The Missionary Position Read Online Free PDF

a religion for slaves; we have to make ourselves slaves and beggars to follow Christ. Despite the chronic financial stringency of the Missionaries of Charity, when I was instrumental in steering a few hundred pounds in Mother Teresa’s direction, she astonished, and I must say enchanted, me by expending it on the chalice and ciborium for her new novitiate.… Her action might, I suppose, be criticized on the same lines as the waste of spikenard ointment, but it gave me a great feeling of contentment at the time and subsequently.
    Of course if the purpose of Mother Teresa’s work is that of strict religious proselytization and the founding of an order toward that end, there can be no conceivable objection to her employing charitable donations in order to decorate an altarpiece with the things of this world. But those who make the donations are, it seems, not always aware that this is the essential point. Mother Teresa, to her credit, has never claimed otherwise. She did not even bother to use the biblical story of the spikenard ointment in reassuring Muggeridge, telling him instead that “you will be daily on the altar close to the Body of Christ.” Muggeridge was not then a Catholic, so he had no grounds on which to object that this was a doubly tricky use of the notion of transubstantiation. He thought of the spikenard alibi all by himself. (This is the passage in which Jesus breaks a costly box of unguent exclusively on his own feet. To the naive objection that the luxury item might withgreater effect have been sold for the relief of poverty, he rejoins, “The poor you have always with you.” I remember as a child finding this famous crack rather unsatisfactory. Either one eschews luxury and serves the poor or one does not. If the poor are always with us, on the other hand, then there is no particular hurry and they can always be used to illustrate morality tales. In which case, it might be more honest for their prophetic benefactors to admit that the poor have us always with them .)
    Modesty and humility are popularly supposed to be saintly attributes, yet Mother Teresa can scarcely grant an audience without claiming a special and personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In the following exchange between Muggeridge and his star, who is the one demonstrating the self-abnegating modesty?
MUGGERIDGE: When I think of Calcutta and of the appallingness of so much of it, it seems extraordinary that one person could just walk out and decide to tackle this thing.
MOTHER TERESA: I was sure then, and I’m still convinced, that it is He and not I.
    Here is a perfect fit between interviewer and subject: Muggeridge finds the poor of Calcutta to be rife with “appallingness,” and Mother Teresa says that therewould be no point in trying if one was not mandated by heaven. A little further on in the interview, Muggeridge inquires as follows:
So you wouldn’t agree with people who say there are too many children in India?
MOTHER TERESA: I do not agree because God always provides. He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world that he has created. And those little children are his life. There can never be enough.
    Muggeridge approves of this reply, saying moistly that Mother Teresa might as well be asked if there are too many stars in the sky. The entire dialogue is conducted in a semi-surreal manner, as if nobody had ever made any reasoned point about family planning or population policy. To say that there are too many children is to miss the point, because they are born already. But to say that there cannot be too many people is (and not only in India) to commit at least the sin of hubris. Mrs. Indira Gandhi—a political patron of Mother Teresa’s, incidentally—once embarked upon a criminal campaign of forced sterilization in India. Clearly there are many ways of getting the population question wrong. On the other hand, there is no rational way of saying that the question does notarise. And if it were