Saint Teresa of Calcutta

By Karl Schmude -September 1, 2016

Saint Terea of Calcutta and Malcolm Muggeridge

By the time of her death in 1997, Mother Teresa was internationally famous. Her white sari with a blue border, enclosing a deeply lined face often smiling, was widely familiar, and her mission among ‘the poorest of the poor’, in Calcutta and elsewhere, was celebrated by popes and presidents alike, as well as by vast numbers of ordinary people.

From the late 1940s, when she set about founding her Order, the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa attracted popular interest in India and surrounding countries.

But it was only in 1968 that she was catapulted to world prominence by a TV interview conducted by the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, followed by a special TV program he made in Calcutta called Something Beautiful for God.

Muggeridge was by then a world-renowned author and TV personality. He had been a newspaper correspondent and columnist in various countries – including Australia for several months in 1958 – and had achieved international fame for his interviews and documentaries.

Yet he was in some ways an unlikely choice for interviewing Mother Teresa. He was well-known as a religious sceptic, possessed of a corrosive wit and a penchant for mocking cherished beliefs and institutions.

In 1955, he provoked outrage when he described the British monarchy as a ‘Royal Soap Opera’. A year later, in Australia, he ruffled feathers with his criticism of the British Commonwealth and his description of Australia as a ‘second-hand’ country, which had not managed to shake off its anachronistic loyalty to England but was now being absorbed by the facile conformities of mass American culture.

At the same time, he had a long history of interest in spiritual matters and moral concerns, even if these were disguised by a cynical, and at times caustic, public persona.

A series of journalistic opportunities occurred in his life that highlighted and advanced his experience of life as a spiritual journey. In the 1920s, soon after he graduated from Cambridge University, he taught at a Christian college in India – a country, as his biographer Gregory Wolfe has noted, that “would haunt his imagination for the rest of his life”.

In the early 1930s, he went to Russia as a newspaper correspondent, at the height of Stalin’s reign of terror. He had previously flirted with Communism and nourished the hope of a socialist paradise in Russia, but his exposure to the barbarities of the Soviet regime shattered these illusions.

His compassion was aroused by the widespread suffering of the people, particularly in Ukraine where millions perished as a result of Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture.

Muggeridge was one of the first Western journalists to report honestly on the famine, and he was later awarded the Ukrainian Order of Freedom.

But his time in Russia was also spiritually decisive. He found himself in the midst of a deeply religious culture, and his visit to a church in Kiev one Sunday morning was the occasion of an almost mystical experience when the spectacle of people turning to God in their afflictions brought home to him most powerfully the truth of the Easter proclamation, ‘Christ is Risen.’

A year later, Muggeridge returned to India to serve on a newspaper in Calcutta – an early exposure to the city that, several decades later, acquired new significance in his life as the setting for Mother Teresa’s missionary work.

I have a personal memory of Muggeridge speaking about Mother Teresa, when I attended a conference in 1978 in San Francisco on the 10th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

Both he and Mother Teresa were expected to speak but, in the event, Mother Teresa fell ill and only Muggeridge was present. In his opening remarks, he paid a moving tribute to her.

He extolled the Church’s opposition to contraception as being a teaching of the most profound and prophetic kind. He believed that reaffirming a belief in human dignity at the very source of life was truly consistent with Mother Teresa’s care for those in later life – exemplified in her love for the derelict and the dying in the slums of Calcutta and elsewhere.

Muggeridge often recalled a scene recorded in the TV program, Something Beautiful for God. Mother Teresa was holding a baby girl in her hands – so tiny that her very existence seemed miraculous. She exclaimed, with a glowing and exalted expression on her face: “See! There’s life in her!” It was for Muggeridge a triumphant glorying in life – “a divine flame”, he said, “which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened”.

Mother Teresa endured spiritual trials in her living out of Christ’s love, as Pope John Paul II mentioned in the Mass in October 2003 celebrating her beatification. In a letter to her spiritual adviser, she confessed to long years of inner darkness:

“I want to love him as he has not been loved, and yet there is that separation, that terrible emptiness, that feeling of absence of God.”

Mother Teresa was intensely aware of the “dark night of the soul”, which St John of the Cross described and many saints have experienced – a form of suffering exemplified by Christ himself, when he cried out on the cross. In the striking words of Chesterton, this was when God himself seemed for an instant to be an atheist: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

In Muggeridge’s mind, Mother Teresa’s experience of inner darkness added to her appeal. He counted himself, as he wrote in his autobiography, among “the walking-wounded from the ideological conflicts of the age”, and he was conscious of that “terrible emptiness” to which Mother Teresa testified – the spiritual poverty afflicting human beings everywhere but especially those in the West who are starved for love in the midst of plenty.

Like her namesake St Teresa of Avila, Mother Teresa not only had mystical insight but also practical acumen. Muggeridge was surprised – and hugely impressed – by her organisational shrewdness and efficiency, managing an order of sisters spread beyond India to various countries across the globe, including Australia.

He admired her raffling off the ceremonial car which Pope Paul VI presented to her after his visit to India in 1964. The proceeds enabled her to establish a leper colony.

