Barry's Blog

Mark Twain once remarked, "I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces." Twain was in many ways tormented much of his adult life, trying to come to grips with his own religious upbringing. In our own day, it is easy for us to become enamored with a sense that this present, temporal world is all that there is.

In many ways, Malcolm Muggeridge, whose conversion to Christianity was later in life, serves as a reliable guide for us.  Muggeridge, educated at Cambridge University, was known internationally as a journalist, broadcaster, and writer for over half a century, He started as an editorial scribe at the Manchester Guardian, before moving to the Soviet Union in 1932, where, as the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, he witnessed in the Ukraine the famine brought about by Stalin: it was the beginning of Malcolm's greatest disillusionment. During the Second World War, he worked in British intelligence alongside such highly individual characters as Graham Greene and Kim Philby. Afterward, he became Washington correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and, later, editor of Punch, Britain's weekly humor magazine. 

His spiritual memoir, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, was originally published by Harper & Row in 1988, but was recently republished as, Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim, by Wipf & Stock Publishers (2005). Here are a few vintage excerpts from Muggeridge's  spiritual autobiography, Conversion, that beckon us to look beyond this present world to the spiritual reality of Christ and His Kingdom.

"When I first became known as an aspiring Christian believer without any denominational tag. This has been at times embarrassing; especially at Evangelical gatherings, when one is liable to be asked precisely how, and in what circumstances, one became a Christian. What is expected is a dramatic account of being converted; something that in the United States became so popular that at one point it almost seemed as though more sinners were being born again than babies being born into the world. The more lurid the old adam, the more impressive the new, so that, in testifying, converts have a way of dwelling upon their past sins and misdemeanors in such detail and so ardently that an element of exhibitionism and even spiritual pornography-if there is such a thing-is liable to creep in."

"Pascal, one of the most brilliant scientific minds of his time, came to realize that, as a pursuit, science is a cul-de-sac, and results in the dethronement of God and the elevation of men, to the point that they come to see themselves as lords of creation - a role that either makes them go quite mad, or sink into mere animality. (William) Blake, too, in his own bizarre way, saw that the so-called Enlightenment was in truth a darkening of the spirit, and scrawled across his copy of Bacon's Essays - a forerunner of Huxley's - "Good Advice for Satan's Kingdom." 

"It dawns on him (Muggeridge, as a soldier)) then that the true wonder of life is indeed its ordinariness rather than an imaginary extraordinariness. God did not come among us trailing clouds of glory; incarnate, He was no great scholar, perhaps barely literate, finding that children understand better what He is getting at than do grown-ups, and so addressing Himself to children as being a more worthwhile audience that scribes and Pharisees; consorting for the most part with lowly people, looking for His disciples among fishermen, and even then, one of the chosen twelve proves to be a crook, and the rest ran away."

"It is, of course, inevitable that in a materialist society like ours death should seem terrible, and even inadmissible. If Man is the very apex of creation, with nothing greater than himself in the universe; if his earthly life exhausts the whole content of his existence, then, clearly, his definitive end, his death, is too outrageous to be contemplated, and so is better ignored." 

"God, humble my pride, extinguish the last stirrings of my ego, obliterate whatever remains of worldly ambition and carnality, and in these last days of a mortal existence, help me to serve only Thy purposes, to speak and write only Thy words, to think only Thy thoughts, to have no other prayer than: 'Thy will be done.' In other words, to be a true Convert."

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow