35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Truly Beautiful, May 11, 2002
This review is from: Something Beautiful for God (Paperback)
This really isn't a biography of Mother Teresa so much as it is a document in reflection on one man's encounters with her. Mother Teresa is such a dynamic and profound personality, indeed so much a reflection of her Savior, that just meeting her has inspired much reflection, conviction, and devotion in the mind and heart of Malcolm Muggeridge. She is that rare persona who somehow ascends past celebrity status. Celebrities, in the end, are entertainment. Mother Teresa's presence and personality are much more than entertainment: with hardly a word she challenges and changes people. The best parts of this book have more to do with Muggeridge's inner searching than with Teresa's life and work.
I'm sure that she would shy away from all this praise. Yet truly she is a reflection of her Savior, which is her heart's desire. This strange and unearthly power she has to affect lives with nothing more than her presence perhaps can help us understand how an illiterate carpenter from the backwaters of the world managed to split history in half and utterly turn the world upside down. When you draw near to God, even just a reflection of Him, you cannot help but be changed.
What I love most about Mother Teresa, what inspires and challenges me the most, is her ability, maybe even insistence, in seeing Christ in the poor and destitute that she cared for. He said `whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me' and she takes it seriously -- and the result is beautiful beyond comparison. It makes my heart leap.
Thank you, Lord, for sending us a woman like your servant Teresa to remind us of your face, your call, and your love. We are eternally grateful.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is truly beautiful, July 12, 2004
This book is expressly concerned with the work Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity do together in Calcutta and elsewhere for the poorest of the poor, written by a man who worked for many years in the same city and who much admired her work. It is full of anecdotes about her life and work and provides a pretty good summary of the major events. We know Mother Teresa for the great love that she poured out on the poor but at the very heart of all she did was her great love for God. "Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" was one of her favorite sayings. Yet Muggeridge had never met anyone less sentimental, less scatty, more down-to-earth. Mother Teresa took a very practical view of money as her needs grew. When the Pope visited India he presented her with his white ceremonial motor car but she never so much as took a ride in it, organizing a raffle and raising enough money to start her leper colony.
The author tells us that while teaching Mother Teresa received her call within a call - to work with the poorest of the poor rather than in her Loreto school convent with its pleasant garden, eager schoolgirls, congenial colleagues and rewarding work. When her release came, she stepped out with a few rupees in her pocket, made her way to the poorest, wretchedest part of the city, found a lodging there, gathered together a few abandoned children and began her ministry of love. To choose, as Mother Teresa did, to live in the slums of Calcutta, amidst all the dirt, disease and misery, signified a spirit so indomitable, a faith so intractable, a love so abounding, that the writer felt abashed.
Following the instructions of her Lord, Mother Teresa regarded every derelict left to die in the streets as Him; she heard every cry of abandoned children, even the tiny squeak of the discarded foetus, as the cry of the Bethlehem child; she recognized in every Leper's stumps the hands which once touched sightless eyes and made them see. What the poor needed, Mother Teresa was fond of saying, even more than food and clothing and shelter (though they need these, too, and desperately) is to be wanted. It is the outcast state their poverty imposes upon them that is the most agonizing. She had a place in her heart for them all. To her, they were all children of God, for whom Christ died. The author never experienced so perfect a sense of human equality as with Mother Teresa among her poor. Her love for them made them equal, as brothers and sisters within a family are equal. This is the only equality there is on earth, and it cannot be embodied in laws, enforced by coercion, or promoted by protest and upheaval, deriving, as it does, from God's love, which, like the rain from heaven, falls on the just and the unjust, on the rich and poor, alike. The nuns all eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and possess as little as their clients - the poorest of the poor. The nuns are not permitted to have a fan or any other mitigations of life in Bengal's sweltering heat. Even at prayers, the clamor and discordance of the street outside intrude, lest they should forget why they are there and where they belong.
Critics point out that statistically speaking Mother Teresa and the sisters achieved little but in Muggeridge's view Christianity is not a statistical view of life. Welfare is for a purpose while love is for a person. The one is about numbers while the other is about a person who is also God. The God Mother Teresa worships cannot see a sparrow fall to the ground without concern.
I found Malcom Muggeridge's portrayal of Mother Teresa penetrating, very helpful and in a small volume you receive a good idea of the woman who may well be recognized as a saint during our lifetime. Sadly, some of our churches appeal to only a small congregation; for someone concerned with why their message is not getting over as effectively as they might wish, there could be no better way than studying this book and learning more about Mother Teresa's way of expressing love.
This book is truly something beautiful
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Beauty of God in a Nun, May 15, 2004
This review is from: Something Beautiful for God (Paperback)
Among the hundreds of books written on Mother Teresa and her ministry, this is one of the earliest and the best. It has the very words of Mother Teresa with regard to her life, vocation and apostolate. The photographs and interviews included in the book make the portrayal of this nun and her work almost complete. Making a TV program about her and writing this book, were life-changing experiences for Malcolm Muggeridge. For someone planning to learn about Mother Teresa this may be the book to begin with.
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