“The rich, when they come to her,” remarked Muggeridge, “are liable to leave a little less rich, which she considers is conferring a great favour on them”.

This blending of spiritual and worldly understanding arose from her abandonment of self in devotion to Christ: “in abolishing herself”, Muggeridge said, “she found herself, by virtue of that unique Christian transformation, manifested in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, whereby we die in order to live”.

There was a special challenge that confronted Mother Teresa, and indeed Muggeridge, as people seeking to respond to God’s grace in a media-saturated society. How to deal with the contradictions of media prominence, exerting a wide influence while resisting the absorptions of publicity and the claims of celebrity status?

A vital part of the answer was the depth of Mother Teresa’s spiritual life – her devotion to prayer which, she told Muggeridge, “enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself”.

Each morning during the filming of Something Beautiful for God, Muggeridge attended Mass with Mother Teresa and the Sisters. He was not, at that point, a Catholic – only later, in 1982, was he received into the Church in company with his wife Kitty – but he recognised the spiritual sustenance Mother Teresa drew from her daily Mass.

She told him that, without it, she could not get through a single day or hour of the life of dedication she had chosen.

Mother Teresa joins the saints of history in taking us to the heart of the Christian mystery. Each generation, GK Chesterton suggested, is converted by the saint who contradicts it most. He was referring to St Francis of Assisi, and Pope Francis has captured in a single phrase the particular model represented by Mother Teresa for our time – that she is the conclusive response to what the pope has called “the throwaway society”. Mother Teresa picked up the throwaways and brought them within the folds of Christ’s love.

It is hard to think of a more stunning saint for today’s West – and today’s world.

https://aleteia.org/2020/09/04/meet-the-journalist-who-introduced-mother-teresa-to-the-world/

Malcolm Muggeridge lived a life of change. The greatest of those changes happened when he met the "saint of the gutters."

Mother Teresa of Calcutta is one of the best-known saints today. Even before she was canonized in 2016, in life she was sometimes referred to as the “saint of the gutters,” because of her work among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta.

 But relatively few people know the person who made Mother Teresa so well-known.

 In 1971, British writer Malcolm Muggeridge published Something Beautiful for God, a book about Mother Teresa and the work of the Missionaries of Charity. Muggeridge had been an atheist earlier in life but eventually became Christian. He was so impressed by Mother Teresa’s witness that he became Catholic in 1982, at age 79.

 Born in Croydon, a suburb of London, in 1903, Muggeridge was educated at Cambridge and began his career as a teacher in Egypt in the late 1920s. Shifting into journalism, he worked for newspapers around the world. Marrying Katherine Dobbs in 1927, he had an idealistic view of communism, and when the couple moved to Moscow in 1932, they felt that they would live out the rest of their life there.

 But Muggeridge became disillusioned with communism. He and Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist, were the only two to report on Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine in 1932. Muggeridge’s reports, however, were heavily censored by the Manchester Guardian, his employer.

 He would continue working for newspapers for the next decade, including some time in India, but during World War II, he served in British intelligence, posted to Africa and Paris.

 Back in journalism after the war, he spent some time as a Washington correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Beginning in the 1950s he was a popular interviewer, panelist, and documentarian on British television. In 1957, he ruffled a lot of royal feathers when he published an essay in the Saturday Evening Post, “Does England Really Need a Queen?” In the 1960s, he became a sharp critic of liberalism and the new sexual laxity and use of drugs.

 Muggeridge also wrote and appeared in several religion-oriented television documentaries, such as an American Public Broadcasting Service six-part series on the lives and teachings of “six characters in search of God” — St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, William Blake, Soren Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

 Something Beautiful for God was based on a film Muggeridge had made for the BBC about Mother Teresa’s work in India. He related how during filming, one scene was taken in a “dark, cavernous building where the Sisters bring the dying from the streets outside.” The scene was “expected to be unusable because of the poor light,” he wrote.

“Actually, to the astonishment of all concerned, it came out bathed in an exquisite luminosity,” Muggeridge said. “Some of Mother Teresa’s light had got into it.”

Toward the end of his life, Muggeridge reflected on meeting Mother Teresa. In his 1988 book Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, he wrote

When I first set eyes on her, … I at once realized that I was in the presence of someone of unique quality. This was not due to … her shrewdness and quick understanding, though these are very marked; nor even to her manifest piety and true humility and ready laughter. There is a phrase in one of the psalms that always, for me, evokes her presence: “the beauty of holiness” — that special beauty, amounting to a kind of pervasive luminosity generated by a life dedicated wholly to loving God and His creation. This, I imagine, is what the halos in medieval paintings of saints were intended to convey.

Fr. James Lloyd, a Paulist Father in New York, hosted both Mother Teresa and Muggeridge on an NBC television program called. The program can still be viewed on YouTube, though the sound quality is less than perfect. 

Muggeridge died in England in 1990.

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MALCOLM MUGGERIDGEMOTHER TERESASAINTS

1. “Peace begins with a smile.”

2. “We fear the future because we are wasting today.”

