The Missionary Position Read Online Free PDF Page B

true that God “always provides,” then, obviously, there would be no need for the Missionaries of Charity in the first place.
    Before leaving Muggeridge’s milestone behind us, it is necessary to record one more of the interchanges between him and his guru:
MUGGERIDGE: You don’t think that there’s a danger that people might mistake the means for the end, and feel that serving their fellow men was an end in itself? Do you think there’s danger of that?
MOTHER TERESA: There is always the danger that we may become only social workers or just do the work for the sake of the work.… It is a danger; if we forget to whom we are doing it. Our works are only an expression of our love for Christ. Our hearts need to be full of love for him, and since we have to express that love in action, naturally then the poorest of the poor are the means of expressing our love for God.
    In the film of Something Beautiful for God , there is a sequence in which Mother Teresa takes an abandoned and undernourished child in her arms. The child is sickly looking and wizened and without much of the charm that babies possess at that age, but the old lady looks down at her with dauntless encouragement and enthusiasm and says, “See. There is life inher.” It is an undeniably affirmative moment. We would not be worse off if there were many more like it. But, just as Mother Teresa rather spoiled her own best moment for me by implying that her life’s work was a mere exercise in propaganda for the Vatican’s population policy, she cheapens her own example by telling us, as above, that humanism and altruism are “dangers” to be sedulously avoided. Mother Teresa has never pretended that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign. And in the excerpt above we have it on her own authority that “the poorest of the poor” are the instruments of this; an occasion for piety.

Good Works
and
Heroic Virtues

Fan Ch’ih asked about wisdom. The master said: “To work for the things the common people have a right to, and to keep one’s distance from the gods and spirits while showing them reverence can be called wisdom.”
Confucius, Analects Book VI, 22
No Philosopher was on hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little fetishism.
Joseph Conrad, Victory
Star light, star bright … we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading up to our destiny, but it’s only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It’s true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you’ll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That’s not a star worth following; it’s just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.
Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

I
    T hose prepared to listen to criticism of Mother Teresa’s questionable motives and patently confused sociological policy are still inclined to believe that her work is essentially humane. Surely, they reason, there is something morally impressive in a life consecrated to charity. If it were not for the testimony of those who have seen the shortcomings and contradictions of her work firsthand, it might be sufficient argument, on the grounds that Mother Teresa must have done some genuine good for the world’s suffering people.
    However, even here the record is somewhat murky and uneven, and it is qualified by the same limitations as apply to the rest of Mother Teresa’s work: that such work is undertaken not for its own sake but to propagandize one highly subjective view of human nature and need, so that she may one day be counted as the beatific founder of a new order anddiscipline within the Church itself. Even in the quotidian details of ostensibly