OCTOBER 2006

ISSUE 8 - ISSN 1448- 6326

DOM BEDE GRIFFITH - MYSTIC OF THE EAST

A HUMAN SEARCH

FRANK GERRY SVD

Abstract

Bede Griffith went to India in search of the other half of his soul – the intuitive, the imaginative, the feminine, and the mystical. Over a period of almost forty years, he became for many people a living symbol through which they could sense what it might mean for followers of different religions to meet ‘in the cave of the heart’. In all of this, he never lost his inner balance: “In his search for one Transcendent Reality, he maintained an equilibrium so delicately balanced that Andrew Harvey has referred to him as ‘the Mozart of Mystics’, . . . His inner life and development have the excitement of space exploration and the passion of a great romance." So writes Shirley du Boulay, his biographer. We honour the centenary of his birth this 17 December 2006.

Dom Bede Griffiths needs no introduction. His visits to Australia plus our visits to his ashram, Shantivanam, have helped us to appreciate the unique gift of the man. On 17 December this year we celebrate the centenary of his birth; this permits us to reflect upon  his meaning for us. Let me say a few words about the title.

Dom Bede Griffiths was a Benedictine monk. As we know, the Rule of Benedict is renowned for its emphasis on stability, balance and moderation; a reverence for learning, and the healthy relationship and interdependence of prayer and work. Bede Griffiths, in his own measured way, in his scholarship, his discipline and unremitting industry, reveals to us at every turn this special monastic heritage. As well, he was very English.

I suppose there are many ways of defining or describing the word ‘mysticism’. Let me simply say, in the words of William Johnston, by mysticism "I mean wisdom. I mean the wisdom that goes beyond words and letters, beyond reasoning and thinking, beyond imaging and fantasy, beyond before and after into the timeless reality." (1) The reality beyond is always the quest.

Mystic of the East! The East, in this case, is more than a place on the planet. It pertains to the geography of the soul. A specifically mystical metaphor from the Upanishads speaks of "The cave of the heart". (2) That is the location of the East in each one of us. Donald Nicholl writes in his forward to the collection of Swami Abhishiktananda's letters, " India is more than a geographical location; it is a dimension of the spirit where all who enter in are changed, and where Western drawn maps and Western compasses are of little avail.” (3)

Not long before Bede Griffiths died, a film crew went to Saccidananda, Bede's ashram in Tamil Nadu, to document his story and to capture on film something of the wisdom and grace of the man before he died. The film was entitled “A Human Search”. (4) It is this human search that I wish to highlight as the sub-title to this article; and although the emphasis is on Bede's journey, I hope that along the way the reader can discover points of convergence with his/her own story. After all, it is a human search and we are all included in that search and in that word ‘human’. His search was for meaning and faith as a young man, for wholeness as a middle-aged man in the marriage of East and West; ultimately, his search was for the God beyond all names where all genuine religions meet in harmony and mutual respect.

Patricia Cave, an Australian teacher, who knew Bede as her own teacher and healer speaks of him in this way: "Father Bede is humanity. He is the totally integrated being ... I think at this moment this is what he has to bring to the West. He is a prophet of our evolution into total humanity." (5)

What a beautiful thing to say about another human being –  'a prophet of our evolution into total humanity!' There is hope in that for all of us.

William Johnston could be speaking of him in his recent book on mysticism for a new age, "Arise, My Soul", when he says: "We need holistic mystics who will teach us to embrace both matter and spirit. We need a mysticism of the earth, a mysticism of the human body, a mysticism of sexuality, a mysticism of science.” (6) Could Bede Griffiths be pointing us in this direction? I think he might.

The title of his biography, "Beyond the Darkness", by Shirley Du Boulay, touches on the element of search which was the highlight of Bede's life. The title, a quotation from the Svetasvatura Upanishad, was a favourite of Bede:

I know that Great Person

Of the brightness of the Sun

Beyond the darkness.

Only by knowing him

One goes beyond death.

There is no other way to go.

Once more, William Johnston, has something to say about Bede: "The person who spoke most eloquently and wrote most prolifically about universal wisdom was Bede Griffiths (7); and speaking of his experience of Bede at his ashram in India, he he goes on to say, "The central thing was not the service of people (at Shantivanam) but the life of prayer and search for the Ultimate Reality." (8)

This was the passion of his life. In his own words he says, "All of us human beings have a capacity for God, a capacity to be drawn by God into the depths of our being where we experience the presence of God, of the infinite eternal reality." (9)"People everywhere are seeking for an ultimate meaning and purpose in life in a world where meaning and purpose seem to have been lost ... Is there within the Christian tradition a path to the Supreme, not by way of doctrine or ritual but of direct experience of reality? That is what people are looking for today.” (10)

This is a comment made over and over again by a host of writers: show me a pathway to the Supreme by way of direct experience of reality! John O'Donohue, the Irish poet and philosopher writes, "The loosening of spirituality from religion has awakened the people to the eternal dimension of their own lives. With the loss of our ancient kinship with nature and the demise of religion, there are so few places of shelter for the modern soul . . Our spiritual hunger is a new and complex form of consciousness." (11)This hunger, he says, requires the mystical, for the mystics are the ones who have gone into the furthest realms of intimacy and nothingness, the undiscovered regions of the soul; but the tragedy of religion, at the moment, seems to be its incapacity or unwillingness to engage this new consciousness. The mystical tends to frighten the institution for it creates “an undeniable window for the wild light of the divine to shine through.”

The Golden String

Let us go to where this search began, where Bede got hold of a golden string and kept pulling on it all through life till it brought him to Saccidananda, The Fullness of Bliss.

Bede was a young lad of about seventeen (Alan was his name then). One afternoon, late in his final year of high school, he walked alone near the school playing fields. He had walked there many times before but this time the experience was one of utter bliss. This is how he describes it years later:

I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all the year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked on I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel, and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God. (12)

This was the experience that was to fire and fuel his lifelong search. This was where he took hold of the golden string not knowing where it would lead. Nature “began to wear a kind of sacramental character.” (13) He approached it, he said, 'with a sense of almost religious awe'. Its majesty supplanted any other religious expression. Even though he had the usual basic Christian underpinnings to his education, his view of life at the end of high school was more pagan than Christian. (14)

In the autobiography of his early years, he writes with an exquisite sense of empathy for the rest of us: "An experience of this kind is probably not at all uncommon, especially in early youth. Something breaks suddenly into our lives and upsets their normal pattern, and we have to begin to adjust ourselves to a new kind of existence. This experience may come, as it came to me, through nature and poetry, or through art or music; or it may come simply through falling in love, or through some accident, an illness, the death of a friend, a sudden loss of fortune. Anything, which breaks through the routine of daily life, may be the bearer of this message to the soul . . . Suddenly we know that we belong to another world, that there is another dimension to existence . . . There can be few people to whom such an experience does not come at some time, but it is easy to let it pass, and to lose its significance."

