SOURCE: Inchausti, Robert. “Interpreting Mother Teresa.” The Christian Century 102 (16 October 1985): 919-20.

In the following essay, Inchausti praises Muggeridge's Something Beautiful for God for capturing the power of Mother Teresa's simple faith.

Goodness, like beauty, leaves us mute, unable to speak. And when we finally do produce halting words to express what goodness invokes in us, they always seem weak and inappropriate. So we look to skilled writers to capture for us the words over which saints bound on their way to God.

Many books about Mother Teresa have been written in the past ten years, each attempting to interpret her life. Yet—although it sounds odd—most of these biographies, essays, interviews and memoirs end up being unintentionally comic. The clash between Mother Teresa's wordless deeds of love and the writer's need for a good story almost always results in a parody of whatever genre the writer uses...