Michael Gerson is a former Bush speechwriter responsible for some of the most elegant and eloquent words spoken after 9/11, including the still-potent speech the president delivered at the National Cathedral on 9/14. Gerson is now a columnist for the Washington Post. And he’s posted today a thoughtful and worth-reading column on Mother Teresa, which concludes:

Other noble religious traditions promise serenity, detachment from striving and release from the suffering of the world. Christianity, in contrast, teaches that grace is found in the worst of that suffering, and through a figure who despairs of God’s presence in his parting words.

This anguish is not convenient — “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” is hardly the best religious marketing slogan. But for millennia this abandonment has offered hope that God might somehow be present even in shame, loneliness and betrayal, even on the descending path of depression, even in the soul’s hardness and doubt, even in the silence of God himself — and that all these things may be the preface to glory.

Through her pain-filled letters, Mother Teresa offers this assurance: Even when all we have to offer is ashes, and all we feel is emptiness, something beautiful may come of it in the end.

But her decades of lonely sorrow are not an easy source of comfort. And Graham Greene might have been speaking of this abandoned mystic when he wrote: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.”

Just go and read the rest. It’s that good.