"To follow the vision we have seen, to keep it in mind when we are thrown back again on the world, to live in its light and to shape our lives by its law, is to wind the string into a ball, and to find our way out of the labyrinth of life.” (15)

Bede knew he had to follow that string:

I give you the end of a golden string

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,

Built in Jerusalem's wall. (16)

The Search

The Pain Begins! In his search for 'that other dimension' the young Bede was to encounter a great deal of pain and unrest, living his questions day and night. His biographer speaks of him as always seeking the state of ecstasy that he had glimpsed on that one summer evening. (17) C. S. Lewis chided him, as Bede recalled late in life, "You always want to recover that paradisial experience, but you cannot. You have to go through the struggle, the pain, to something beyond." (18) 'Go beyond!' There is that word again! It is almost like a subliminal, underlying mantra in his life. It is surprising how often it occurs.

I am sure a lot of our young people can relate to his experience and the desire to hold on to something that lifts one's life out of routine ordinariness. As I was reading this early section of his biography, a young man came to talk to me about his own confusion and search for meaning. He was looking for an anchor, something to ground him in reality. In listening to him, it was as though the young Alan Griffiths was sitting on the floor in front of me. I couldn't help but see this same intense search mirrored for me in the young man. In time, many, many young people found their way to Bede at his Indian Ashram. No doubt the confused, painful time of his own youth helped him to understand their anguish and their search. As one such person put it to me, "I had the sense that he could see right through me, but it didn't really matter. I knew he loved me unconditionally."

Towards the end of his Oxford years, C. S. Lewis, Bede's tutor, advised him to move from the study of the classics to English literature by reading some philosophy. Eventually, Bede was introduced to Bishop Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. He was so moved by what he discovered that in his eighties he could still recite a piece from memory that had moved him in his early twenties:

Some truths are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his mind to perceive them . . . That all the choirs of heaven and all the furniture of the earth . . . have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived and known . . . (19)

Suddenly the young searcher saw that 'God was a mind, a pure Spirit, and the universe was the thought of his mind’. (20) This was the same Presence that he had been seeking in nature. Even though he had gone through a Christian upbringing, it was the first time it occurred to him that the God of Christians had any rational justification. It was, in his own words, 'a momentous event in my life’. (21) He writes: "To discover God is not to discover an idea but to discover oneself it is to awake to that part of one's existence which has been hidden from sight and which one has refused to recognize.” (22) Expressed in such terms, it is momentous, isn't it! To discover God is to discover oneself!

At this time he was also reading Augustine's Confessions and Dante's Divine Comedy. He writes of the effect of Augustine's Confessions on himself. "Here was, in fact, what I had so long desired to find, a record of a personal experience of passionate intensity and immense imaginative power, engaging all the energies of the intellect and the will in the search for truth. From this time truth could never be for me anything less than this, something which corresponded to the need of one's whole being and called forth all the energies of one's nature.” (23) Can you imagine what this discovery might mean to a young man in search of an ideal, something on which he could focus all the energies of his nature? His life will bear witness to the truth of his statement. He is beginning to find ground beneath his feet.

This was the first time he came across the Catholic Church as a reality which commanded respect and demanded investigation, but he continues, "I felt no more called to be a Christian than to be a Jew or an ancient Roman." (24)

Dante, in contrast to Augustine, helped Bede to understand the true nature of love, especially romantic love. He showed him that it was not the fire of love that was evil but the passion that enslaved one; a passion that was disciplined and controlled was stronger and deeper than an undisciplined love. He goes on to say, “It was clear to me that the strength of Dante in comparison with poets like Shelley and Keats lay in the greater moral and intellectual power of his mind. He was a greater poet because he was a greater lover than they; with him the moral and intellectual power came to reinforce the power of love and not to destroy it. This was a lesson of enormous importance which it was to take me years to assimilate.” (25) Not only an honest statement but also an encouraging one. He knew the struggles on the sexual side of his nature, which he alludes to from time to time. He knew the victory of understanding and integration was not to be won by surrender to passion nor by its suppression but by its transformation. Here he is a young man coming upon a new insight. Years later, in letters to friends or in discussions with people who came to him with their stories or asking for advice, he will show great empathy and understanding, due I am sure not simply to his powers of reflection but to a subsequent integration within his own life. At the end of his life, while being interviewed for the documentary A Human Search, he recalls this moment of insight: "Dante's relation to Beatrice is beautiful", he said. "He falls in love with this girl. It's a perfect, total love, but he doesn't go and indulge it. He keeps it within and allows it to grow, and it becomes a pure spiritual love. She takes him to paradise in the end. It's a wonderful parable of how love can be transformed. That's what I was learning.” (26)

I am giving you this in some detail, for I believe we are building an image of Bede as a man who is willing to struggle with all sorts of thoughts, feelings, and inner movements until there is an insight into their true meaning; at which time a reconciliation then becomes possible rather than an elimination of seeming opposites. In fact, it is the balancing of opposites that becomes a significant part of Bede's charism: light and darkness, old and new, East and West, the conscious and unconscious, the rational and non-rational, the masculine and feminine, In the detail of this story, I also wish to honour the lives of young people today, who like young Bede are searching for their own way 'in a world of many conflicts and contrary impulses’.

We continue the Journey. Bede even discovered to his great surprise that behind Bach, Dante, and Giotto there stood the massive power of religion, which did not cramp the natural powers of a human being but on the contrary developed them to their highest point. He writes of this period: "I was travelling on my own with very little guidance from others and exposed to all the dangers of inexperience. The effort of thought was so intense, the desire, for a new life which I experienced was so fervent, the light which I received penetrated so deeply into my mind, that the marks of it remain in my soul like the grain of a tree, and I still feel it as part of a living process of thought which has never ceased.” (27)  If only more of our young people could touch the wisdom of our Christian heritage in a similar, life-giving way! Why do we feel so helpless?

All of this was going on during his Oxford years. It was the period after the World War  I and he shared the bitter disillusionment of that age. He and his two close Oxford friends, Martyn Skinner and Hugh Waterman (the three of them would remain the closest of friends through a life-time) sought a refuge in nature.  They believed that the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century was the root cause of the disease at the heart of humanity. "It was the divorce of the scientific and rational mind from nature, from the world of instinct and feeling and imagination which seemed to be the root of all evil.” (28) The three of them, profoundly discontented at the completion of their Oxford studies, tried to live a self-supporting life of the utmost simplicity and rigor, in a cottage in the Cotswold English countryside. They felt they did not belong in the city, in a system that was destroying the world’s beauty. They tried to return to a time and a lifestyle on the far side of the industrial revolution, even to the point of only reading books printed or written before the period. Martyn though that using a quill pen was going a bit too far. But they were young, idealistic, and radical.

Each of them had a bible that they read purely as literature and for no other reason. However, Hugh and Alan rather quickly passed from reading to praying, dropping to their knees on the bare stone floor. Alan began to see in the Old Testament a reality deeper than anything he had known before. Apart from reacting to industrialisation, there was an instinctive leaning to all that was true and beautiful. He found the reconciliation of religion anad philosophy, that he had glimpsed in Dante and St. Augustine, had its roots in the Old Testament itself. (29)

Eastington, the name given to this experiment, lasted less than a year. In one sense, it was a failure, but it led to the unexpected discovery of Christianity. Bede writes, “I read the Bible seriously for the first time, and found the facts were quite different from what I supposed and that Christianity was just as much a living power now as it had ever been. I then had to find a Church in which I could learn to practise my newfound faith, and after a long struggle, which cost me more than anything else in my life, I found my way to the Catholic Church.” (30)

The cost was a sort of death. At a critical stage he decided to spend the whole night in prayer. He struggled on through the night with a vivid picture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane facing darkness and death: "This was a real death experience," he writes. Nothing happened during the night but getting up from the floor in the morning he heard a voice saying to him: "You must go to a retreat."

The aftermath of this death experience and the retreat was difficult for Bede to describe:

"Something simply came over me. The whole world carne alive, and I remember the buses in the streets were sort of glowing with light. I could have been run over. I think everything was dissolving. For the first time in my life (he was still an Anglican) I went to confession. I felt this tremendous repentance, a sense that everything I had done was wrong in some way. It was an extraordinary experience. I wept. I had never wept before or since, I think, like that. It cleansed my heart completely. This was an overwhelming conversion experience.” (31.)

Again he returned to the countryside in an effort to find a balance and to wait for the way forward to open up. After sometime he approached the parish priest who, probably sensing something special in Bede, took him to the nearby Prinknash Benedictine Abbey. The first stage of his search was over. Bede had come home. He was twenty-six years of age.

The Other Half of My Soul: The Marriage of East and West

We pick up the story twenty years later. Bede had already published his own story of a soul, The Golden String, which was an immediate best-seller; in the year 2000, it was selected as one of the hundred best books of the Twentieth Century by the Harper Publishing Company, San Francisco. In 1954 Bede was invited by a Father Benedict Alapatt to join him in establishing the first Benedictine monastery in India . He was thrilled with the prospect of going to India and wrote to a friend, "I want to discover the other half of my soul." This is the key to his life's work: "The integration of the rationality of the West, symbolised by science, with the intuitive capacity of the East, represented by Hindu and Buddhist mysticism, and more generally by India itself. (32)

He writes:

I had begun to find that there was something lacking not only in the Western world but in the Western Church. We were living from one half of our soul, from the conscious, rational level and we needed to discover the other half, the unconscious, intuitive dimensions. I wanted to experience in my life the marriage of these two dimensions of human existence, the rational and intuitive, the conscious and unconscious, the masculine and feminine. I wanted to find the way to the marriage of East and West. (33)

In a letter to Martyn Skinner, his close friend, he wrote, "I feel that somehow I am destined to go. There is something in me which will not be fulfilled till I have been there.” (34) The golden string was once more tugging at him. Once again we get a glimpse into his single-mindedness to follow and be opened up to ever widening horizons. His superiors were wise enough to let him go, one of them saying they feared they might otherwise lose him.

He was quite bedazzled by India , by the vitality of the people and their gracefulness. "Whether sitting or standing or walking," he writes, "there was grace in all their movements and I felt I was in the presence of a hidden power of nature." (35) Indian religion has been called the "most searching quest for the divine in the natural order. that the world has known.” (36) In visiting the Hindu temples, Bede felt one "could encounter that hidden depth of existence, springing from the depth of nature and the unconscious, penetrating all human existence and going beyond into the mystery of the infinite and eternal, not as something remote and inaccessible, but as something almost tangible, engraved in stone. Here was the secret I had come to discover.” (37)

One can sense his excitement. There are suggestions here of the young boy standing in that playing field and being overawed. Here is something similar thirty years later –  a whole new world bathed in the spiritual and transcendent. He knew he was face to face with one of the most profound religious cultures of the world. He was thrilled.

It is a very moving experience to visit these temples erected well over a thousand years ago; and although one may not understand the stories that are engraved there in stone, one can still wonder about the faith of the people who built them, the dedication of the sculptors who poured their souls into the work, and the millions of pilgrims who have come to these temples over the centuries to worship, to pray, and to be touched by the power of their myths. One is reminded of the stain-glassed windows of our ancient European cathedral – the way of catechesis for the illiterate masses. The Eastern tradition sees the whole of creation as pervaded by one eternal spirit, a spirit both transcendent and immanent. This pervading sense of the sacred was balm to Bede's soul.

All of this echoes what I said at the beginning: India is more than a geographical point on the globe. It is a dimension of the human spirit. This is what so attracted Bede Griffiths. Here was his passion. As far back as his Oxford days, a friend of his mother had introduced him to the Bhagavad Gita, the supreme expression of Hinduism, a version of the Dhammapada called the Buddhist Way of Virtue, and the Tao Te Ching, one of the texts of Taoism. The influence of this eastern thought remained as ‘a secret ferment' in his soul and later in The Golden String, he writes, "The effort to bring it into relation with Christianity was to occupy me for many years." Here he was being prophetic. It would occupy him for the rest of his life.

What is the nature of the spiritual tradition that many claim is found in its purest form in India and constitutes the supreme heritage of human kind? Bede put it simply: "There is one absolute, eternal, infinite, unchanging Being, which is the unique source of all existence, of all knowledge and of all life; which is above all things and in all things and for which all things exist." (38) The characteristic of this religion is that it has always ranked contemplation and the contemplative life as the supreme goal of human life. (39) To this day it remains the ideal of the Hindu religion that a person after passing through the first two stages of life, as the student and householder, should then choose to pass on to a higher stage of renunciation of the world and to contemplation. (40)

The French Benedictine, Henri Le Saux, otherwise known as Abhishiktananda, writes,

"India only reveals herself to those who are prepared to be still and over a long period to listen humbly at close quarters to the beating of her heart; only to those who have already entered sufficiently far into themselves, into their own depths, to be able to hear in the inner chamber of the heart that secret which India is ceaselessly whispering to them by means of a silence that transcends words. For silence is above all the language through which India reveals herself . . . and imparts her essential message, the message of interiority, of that which is within.” (41)

This being the case, it might be a fair question to ask, 'how come, after centuries of Christianity in India, there was as yet no Christian contemplative foundation? When Christians came from the West they usually became involved maainly with education and social work. Bede writes in 1965, ten years after being in India, "The Church remains cut off by its habits of thought from those deep sources of spiritual life and thought which have moulded the character of the Indian people for four thousand years. Unless some means is found of making contact with these sources, there seems to be absolutely no hope (except by a miracle of grace which we have no right to expect) of Christianity making any deep impression on the mind of India.” (42)

Abhishiktananda was of the same opinion. Speaking about the enormous task of the Church in India, he warned us "that it is only on this contemplative plane, from the mystical life, that the Church can ever hope to enter into a fruitful dialogue with India, and so to make any real progress there. The Church has to actualise her own contemplative understanding of the faith, to renew and spread it; she must live out of

her own depths . . . where the authentic spiritual life of India is lived.” (43)

As late as 1982, in his book, The Marriage of East and West, Bede moves beyond India to the rest of the world to make this comment: "The Western world has to rediscover the power of the feminine, intuitive mind, which has largely shaped the cultures of Asia and Africa and of tribal people everywhere. This is a problem not only of the world as a whole but also of religion. . . "

"All the Christian churches, Eastern and Western, have to turn to the religions of the East, to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the subtle blend of all these in Oriental culture . . . if they are to recover their balance and evolve an authentic form of religion which will answer to the needs of the modern world." (44)

How many thousands of our young Christian people have travelled East to Hindu ashrams and Buddhist monasteries in search of this blend of wisdom and inner peace?

It is very sad to see our young people having to go East for its wisdom when we have such a rich treasury of wisdom and mysticism within our own tradition, and about which they know nothing. Evidently, we have lost touch with it and so have been unable to pass it on.

William Johnston writes in his latest book:

We have a rich mystical tradition – but how often were the mystics ignored or marginalised or persecuted by an establishment that put its emphasis on words and letters, on doctrines and dogmas, on the strict observance of the law. (45)

In the beginning of this section I said Bede was bedazzled by India. Others have accused him of having an over romantic attitude to India: he was sometimes seeing what he wanted to see, even what he needed to see. One is not in a state of equilibrium in encountering a new world. There was such a kaleidoscope of impressions to cope with; however, these were his first impressions, and they remained with him to the very end.

After the first attempt to establish an ashram failed, Bede lived for the first ten years with Father Mathieu, in a Cistercian ashram at Kurisumala in Kerala. Together they attempted a delicate balance of simultaneously living a Cistercian interpretation of the Benedictine Rule, using the liturgy of the Syrian Church, and honouring the ancient Indian tradition of the sannyasi (the traditional life of a holy man in India who renounces everything). So they went barefoot, sat and slept on mats, took their meals of rice, curry and vegetables, squatting on the floor and eating with their fingers, wearing the orange robe of the kavi.

Understandably, they were criticised for their actions. Some thought they were crazy. Others looked upon their Indianization as an apostasy from Canon Law, while the broad-minded thought their lifestyle was something unpalatable and eccentric. Still, the ashram prospered. After ten years Bede transferred to Shantivanam, accepting the call to revive and reshape the ashram which had become vacant by Abhistiktananda's move to a hermitage at the foot of the Himalayas. Here he incorporated Sanskrit chanting and readings from non-Christian Scriptures into each meeting for prayer. He organised their life around the morning and evening meditation. Although they met for liturgy everyday, Bede considered the heart of ashram life was the morning and evening meditation.

Inter-religious Dialogue

In this rapprochement of East and West, where do we start, how do we begin? What attitudes of soul do we need to cultivate towards both our own Christian tradition and towards the faith of others to make dialogue possible and mutual enrichment the fruit of our efforts? Is there a pedagogy of Interfaith Dialogue?

Some answers or responses may have been suggested already in the general discussion of Bede's dream, "a marriage of East and West". Bede Griffiths spoke of 'the discovery of the other half of my soul' in his crossing over to India. William Johnston speaks of  “a matter of survival” for Christian churches to turn to Asia to rediscover the mystical side of their tradition.

Personal fulfilment and the matter of survival! Could there be something else beckoning us to open up to the East? Something more than personal fulfillment and institutional survival! Could there be a divine plan in the coming together of East and West? Could something of the glory of God be revealed in this coming together of seeming opposites? We have so much to learn from one another.

I do believe God's glory shines forth in the sharing and in the respect given to different religious traditions of our human search for the Ultimate. I asked a missionary in Japan why he had dedicated his life to inter-religious dialogue. "It is participating in the work of creation," he replied, "The universe is still evolving. Here in inter-religious dialogue the glory of God is being revealed. Like the Mystery of Christ, it is a plan hidden in the mind of God before time began and is now evolving in our age." Those of us who live at the dawn of this age must learn to live with the paradoxes, the doubts and difficulties while still nourishing our fervent hopes.

Bede Griffiths speaks frequently enough of how the Church's early development hinged on Greek philosophy and Roman law. The consequent evolution has been the story of the last two millennia. During all this time, Europe has been the centre and the dominant force. Now a whole new opportunity and challenge is facing the Church as it opens to the East. There is challenge and opportunity to grow 'in the deeper understanding of its own mystery and of the purpose of God in the world religions.

Pope John Paul II speaks to this in these words: "It must first be kept in mind that every quest of the human spirit for truth and goodness, and in the last analysis, for God, is inspired by the Holy Spirit. The various religions arose precisely from this primordial human openness to God.” (46)

This new understanding prompts one to ask the question, dare we encourage the insight to consider the religious treasury of the world as belonging to all of us because it is part of the human search under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? This too is our inheritance. The riches of Asian religions belong to the treasury of the 'human search' for whatever name one gives to the Ultimate or the Absolute.

In dialogue, one takes the religion of the other as seriously as one's own. That is just a matter of respect and good common courtesy. One does not have to step back one inch. from belief in Christ as the Alpha and Omega; but having said that, one still has much to learn from faiths other than Christian. As long as we present Christ as the opponent of something that others know to be true, there will never be an openness to hear what Christ has to say to them.

This requires a conversion in us. It is not only a question of respect for the other, but a realization that we have something to learn from them, that through our openness to their tradition and the fruit of their search, we can come to a better understanding of Christ and the mission of the Church in the plan of God.

One of my own SVD confreres speaks from his experience of dialogue in Japan: "I do not see any way for traditional world religions like Buddhism and Christianity to produce a general spirituality for their faithful in a religiously plural world except they first accept as their rightful inheritance the entire religious wealth of humanity . . . only then can each faith produce a general spirituality for their faithful. This calls for a major conversion.” (47)

I believe a major part of our conversion in preparing ourselves for this dialogue is restoring the primacy of religious experience. We cannot fall back on dogmas and doctrine to do the talking for us. We must share from our own experience of the Divine or the Ultimate in our lives. Thomas Keating writes: "Doctrines (the domain of words and concepts) always occasion serious differences, misunderstanding and precious little agreement. But when Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus meet in silence and meditation, there is usually a deep experience of union and communion transcending the divisions that conceptualisation brings.” (48)

Bede writes, "Each religion has to purify itself and discover its own inmost depths and significance and then relate it to the inner depth of the other tradition. Perhaps, it will never be achieved in this world, but it is the one way in which we can advance towards that unity in truth, which is the ultimate goal of humankind." (49) “It is only in the awakening of the contemplative spirit, of a transcendent consciousness, that we come to a vision of unity." (50)

No doubt with such a unity in mind, John Paul 11 had this to say to an inter-religious meeting in Jerusalem in 2000: "The Catholic Church wishes to pursue a sincere and fruitful inter-religious dialogue with the members of the Jewish faith and the followers of Islam. Such a dialogue is not an attempt to impose our views upon others. What it demands of all of us is that, holding to what we believe, we listen respectfully to one another, seek to discern all that is good and holy in each other's teachings, and cooperate in supporting everything that favours mutual understanding and peace.” (51)

Bede Griffiths was at the forefront of this whole movement a decade before the Second Vatican Council issued its Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. Some few months before he died in 1993, in a speech written for the acceptance of the John Harriott Award, sponsored by The Tablet magazine, he wrote: "We are in a position now to be open to all the religious traditions of the world, being aware of their limitations but also, most importantly, realising their unity in the depth-dimension which underlies them all; and that, of course, is the mystical dimension.” (52)

One almost senses here a Nunc Dimittis: “Now, Lord, you can dismiss your servant in peace; for my eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared.in the presence of all peoples”. (Lk. 2: 29-30)

Fulfillment/Complementary

In the best sense of the word, Bede was a mystic, and this has to be the key to our understanding of him. What Du Lubac, the French theologian, suggested to Jules Monchanin, the co-founder of Shantivanam, seems to have found an echo in the life of Bede: "to rethink everything in terms of theology, and to rethink theology in terms 0f mysticism” (53), that is, to have that sense of wisdom, love and compassion, and the unity of all things as one's basic point of view. Bede set out to find union with the divine and to find it not in theory but in experience; and it is his experience that then becomes the rich source of his reflection and writing. This was the dialogue that took place within him, between what he characterized as the 'two halves' of his soul, the rational (associated with Western cultures and Christianity) and the intuitive (corresponding to the Indian culture and Hinduism). Both met within him in his hours of meditation.

Judson B. Trapnell, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Bede's theory of religious symbols and practice of dialogue, maintains that a chronological reading of Bede's writings reveals a close relationship between the stages of development in his mystical life and his position on the status of non-Christian religions. When Bede first moved to India, he endorsed a “theology of fulfillment” according to which the numerous non-Christian religions are seen as providential means through which God prepared humanity for the revelation of Jesus Christ, a revelation that in turn fulfils all other religions. But after moving to Shantivanam and through the deepening of his insights about the divine mystery in meditation, he spoke of the “one spirit of all religion” and shifts to a theology of “complementarity”.  This latter theory presents each religion as revealing a unique aspect of the one Truth, aspects that when compared are not contradictory but complementary, like different colours within white light. Beneath this level of understanding of the uniqueness of each tradition, however, one may discover at “the deepest level” a  “fundamental unity” or point of convergence of the various religions. This encounter takes place in the depths of contemplative experience, which is a way of saying that the deepest form of dialogue is not with words. It is significant that Bede uses a mystical metaphor from the Upanishads to name this point of convergence, namely, “the cave of the heart”.  Trapnell traces this development in the following quotations from Bede's book,  Return to the Centre:

In meditation I can become aware of the ground of my being ... I can get beyond all these outer forms of things in time and space and discover the Ground from which they spring. I can know the Father, the Origin, the source, beyond being and non-being, the One 'without a second'. . .

In each tradition the one divine Reality, the one eternal Truth, is present, but it is hidden under symbols ... Always the divine Mystery is hidden under a veil, but each revelation (or 'unveiling') unveils some aspect of the one Truth, or, if you like, the veil becomes thinner at a certain point . . .

It is not by word or thought but by meditation on the Mystery that we can pierce the veil. This is where all human reason fails. All these words, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, Yahweh, Christ, are meaningless to those who can get beyond their reason and allow the divine Mystery to shine through its symbols  . . .

It is this 'mystery of Christ' which lies at the heart of the gospels and of all the evolution of Christianity . . . and this Mystery when known in its ultimate ground is one with the mystery of Brahman, Nirvana, Tao, Yahweh, Allah. It is the one Truth, the one Word.” (54)

In saying this he is not endorsing a superficial syncretism in which each religion loses something of its own. He speaks of the necessity of “a clear commitment and a firm, clear faith, while at the same time being truly open to other ways of faith and commitment”. (55) Teasdale comments: "Since each path (Christian, Hindu, Buddhist) leads to an authentic experiential awareness of the Source and harmonizes with the same underlying reality, how can their inter-relationship not be one of complementarity?" (56)

Bede says:

"I often use the illustration of the fingers and the palm of the hand. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are all separate in one sense. But as you move toward the source in any tradition, the interrelatedness begins to grow. As one might say, we meet in the cave of the heart. When we arrive in the centre, we realize the underlying unity behind the traditions. But I'm suspicious of attempts to mix them on the outer level.” (57)

In a conversation with William Johnston he says, "I did once hold the view of fulfillment, but for many years now I have accepted ‘complementarity’.” (58)Yet, Johnston remarks Bede added with characteristic second thoughts, "I would say honestly that to me there is a fullness and finality in Christ which I don't find in others. But I wouldn't press that on the Hindu obviously. I would rather simply emphasise the distinctive character of Christian revelation and of Christ.” (59) In relation to this remark, Raimundo Panikkar has his own comment to make: "There are Indian gurus of great and profound spirituality who tell me: 'The final stage in spiritual evolution is the discovery of the Christ.' They realize that Christ is the most sublime Epiphany that has ever existed on earth.” (60)

In perhaps his final written statement on that matter, the acceptance speech already quoted, Bede writes, "In gathering all things, all matter into one in himself, he (Christ) transforms the world, bringing the cosmos, its matter and its processes, back to its source in the transcendent Reality which he calls ‘Abba, Father!’. This is unique.” (61)

Bede wrote those words just a few months before he died, suggesting that at the end he saw more clearly the centrality of Christ: “In the historic revelation of God in Christ, Jesus experiences God (the Absolute), as Father, the ground and source of Being, and as Spirit, that is as Self-giving Love, and himself as one with the Father and the Spirit. This seems to me to be the most profound revelation of the Mystery . . . This is at one the advaitic experience of non-duality – ‘The Father and I are one’ – and the experience of personal love’. Beyond the twilight of non-duality was the light of Trinitarian love.” (62)

Du Boulay sums up Bede's life and work:

Bede worked at a grass-roots level and at a national and international level. In his liturgy at Shantivanam, he included readings and rituals from the Hindu Scriptures and rituals, as well as from other world religions. He became a great spiritual traveller, exploring both Christianity and the essential unity of all religions at a level that led him both to great heights and to dark places . . . In his search for one transcendent reality he was travelling in extreme territory, but he never lost his inner balance, maintaining an equilibrium so delicately poised that Andrew Harvey has referred to him as 'the Mozart of Mystics': He was no doubt very English and his Benedictine training had stood him in good stead to contain the intense spiritual level at which he lived for so much of the time. (63)

The Church

It is the experience of those involved in inter-faith dialogue that when they return to their own tradition they gain deeper insight and understanding of their own faith. This can be a painful as well as a joyful discovery. One aspect of the pain is to realise how we see through a mirror darkly: we begin to realise how imperfect and culture-bound is our understanding of the mystery of the Church. It was the same with Bede. The Church is a constant theme in his writings, and he turns to it again and again.

What then is the essential Truth which is signified by the doctrine, the ritual and the organisation of the Church? If we attempt to put it into words we can say it is the presence of the divine life among people, of the infinite, eternal, transcendent mystery of being, which is the Ground of all religion and of all existence, manifesting itself in the person of Jesus Christ.(64)

The original message, the essential truth, of every religion is the sacred Mystery, the presence in this world of a hidden Wisdom, which cannot be expressed in words, which cannot be known by sense or reason, but is hidden in the heart - the Ground or Centre or Substance of the soul, of which the mystics speak - and reveals itself to these who seek it in the silence beyond word and thought. All myth and ritual, all doctrine and sacrament, is but a means to awaken the soul to this hidden Mystery, to allow the divine Presence to make itself known. (65)

Evidently to come to this understanding of Church, to have this quality of freedom and intimacy with the mystery suggests the presence of deep prayer and contemplation in the believer's heart; one has a sense that such a person has gone beyond the symbol to the Reality. But having said that, I can imagine that there are many people looking for such an understanding of Church. The pain and searching of their own soul has brought them to this intuition, if not yet to the sense that it is all right to feel that way.

The Ingredient of Sexuality and Friendship in Bede's the Human Search

We have been filling the pages with lofty thoughts. Let us ground ourselves awhile in acknowledging Bede's own efforts at understanding the sexual side of life and his growth towards the integration of the masculine and feminine side of his nature. I have already alluded to this topic in the few sentences about Dante. This aspect of Bede's search deserves to be honoured, even though I mention only a few instances. It just makes his life so much more whole and human.

Christudas, one of his first two postulants at Shantivanam, once asked him with typical Indian innocent candour, "Do you have sexual temptations?" Bede simply answered, "You must always go beyond." This would seem to be the response of a wise, old man talking from the distance of his years. I wonder did he smile when he said that to Christudas.

In spite of his English background, his celibacy and his natural reserve, he wrote and spoke with surprising freedom tempered by his empathy and understanding for the work required on this side of one's nature. Again and again, his English reserve was confronted by the matter-of-fact openness of life in India. This is reflected in his letter to his friend Nigel Bruce a few years after his arrival in India:

India has released in me the forces of the unconscious, which were previously submerged, and I have sometimes been terrified to find the demonic power which is in me. This is the 'dragon', as you say, which is in all of us. The spiritual life consists in the conversion of this power. We cannot destroy it or suppress it. It is not evil in itself, it is rather a holy power (as the Hindu genius has so well discovered) coming from God. But it has become subdued to our own selfish interest and so perverted. We have to turn this energy back to God, to withdraw it from sex and all selfish interest and to allow God to take possession of it. This is, of course, a tremendous battle, but all spiritual disciplines are ultimately concerned with this. I have been finding myself lately engaged in this battle as never before. (66)

Years later, Andrew Harvey, the writer, said the most profound things he had ever heard about sex came from Bede, partly because he never felt he was in the presence of someone who had done “a horrible act of repression upon himself”. He writes, "I think he had a capacity for love, which took up a great deal of that sexual energy. Bede once said, "You can't deny sex – that leads to craziness. And you can't completely embrace it because it has dark aspects which can mislead you. There's only one way, and that is to consecrate it.” (67)  Lawrence Freeman comments: "He treats sex in such an elevated way that it becomes a religious rather than simply an erotic experience.” (68)

Bede never lost his admiration for D. H. Lawrence whom he found so helpful in his early years at Oxford; indeed, he made a point of visiting his grave while he was in New Mexico on one of his visits to the States. In the documentary, A Human Search, there is a wonderful moment when he had Lawrence's book, Women In Love  in his hands, and he reads Lawrence's description of a mystical moment in the experience of love in its sexual expression:

How can I say 'I love you' when I cease to be, and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one.

Bede then closed the book and smiled a smile of deep resonance with and understanding of what he had just read. He simply said, "That's what Saccidananda means -- the fullness of bliss in life.” (69)

Friendship

Where does friendship fit into the life of a mystic, of someone so captivated by the “Beyond”, by his search for the Ultimate? Was there a place for friendship? We know of Bede's loyalty to his Oxford Dons, to C. S. Lewis, Hugh Waterman and Martyn Skiner. Lewis died in 1963 and of that relationship Bede wrote: “There are not many things in my life more precious to me than that friendship.” (70)

As he grew older, people were captivated by the quality of unconditional love flowing from him. People came and went in his life, visited the ashram and then departed; while there they experienced the presence of a holy man holding them in a loving, accepting gaze. But this is not friendship, is it? In his early days at Shantivanam (be went there in 1968), Bede wrote to Hugh and Martyn saying they were “the only two people left with whom he has an intimate and what you might call 'on the same level’ friendship.” (71) One can only imagine how lonely and trying those early years at Shantivanam must have been. Bede was very private about his own life. In letters to friends he was open, self-revealing, as occasion demanded. The candour with which he wrote his autobiography, The Golden String, was not repeated in his many other writings. It is only at the end of his life, after his stroke, that he shared more intimately his personal journey. Those close to him attribute much of this openness and emotional warmth to a friendship that developed with two people who came to Shativanam.

In 1984, a young postulant, Russill Paul D'Silva, arrived at the Ashram. He was nineteen at the time; Bede was seventy-eight. Russill was an Anglo-Indian from Chennai, “a fascinating blend of English and Indian culture”. (72)

Three years later in a letter to Martyn, Bede wrote about his friendship with Russill: “He is closer to me than anyone I have known in India . . . He has an extraordinary attraction to contemplative prayer and spends hours in meditation. So I feel that I can share everything with him . . . For me it is as though God has given me a son in my old age who can make me live my youth again.” (73) According to his biographer, this cool account gives little indication of the intensity of the relationship.

Russill writes about watching Bede in prayer and moving among people at the Ashram: “It really fascinated me, because I was so much aware of his deep communion with Nature and with God. Every time he moved away from people I sensed that deep communion with God, with reality, whatever. It was really then that I began to feel a kind of awe about him, his presence as a person. I realised I was in the presence of an extraordinary being. Somebody who was not just the Abbot of a monastery or somebody who had become a kind of spiritual father to me, but somebody who was far more than that.” (74)

Bede spoke in terms of a guru-disciple relationship: “He came at all hours to pour out his heart to me. This led to a deep love between us, a love that is typical of the guru-disciple relationship, which is not normal human love, but an experience of God in the heart.” (75)

It is not hard to imagine the resentment and suspicion such a relationship would arouse in a community. This was compounded by the arrival at the Ashram of a lovely young woman, Asha Muthayah, who had just completed her high school. Soon after meeting her, Bede remarked: “I feel I have found a daughter”. Evidently, these vibrant young people affected Bede deeply. Russill too formed a new and rich relationship with Asha;  it was not long before they were in love.

The growing community resentment and suspicion led some to crude and inexcusable accusations. Bede was shattered. Eventually, Russill decided to leave, although Bede tried to dissuade him but to no avail. As Russill left he looked back to his beloved friend, slumped in his chair and weeping. He commented, "I knew that I had broken his heart in some way.” This reserved and dignified man of God reduced to inconsolable tears was a picture beyond words. (76)

Later Russill and Asha married, returning to the Ashram for some months in preparation for their religious marriage ceremony. A year or so later Bede wrote to them: “Somehow I feel I share in your love for one another and experience married love in myself through you.” (77)

What effect did these experiences have on Bede? One answer is to quote his reply to the question put to him by a member of the Australian film crew, an answer he could never have given before: “The meaning of life is love and there are two ways to love. One is through a dedication of the whole of your life to the spirit and the working out of that dedication. The other is to love another human being so profoundly that that initiates you into the divine love.” (78)

In a letter to Russill and Asha in the United States he writes: “My love for you is not only agape; it is a deep natural urge of love which draws me to you. Often I feel your presence, especially during these last days, as a tremendous force in my life, making me realise that I cannot experience the divine love, unless it is united with human love for you.” (79) His friendship with Asha deepened to a point where for Bede she became the archetype of the feminine, “helping him to relate to the feminine in a way he had sought all his life and had failed to achieve. The culmination of this relationship with the feminine was to come in a way nobody could have foreseen.” (80)

The Mother, The Crucified Christ, and Advaita

Even into his eighties, the search for the other half of his soul was not yet over. He was still growing in friendship and openness through his enriching and freeing relationships. To highlight this quest, and some say as a result of the expansion of soul, spirit and emotion he had experienced in the friendship just described, an extraordinary thing happened in his eighty-fourth year. This crowned his gradual opening to the intuitive side of his nature. Something like the weight and force of a sledge-hammer hit him on the left side of his head. For a week he lay motionless and speechless. He later related, fear was the immediate feeling, something like the dark night as described by John of the Cross: "I had blown my mind. The ego collapsed . . . I think I know what the void of Buddhism is." (81)

Two images helped to summarise the whole experience. The first image was of the Black Madonna, the feminine in all its forms – Mother of God, Earth Mother, Nature, Church, Motherhood itself." (82)  A month later, he felt a heavy pressure once more in his head. After sometime the inspiration came to him to surrender to the mother once more. This time the experience was of overwhelming love. He called out to Judy Walter, “I am being overwhelmed by love.” (83)

Judy Walter summed up these experience in a few sentences: "On January 25, the Mother came and "struck" him and wounded him. On February 25, the Mother came and overwhelmed him with love and healed him." (84)

A couple of years later, during a conversation with John Swindels, Bede speaks with a clarity and conviction about the understanding that emerged from this experience: "God is not simply in the light, in the intelligible world, in the rational order. God is in the darkness, in the womb, in the Mother, in the chaos from which order comes. So the chaos is in God, we could say, and that is why discovering darkness is so important. We tend to reject it as evil and as negative and so on, but the darkness is the womb of life.” (85)

The other image that stands out in this whole experience is his identification with the Crucified Christ; this experience led him to new insights about the experience of Jesus: "He became increasingly aware that the breaking of his own body was a sharing in the broken body of Christ, as he experienced the power of love behind all the sin and suffering in the world more acutely than ever before. He began to feel the same love in himself: "Nothing could stand in the way of that love – least of all death. I feel death is only its ultimate embrace." (86)

Is it too much to say that the whole experience for Bede must have been something like a mystical death, as though he had passed through to another plane of existence. His friends say his body was weak but his face was radiant: "One has to simply accept it, totally. Jesus on the cross was my model there. I felt convinced that he went through this stage of total death, of annihilation. He let go of everything, only then could he, as a human being, become total love." (87) Here is our redemption and here is our destiny: A human being becoming total love!

