The Missionary Position Read Online Free PDF Page A

impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused.… I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light [Cardinal] Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.
    Nor was Muggeridge attempting to speak metaphorically. Of the love he observed in the home, he wrote that it was
luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible round the heads of the saints. I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity should register on a photographic film. The supernatural is only an infinite projection of the natural, as the furthest horizon is an image of eternity. Jesus put mud on a blind man’s eyes and made him see.
    Having gone on in this vein for some time, Muggeridge concluded:
This is precisely what miracles are for—to reveal the inner reality of God’s outward creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle . [Emphasis added.]
    Muggeridge did not exaggerate when he wrote “I fear I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium.” So it is interesting to have the direct testimony of Ken Macmillan himself:
During Something Beautiful for God , there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said, “Ah well, it’s very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?” And we had just taken delivery at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn’t had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, “Well, we may as well have a go.” So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater at Ealing Studios and eventually up came the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, “That’s amazing. That’s extraordinary.” And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn’t get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun round and said: “It’s divine light! It’s Mother Teresa. You’ll find that it’s divine light, old boy.” And three or four days later I found I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like: “We hear you’ve just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle.”
    And a star was born. Ken Macmillan’s testimony came far, far too late to prevent the spread, largely by the televisual and mass-media methods thatMuggeridge affected to despise, of the reported “miracle.” Rather than “the first authentic photographic miracle,” this episode is actually something considerably more significant. It is the first unarguable refutation of a claimed miracle to come not merely from another supposed witness to said miracle but from its actual real-time author. As such, it deserves to be more widely known than it is. But modern technology and communications have ensured instead that rumor and myth can be transmitted with ever greater speed and efficiency to the eyes and ears of the credulous. How splendidly we progress. Ever since Something Beautiful for God , the critic of Mother Teresa, in small things as well as in great ones, has had to operate against an enormous weight of received opinion, a weight made no easier to shift by the fact that it is made up, quite literally, of illusion.
    Muggeridge gave numerous other hostages to fortune during the course of his film and his book. Only his adoring gaze, for example, inhibited him from seeing the range of interpretation that might be placed on the following anecdote:
As Simone Weil says, Christianity is