3. “When you don’t have anything, then you have everything.”

4. “Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life.”

5. “Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.”

6. “Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.”

7. “Some people come in our life as blessings. Some come in your life as lessons.”

8. “If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.”

9. “A life not lived for others is not a life.”

10. “I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.”

11. “Love is a fruit in season at all times and within reach of every hand.”

12. “Work without love is slavery.”

13. “I want you to be concerned about your next-door neighbor. Do you know your next-door neighbor?”

14. “Be happy in the moment, that’s enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.”

15. “‎Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”

16. “There is more hunger in the world for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.”

17. “If we really want to love, we must learn how to forgive.”

18. “I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.”

19. “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”

20. “What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight; build it anyway.”

21. “I go of my free choice, with the blessing of obedience.”

22. “Life is a song, sing it. Life is a struggle, accept it.”

23. “True love is love that causes us pain, that hurts, and yet brings us joy. That is why we must pray to God and ask Him to give us the courage to love.”

24. “There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.”

25. “If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.”

26. “Be kind and merciful. Let no one ever come to you without coming away better and happier.”

27. “One of the realities we’re all called to go through is to move from repulsion to compassion and from compassion to wonderment.”

28. “We cannot give what we have not got."

29. “If we are humble, nothing will change us, neither praise, nor discouragement.”

30. “Life is an opportunity, benefit from it. Life is beauty, admire it. Life is a dream, realize it.”

31. “Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened by any failure as long as you have done your best.”

32. “Together we can do great things.”

33. “Life is a challenge; we must take it.”

34. “Spread the love of God through your life but only use words when necessary.”

35. “Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”

36. “Poverty was not created by God. It is we who have caused it, you and I through our egotism.”

37. “There is thing you can do but I cannot and there is thing I can but you cannot; so, let us make something beautiful for God.”

38. “If you are discouraged, it is a sign of pride because it shows you trust in your own powers.”

39. “We interfere with God’s plans when we push in someone or something else not suitable for us. Be strict with yourself, and then be very strict with what you are receiving from the outside.”

40. “Life’s a song, sing it.”

41. “One filled with the joy preaches without preaching.”

42. “Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; give the world the best you’ve got anyway.”

43. “I do not pray for success; I ask for faithfulness.”

44. “Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”

45. “I know I am touching the living body of Christ in the broken bodies of the hungry and the suffering.”

46. “We must never be afraid to be a sign of contradiction for the world.”

47. “The fruit of love is service, which is compassion in action.

48. “There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.”

49. “Loneliness is the most terrible form of poverty.

50. “Jesus said love one another. He didn’t say love the whole world.”

51. “We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.”

52. “Do extraordinary things with love.”

53. “True love is giving and giving until it hurts.”

54. “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

55. “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.”

56. “You are greater than you know.”

57. “The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.”

58. “Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.”

59. “Go out into the world today and love the people you meet. Let your presence light new light in the hearts of people.”

60. “God speaks in the silence of the heart.”

61. “Whenever you share love with others, you’ll notice the peace that comes to you and to them.

62. “Yes, you must live life beautifully and not allow the spirit of the world that makes gods out of power, riches, and pleasure make you to forget that you have been created for greater things.”

63. “Joy is prayer; joy is strength: joy is love; joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.”

64. “I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us, and we change things.”

65. “Life is a game, play it… Life is too precious, do not destroy it.”

66. “Do ordinary things with extraordinary love.”

67. “We must make our homes centers of compassion and forgive endlessly.”

68. “Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of Christ risen.”

69. “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”

70. “The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.”

71. “In order to keep the lamp burning you have to keep putting the oil in it.”

72. “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”

73. “Smiling novices. I can hear the music of your laughter of joy. Learn, my children, to be holy, for true holiness consists of doing God’s work with a smile.”

74. “One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.”

75. “We have to possess before we can give.”

76. “It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”

77. “If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies. Succeed anyway.”

78. “If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you. Be honest and frank anyway.”

79. “I know God won’t give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish he didn’t trust me so much.”

80. “Live simply so others may simply live.”

81. “Peace and war start within one’s own home. If we really want peace for the world, let us start by loving one another within our families. Sometimes it is hard for us to smile at one another.”

82. “God is everywhere and in everything and without Him we cannot exist.”

83. “Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.”

84. “He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your weakness.”

85. “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”

86. “The first requirement for prayer is silence. People of prayer are people of silence.”

87. “Humility is truth, therefore in all sincerity, we must be able to look up and say, I can do all things in Him who strengthens me. By yourself you can do nothing, have nothing but sin, weakness and misery. All the gifts of nature and grace you have them from God.”

88. “Although she be but little, she is fierce.”

89. “I don’t do great things. I do small things with great love.”

90. “Words that do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.”

91. “The openness of our hearts and minds can be measured by how wide we draw the circle of what we call family.”

92. “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

93. “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use violence to get what they want.”

94. “Not handouts, but rather hands held.”

95. “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.”

96. “Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.”

97. “If now we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten how to see God in one another.”

98. “There is a light in this world, a healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter.”

99. “We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.”

100. “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

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