It turns out that Mother Teresa was more like the rest of us than we might have thought.

Her newly published memoirs — featured in a sensationalist cover for the Aug. 23 issue of Time magazine — make clear that she, too, suffered agonizing doubts about her faith and sometimes felt Godless.

For some, publication of the book, titled "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light," is good news. A collection of her correspondence with close advisers over more than six decades, it suggests a long period of spiritual struggle and aridity. The idealized Mother Teresa now can be replaced by a more human portrait that narrows the vast distance separating her image from her many admirers.

"I'm no Mother Teresa," the off-handed testimony that has found its way into the language, could more often become "I'm no Mother Teresa, but I can relate to her." There is relief among those who discover she may not have considered herself a Mother Teresa either. The relieved ones welcome her to the club, no less loved and epitomized, but a fellow sufferer.

But for many others, the removal of those differences is likely a bitter pill. They want her to remain above the common lot, someone whose unshakable convictions and steadfast trust in a divine presence made her not only better but also a chosen sign of hope. If, instead, she was plagued by bouts of darkness that ordinarily afflict the soul from time to time, the possibility fades that she could be that someone who rises above the crowd. Most in that crowd don't intend to try; they want someone to do it for them, and she has served that purpose.

In that sense, Mother Teresa is a mirror in which we Americans see our own obsessions and, in our attempt to rationalize them, ignore — by casting her both as the epitome of service and fidelity and yet also as someone who is ultimately irrelevant to our actual lives. As our commitments have become more conspicuously material and our goals more self-serving, we have become less able even to imagine a life devoted principally to sacrifice and arduous prayer.

Religion, though seemingly everywhere in the nation, is almost nowhere in the marketplace. It gets crowded out by competing values such as success and status. Unwittingly, perhaps, much of organized religion long ago stopped fighting the system and joined it as an auxiliary rehab to prop up victims of the fray and send them back to battle. Religion is "kept personal" to avoid challenging the convictions that dominate the battleground. The center of American worship has shifted toward an economic system complete with its own pieties. The incessant talk of "spirituality" likely signals the acute absence of it.

How to justify this friction? One way is to segment life even more, assigning sainthood and holiness to specialists. Assume it's the task of a chosen few to endure the rigors of faith, providing a handy exemption for those who cannot be expected to take on a full-bore exploration of what it might be like to apply faith to a world of endless casinos, Little League travel teams, luxury condos, and "American Idol — and grinding poverty such as Mother Teresa couldn't ignore. Charity and "giving back" help, but as many have noted, those actions rarely come close to the sacrificial love she espoused.

Needing to resolve their own dilemma, many Americans put Mother Teresa in her "place" on a pedestal. If they feel any religious yearnings that resiliently remain in the midst of the marketplace, they can find in her someone they can adore from afar. She becomes the glorification of what ordinary folks in a rat race want "someone else" to be while they attend to business. She is the reason they don't need to try; she is the expert, and the rest can go on their way thinking, "Well, that matter has been taken care of."

Mother Teresa has been a surrogate; we respect her with all our might and may send spare money to her causes, but we've worked hard to keep her sphere separate from ours, as an excuse for not pursuing a similar course.

Suddenly the turbulent passages in her letters become her belated reminder to us that she belonged to the same world of joys and worries, hopes and fears, virtues and vices, faith and doubt, as we all do. She is reminding us that although we may think we can escape from her, or from that world, we can't.

Though she didn't give many hints of her misgivings during her life, thereby reinforcing the idealistic image of her, it was in fact her last testament to the conviction that if she felt the demanding claims of the gospel, then anyone could and perhaps must accept the call to divine purposes. Nothing she writes diminishes her remarkable witness. "Dark nights of the soul" go with spiritual greatness.

Perhaps her letters will introduce that possibility of radical choice by making her more accessible. With her confessions in hand, the distance could begin to lessen and the vividness of her humanness make her a powerful example in new ways.

Kenneth Briggs is an adjunct professor of English at Lafayette College and author of the forthcoming book "The Power of Forgiveness."