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Something Beautiful for God

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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.

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

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.

....of Mother Teresa's activities with the poor, written with grace and conviction. My favorite book about her and her work. You won't read this and remain unchanged by it.

Late in his adult life the renowned agnostic Malcolm Muggeridge converted to Christianity through the influence of Mother Teresa (1910-1997). In 1959 he interviewed Mother Teresa, and then ten years later made a television documentary of her life for the BBC. To honor her beatification in October 2003, Harper reissued the book version of these two efforts as a short, popular biography. Muggeridge reviews how Mother Teresa left her very satisfying call as a high school teacher and followed her "call within a call" to love the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. Under her direction, and convinced that every person should be able to die within sight of a loving face, no person was ever refused. Today, the Missionaries of Charity which she founded have houses in almost every country of the world. Evocative black and white photos accompany Muggeridge's powerful story-telling.

Muggeridge, in his conversion to Catholicism described the process as " a homecoming, a sense of picking up the pieces of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of finding a place at a table that had been set and long vacant...." There is no finer person then to describe the power and poetry with which the great mystic Mother Theresa lived this presence, someone who was constantly picking up the pieces of lost lives, bringing them together at the table with Christ. This book is unsurpassed in its simple beauty.

Tired of chasing mammom and the treats of this world that won't survive your death? Malcolm Muggeridge gives an outstanding review of the daily life of Mother Teresa and the sisters who serve in the Missionaries of Charity and why they are such peaceful and joyful women. Mother Teresa and her work are a fresh breeze in a world that is increasingly populated at all levels with naval-gazers. She makes it clear that you don't turn inward and find ways to indulge yourself in ever increasing amounts but, to be truly happy, you must serve others. Why should you do this? Read the book and find out....

Muggeridge penetrates to the essence of Christianty--and he does so with remarkably few words--by describing his encounter with Mother Teresa. I feel like I encountered this saintly woman myself--and like Muggeridge, I was challenged and uplifted by the contact.

This book was touching to me. It has changed my life. Ever since I read this book it made me feel sad about how other parts of the world are poor and we are sitting here with everything bowing to our feet! Oh well....I loved this book!

Perhaps the most gifted "vendure of words" in recent history, Muggeridge paints a magnificant portrait of Mother Teresa. This account helps the reader capture the true essence of spirtuality and humankind's need for it as Mother Teresa herself is a living conversion of sorts. This is a must read for anyone needing evidence of God's work in a life.