I doubt you would have cared much for Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) in the first six decades of his life. He was known as a cutting-edge British journalist who skewered victims with biting sarcasm. He harangued the church as a hardened atheist. He was infatuated with communism until he went to Moscow on assignment and witnessed the brutality of Stalin’s totalitarian regime. Worse yet, he was a hard drinking, chain-smoking womanizer. That’s why he titled his autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time.
So why am I writing about him in this prayer exercise? Because the change that came over him turned his life upside down. As a television personality who interviewed famous people, his visit with Mother Teresa rocked his world. No one had ever heard of Mother Teresa before Malcolm interviewed her. He was so taken with her that he spearheaded a documentary film on her work that was later published in book form, Something Beautiful for God.
In the early 1970s, Malcolm began to identify himself as a Christian. He wrote three books in quick succession about Jesus and walked away from his former life. His decision to quit drinking and philandering stunned English society. He and his wife, Kitty, joined the Catholic church in 1982, no doubt as a result of Mother Teresa’s influence. He wrote of joining the church that he felt, “a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.”
Written two years before he died, his last book, Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a 20th Century Pilgrim includes this prayer: