A Spiritual Pilgrimage
By Malcolm Muggeridge
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(2007)Discussion Guide Included.
A life in perspective, offering questions to consider and a path worth exploring.
This reading by Malcolm Muggeridge features two chapters from Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim—his final autobiography—introduced by Alonzo L. McDonald, Senior Fellow and Founding Chairman of The Trinity Forum.
Muggeridge (1903–1990) was, at various points in his life, a teacher, journalist, soldier-spy, foreign correspondent, television personality, pilgrim, and public voice for Jesus. McDonald summarizes the story of a full life—often excessive, generally unconventional, with adventures on every continent—and presents Muggeridge to us as a twentieth-century “everyman” following a path as old as Solomon’s in Ecclesiastes.
Muggeridge’s Conversion is an autobiography written largely in the third person and in a style that evokes Augustine’s Confessions. In it, he looks back on his life from the perspective of a late convert to the Christian faith, retelling his journey and some of the lessons learned. Our selections focus on his conversion as well as on his deeply moving and provocative meditations on the prospect of death. This brief Reading offers an opportunity to step back and see one life in full perspective, which may offer us not only questions to consider but a glimpse of a path we might want to explore.
“After all, the Church went on crusades, set up an inquisition, installed scandalous popes, and countenanced monstrous iniquities. Institutionally speaking, these are perfectly comprehensible and even, in earthly terms, excusable. But in the mouthpiece of God on earth, belonging not just to history but to everlasting truth, they are not easily defended. Yet, as Hilaire Belloc truly remarked, the Church must be in God’s hands because, seeing the people who have run it, it couldn’t possibly have gone on existing if there weren’t some help from above.
“I also felt unable to take completely seriously, and therefore to believe in, the validity or permanence of any form of human authority. However, what goes on in one’s mind and what goes on in one’s soul aren’t necessarily the same thing. There is something else, some other process going on inside one, to do with faith which is really more important and more powerful. I can no more explain conversion intellectually than I can explain why one falls in love with someone whom one marries. It’s a very similar thing.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Conversion, “A Spiritual Pilgrimage”
The cover of this Reading is white with gold foil lettering. The booklet includes a discussion guide and suggestions for further reading. It will be available at the beginning of December 2007.
People interested in further reading on Muggeridge may be interested in the Malcolm Muggeridge Society.
