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Recently, a number of Mother Teresa's private letters - written over the course of some six decades - were published as a book titled, "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light." The letters reveal a woman, long believed to be "a living saint," as depressed and in a day-to-day struggle with her faith.

Despite every gentle touch Mother Teresa offered to people horribly cast off from our great, global community, nothing seems to have delighted progressives more than these results of her hands touching paper.

Atheists, chief among them Christopher Hitchens, have callously seized her laments as a witness to their belief that there is no God.

That's the very nature of faith, though, isn't it? Believing in something that cannot be absolutely demonstrated?

There are elements of Christianity that require us not to suspend our disbelief, exactly - but rather to believe in what we cannot see or touch.

By the same token, though atheists won't agree, nonbelievers cannot prove beyond a doubt that there is no God. They take it as faith - their faith.

Brilliant men and women have written on the truth of God's existence - men and women who articulate their apologetics every bit as well as Hitchens or another atheist favorite, Sam Harris, argue on behalf of their religion.

Hitchens recently wrote that Mother Teresa was driven by her doubt to "more and more professions of faith." Each benevolent act, each time a child died in her arms as she cradled him or her, Hitchens believes, left Mother Teresa feeling more and more wanting.

Curious, that. Using Hitchens' reasoning, one could argue that acts of unselfish charity would serve somehow to cast a darker pall over anyone.

When my father served in World War II and became one of the first GI liberators to set foot in a Nazi death camp, he wrote to my mother that he no longer believed in God. God wouldn't allow this to happen, he offered. Years later, he told me could still recall some of the prisoners' faces and vividly recall the stench.

As Mother Teresa worked among people more destitute, I imagine, than my parochial American world-view can grasp, is it any wonder she had doubts? Can you picture yourself treading through squalor, poverty and death, day in and day out, and not questioning whether there truly is a merciful God? And not be depressed?

Some time before he died, my father came to believe differently. He came to understand that man-made death camps, poverty and destruction, whether created by malfeasance, hate, greed or neglect, don't prove God's absence - only man's endless shortcomings.

It's important to note that Mother Teresa, doubts and all, never abandoned her work or her unprovable faith. What her writings do prove beyond any doubt is that she was one of us. Not a living saint - just a remarkably selfless, compassionate human being.