Thoughts on a Saturday evening

Inscribed on the inside of the front cover is a note from my mother-in-law, "To Beth, Christmas 1997." Mere days away from my twenty-fifth birthday and only four months married, I picked up Malcolm Muggeridge's relatively small book on Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God and read it for the first time. Just three months earlier, I had sat glued to the television in our newlywed apartment in Wheaton College's married housing, and like millions of others across the world, watched as the now dead body of this tiny, withered woman decked in her familiar blue and white sari was carried in procession through the streets of Calcutta. As I picked up Muggeridge's book on that Christmas morning, could I have even considered the impact on my life this work, this woman, this Catholic nun, would have? Doubtfully. And now after countless readings, I pick up the work again, knowing and embracing the power of the words, the life, and on this January evening fifteen years later, while my husband works, and while my children watch a movie, I patiently wait to be changed.

It is, of course, true that the wholly dedicated like Mother Teresa do not have biographies. Biographically speaking nothing happens to them. To live for, and in, others, as she and the Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity do, is to eliminate happenings, which are a factor of the ego and the will. "Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me," is one of her favorite sayings. I once put a few desultory questions to her about herself, her childhood, her parents, her home, when she decided to become a nun. She responded with one of her characteristic smiles, at once quizzical and enchanting; a kind of half smile that she summons up whenever something specifically human is at issue, expressive of her own incorrigible humanity. Her home, she said, had been an exceptionally happy one. So, when her vocation came to her as a schoolgirl, the only impediment was precisely this loving, happy home which she did not wish to leave. Of course the vocation won, and for ever. She gave herself to Christ, and through him to her neighbour. This was the end of her biography and the beginning of her life; in abolishing herself she found herself, by virtue of that unique Christian transformation, manifested in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, whereby we die in order to live.

-from Something Beautiful for God