Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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.

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.

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....