Friday, June 21, 2013

Here in dust and dirt ... lilies of His love ...


“Thus in the turmoil of life without, and black despair within, it is always possible to turn aside and wait on God. Just as at the center of a hurricane there is stillness, and above the clouds a clear sky, so it is possible to make a little clearing in the jungle of our human will for a rendezvous with God. . . . Once, in Times Square, I was glancing disconsolately but also avidly at the rows and rows of paperbacks, each with some lewd or sadistic picture for its cover, and noticed that by some strange accident my book on Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful For God, had got on to these sad shelves. Wondering how it could have happened, Herbert’s beautiful lines came into my mind:

And here in dust and dirt, O here
The lilies of His love appear.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (San Francisco, 1988), pages 22-23. [SOURCE]

[Hat tip to JM]

P.S. Of course, as you may remember, it was with the discovery of Mother Theresa that the erstwhile cynical atheist and admirer of the Soviet Marxist experiment, Malcolm Muggeridge, began his long and circuitous pilgrimage to Rome and conversion.

Update: Malcolm Muggeridge and Vatican II

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