Today, on her feast day, it is good to remember that true Christian faith is not merely literary and not always beautiful. Its protagonists might possess, as Malcolm Muggeridge said of Mother Teresa, “homely features.” They may not be clever or gifted. But, if they are willing to do as God wants, they too can do something beautiful for God.
Even in their deaths, saints often manifest the humility of Christ. I remember vividly watching one of the major news networks on September 5, 1997, the day Mother Teresa died at the age of 87. Whichever one it was had invited on the enfant terrible of New Atheist punditry, Christopher Hitchens, to discuss her life. Hitch, who had penned an attack on the Albanian nun’s work, titled naughtily The Missionary Position, was given the green light to summarize his book that attacked the sexual teaching of the Catholic Church, questioned whether Mother Teresa was really poor or just pretending, and complained that Mother Teresa’s care for the poor really wasn’t that great.
I turned off the television in disgust. Over the next few days, it became clear that, rather than seeing others come to her defense in mainstream media outlets, we would see almost nothing. For Princess Diana’s death, which had preceded Mother’s by five days, continued to eat up almost all of the western media attention.
No doubt Mother Teresa would not have minded. Contrary to Hitchens’s insinuations, Mother Teresa’s life was not about herself. The international attention she had begun to receive starting in the late 1960s was welcomed only insofar as it brought attention, volunteers, donations, and prayers to the work her order, The Missionaries of Charity, was doing.
That attention had really skyrocketed after the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1969 BBC movie about her, Something Beautiful for God, and his 1971 book of the same name. In his later attack, Hitchens had referred to Muggeridge as “that old fraud and mountebank” for claiming that a “particularly beautiful soft light” that had pervaded footage shot inside Mother Teresa’s Home of the Dying was supernatural in origin. While Hitchens insisted it must have been the film, Muggeridge claimed his cameraman had tried to use “the same stock in particularly poor light” on a later shoot in the Middle East and had failed. Muggeridge’s explanation was that the “technically unaccountable light is, in fact, that Kindly Light Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.”
I read Muggeridge’s book recently and found it much less fraudulent than Hitchens did. But then again, the former left-wing radical and then-agnostic Muggeridge’s approach to Mother Teresa had a much greater moral realism about it than did the ever-left-radical Hitchens’s approach.
What impressed Muggeridge about Mother Teresa (who would be canonized Saint Teresa in 2016) was precisely her authentic love of Christ and the poor. Muggeridge described her as: “a unique person in the world today; not in our vulgar celebrity sense of having neon lighting about her head.” Instead, she had “merged herself in the common face of mankind, and identified herself with human suffering and deprivation.”
No mere public relations move, her life had nothing of the feeling of John Lennon and Yoko Ono posing for a picture while waiting for the hotel maid to finish cleaning their room so that they could continue to signal their own oneness with the masses. Instead, the Albanian nun simply “gave herself to Christ, and through him to her neighbor.”
Muggeridge, who had lived in India before, recalled being in a car that hit a man in the street, and contrasted himself to Mother Teresa. Though Muggeridge had taken the man to the hospital to be tended, the sight of another there “who had just cut his throat from ear to ear” caused Muggeridge to flee back to his flat and have a whiskey and soda. “I ran and stayed away; Mother Teresa moved in and stayed.” He was content to deal with the problems of Bengal in the abstract. The fleshy and often bloody concrete was too much.
Muggeridge’s history of leftism allowed him to see through the criticisms that Mother Teresa’s work , “statistically speaking,” achieved little to nothing. “But then Christianity is not a statistical view of life.” Mother Teresa did not measure her work in the kind of measures that economists or social workers did. She did not worry about numbers of mouths fed or lives prolonged, all of which often depends upon circumstances beyond human control. Instead, she measured in love of persons.
Nor did she worry about the problems that were roiling the Church in the post-Vatican II era. “The various controversies and conflicts now shaking the Church scarcely touch her; they will pass, she says, and the Church will remain to perform its divinely inspired and directed function.”
Muggeridge, who obviously felt the pull of Mother Teresa’s faith, also felt constrained to note that he could not enter the Church and then humorously wonder at the Catholic Church’s decision “to have a reformation” even as “the previous one—Luther’s—is finally running into the sand.” Given the nature of this postconciliar reformation, Muggeridge offers that if he were Catholic, he should “be forced to say that, in my opinion, if men were to be stationed at the doors with whips to drive worshippers away, or inside the religious orders to specifically to discourage vocations, or among the clergy to spread alarm and despondency, they could not hope to be as effective in achieving these ends as are trends and policies seemingly now dominant within the Church.”
There is something bracing about the voice of an honest outsider such as Muggeridge. Eventually, he gave up on his agnosticism, but the reality of scandals is undeniable.
And yet Mother Teresa will be found right, I believe, in the end, about the troubles that have marked Catholicism in her and our time. They pass, as do all things. In our own time, however, the most important thing to do is to determine how it is that God wants us to love him in and through others.
Muggeridge saw in Mother Teresa the deepest truth of Christian faith—that one who hears the voice of Christ and responds to him will be given a glory not accessible to all the smarty-pants political journalists in the world from Muggeridge to Hitchens to your scribe.
She, a nun, rather slightly built, with a few rupees in her pocket; not particularly clever, or particularly gifted in the arts of persuasion. Just with this Christian love shining about her; in her heart and on her lips. Just prepared to follow her Lord, and in accordance with his instructions regard every derelict left to die in the streets as him; to hear in the cry of every abandoned child, even in the tiniest squeak of the discarded foetus, the cry of the Bethlehem child; to recognize in every leper’s stumps the hands which once touched sightless eyes and made them see, rested on distracted heads and made them calm, brought back health to sick flesh and twisted limbs. As for my expatiations on Bengal’s wretched social conditions—I regret to say that I doubt whether, in any divine accounting, they will equal one single quizzical half smile bestowed by Mother Teresa on a street urchin who happened to catch her eye.
Today, on her feast day, it is good to remember that true Christian faith is not merely literary and not always beautiful. Its protagonists might possess, as Muggeridge said of Mother Teresa, “homely features.” They may not be clever or gifted. But, if they are willing to do as God wants, they too can do something beautiful for God.
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The featured image, uploaded by Rajasekharan Parameswaran, is “Mother Teresa, also known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun. This painting is by artist Rajasekharan.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.