt and faith will continue their sometimes graceful and sometimes awkward dance. All we get to decide is which one leads and which follows.