Advent Thought 20

Malcolm Muggeridge was a British journalist who had hob-nobbed with the "people who count" and the "high and mighty" nearly his entire life.  He was perceptive enough to see through the facades and pretenses and all too often the moral rottenness present, often making this facade and pretense the butt of his humor.  Towards the end of his career, he was asked by the BBC to do a special on a woman of obscure, Albanian peasant background, Mother Teresa, who had dedicated her life to serving the poor and dying of Calcutta, India.  Her work was done in the conviction that even these people were made in God's image and thus were worthy of being treated with dignity.  Muggeridge was so overcome by what he saw in her work that he surprised the world and became a believer in Christ fighting, among other things, for the cause of the dignity of the unborn .  From this moment onward, he wrote with remarkable but witty incisiveness at what he perceived to be the Western world's demise; often the target of his wit were the "people who count".  Here's some Muggeridge humor.  (Just a brief word to the non-British; Punch was the satirical magazine of which Muggeridge was at one time editor.)

"By definition, God belongs to eternity, not to time and so intrinsically is immortal.  The last Archibishop of Canterbury but one, Dr. Ramsey, appeared not to realize this when, to my amazement, at the end of a performance of Godspell, he rose to his feet and shouted, "Long live God" which as I reflected at the time, was like shouting "Carry on eternity" or "keep on going infinity". The incident made a deep impression on my mind because it illustrated the basic difficulty I met when I was editor of Punch: that the eminent so often say and do things which are infinitely more ridiculous than anything you could invent for them.  That might not sound to you like a terrible difficulty but it is, believe me, the main headache of the editor of an ostensibly humorous paper.  You go to great trouble to invent a ridiculous Archbishop of Canterbury and give him lines to say and then suddenly he rises in his seat at the theater and shouts out: "Long live God!"  And you're defeated, you're broken."