For me, Mother Teresa of Calcutta embodies Christian love in action. Her face shines with the love of Christ on which her whole life is centred, and her words carry that message to a world which never needed it so much.

Something Beautiful for God is about her and the religious order, the Missionaries of Charity, she has instituted. About how they live and work and worship God together. It is not, in the ordinary sense, a biography (which, in any case, she would never countenance), but arises largely out of a film we made in Calutta on the same theme and with the same name.

The name, taken from a phrase often on Mother Teresa's lips, seemed perfect. How perfect I only realized when the film was being edited. One particular sequence, taken in a dark, cavernous building where the Sisters bring the dying from the streets outside, was expected to be unusable because of the poor light. Actually, to the astonishment of all concerned, it came out bathed in an exquisite luminosity. Some of Mother Teresa's light had got into it.

Something Beautiful for God includes, along with other writings about and by her, the transcript of my conversations with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. My best hope for it is that it will live up to its name, drawing others to help Mother Teresa's work, thereby participating in the love that inspires it and the joy that it brings. —Malcom Muggeridge 

From the dust jacket