There was also the sense of Oneness with all, pure unity beyond distinction, mirroring the Hindu experience of non-duality called Advaita, but with this distinction. He strives to describe the experience in a marvellous simile:

"I like to use the illustration of the symphony. Mozart could apparently conceive a total symphony in one note. But it does not mean the notes are confused. It means every single note and passage and harmony is there, but it is all contained in a moment. The whole is specifically contained in that moment. It is an awareness that all the differences are there.” (88)

Abbishiktananda in trying to describe a similar experience offers the Trinity as the key to a fuller understanding of this ultimate experience: distinctions seem to disappear, but they are permanent, as in the mystery of the Trinity: three Person but one God.

In letters to Sr. Pascaline Coff in the United States, he writes: "In the ultimate reality, we find ourselves and God and Christ and other people and the whole created universe, not divided in space and time and subject to conceptual thought, but integrated in one eternal infinite reality, which is differentiated reality not divided in any way, but realised in its total reality." (89)

"The lived experience of the mysteries of the faith is the way to final reality and not the experience of Hindu advaita. This is not to say that many may not come to find reality through Hindu advaita or Buddhist sunyata but for a Christian the way is through Christ and the Church. I should add that for me there is a Christian advaita in which the mysteries of faith are not lost, but finally realised." (90)

Conclusion

So we come to the end of our story, one human search. Surely, the word “human” now shines with an inner-light and warmth, redolent of wisdom, love, compassion, and especially for us, hope.

Lawrence Freeman says it well in the following remark: "The monastic life has no greater sign to show than the sweetness of human nature it can sometimes produce. It seemed to me that in so fully and faithfully following his monastic call Bede Griffith had become purely and simply himself No one can do more or is asked to do more with the gift of their life." (91)

"He helped today's Christian to realise that it is possible to follow a mystical path and remain within the institutional church. People who feel that there must be one God, one reality, behind all religions, that God did not create a divided humanity, have found in Bede that their instincts are clarified, developed, most importantly, lived.” (92)

Shortly before he died, Bede said, "I have given everything I can give, I have received everything I can receive." A confession, no doubt, coming from an experience of fullness!

Bede Griffiths died on 13 May 1993. surrounded by love and devotion. The long search was over. The golden string had led him to Saccidananda, the fullness of bliss.

Saccidananda was the name given by Jules Monchanin to the ashram near the river Kavery, in Tamil Nadu. Saccidananda is a Sanskrit word combining the roots of three words: Being, Consciousness (Knowledge), and Bliss. It is the bliss of being absolutely conscious of its own fullness of being. In the Vedanta, it is the name for the Godhead. Jules Monchanin used this word to express the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. In a letter to his mother in January, 1939 he wrote: "I think that the mission of India in the Church is to sink a well – to the very depths of the abyss - into the contemplation of the Holy Trinity." (93)

The one who put the Ashram, Saccidananda,(popularly known as Shantivanam), on the map as a centre for peace and prayer for the world was Bede Griffiths. He was the one who went beyond the darkness of the well into the abyss. His last words were: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, I surrender to you." He then closed his eyes and slept in the arms of Christudas. He died peacefully in his sleep. His biographer writes, "His inner life and development have the excitement of space exploration and the passion of a great romance." (93)

And so it was!

I know that Great Person

of the brightness of the Sun

beyond the darkness.

Only by knowing him

one goes beyond death.

There is no other way to go.

References:

1 W. Johnson, S.J., Arise, My Soul, (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2000), p. xvi.

2 B. Griffiths, Benedictine Ashram: An Experiment in Hindu-Christian Community, The Laughin Man no, 3, p, 3 7.

3 D. Nicholl, forward to Swami Abhishiktananda, his life told through his letters, James Stuart (ISPCK, 1989) p. vii.

4 John Swindells, A Human Search, (Triumph Books) p.xxii

5. Ibid., p. 137

6 W. Johnston, op. cit. p. 162

7. Ibid., p. 46

8. Ibid., p. 124

9. B. Griffiths,

11. J. O'Donohue. Spirituality as the Art f Presence, quoted from a tape.

12. B. Griffiths, The Golden String, (Templegate Publishers), p. 9.

13. Ibid., p. 10.

14. Shirley Du Boulay, Beyond the Darkness, (Rider, London), p. 2.

15. B. Griffiths, The Golden String, op. cit., pp. I I - 12.

16. William Blake, Jerusalem.

17. S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p, 26.

18. J. Swindells, op. cit., p.18.

19. Berkeley. Principles of Human Knowledge, 17 10, quoted in The Golden String, p. 52.

20. B. Griffiths, The Golden String, op. cit., p. 53.

21. Ibid., p. 53.

22. Ibid. p. 12.

23. Ibid. p. 58.

24. Ibid. p. 59.

25. Ibid. p. 60

26. J. Swindells, op. cit., p. 34.

27. Ibid., p. 63

28. Ibid., p. 38

29. S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 51.

30. B. Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 13.

31. John Swindells, op. cit., pp. 52-54.

32. W. Teasdale, The Other Half of My Soul, compiled by Beatrice Bruteau, (Quest Books), p. 8.

33. B. Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West, (Templegate Publisher), p. 8.

34. B. Griffiths, letter to Martyn Skinner, 21 November 1954, quoted by S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 114.

35. B. Griffiths. The Marriage of East and West, op. cit.. p. 8.

36. B. Griffiths, Christ in India, (Templegate Publishers), p. 78.

37. B. Griffiths. The Marriage of East and West. op. cit., pp. 10- 11.

38. B. Griffiths, Christ in India, op. cit., p. 79.

39. Ibid., p. 78.

40. Ibid., p. 78.

41. Abhishiktananda, The Secret of Arunachala, (ISPCK), p. viii.

42. B. Griffiths, Christ in India, op. cit., p. 89.

43. Abhishiktananda, Hindu-Christian Meeting Point, (ISPCK) p.111.

44. B. Griffiths. The Marriage of East and West, op. cit., p. 152.

45. W. Johnston, op. cit., p. 229.

46. Pope John Paul II, The Holy Spirit is mysteriously at work in Other Religions, General Audience, 9 September, cited in MID, Issue #6 1, Winter 1999, p. 16.

47. Conversation of the author with Jim Heisig SVD, Nanzan University, Nagoya. Japan.

48. Thomas Keating, The Other Half of My Soul, p.

49. B. Griffiths, The One Mystery, The Tablet, 9 March 1974.

50. B. Griffiths, A New Vision of Realty, (Templegate Publisher), p. 264 ff.

51. Inter-religious Meeting at Notre Dame Pontifical Institute of Jerusalem, 23 March, 2000

52. B. Griffiths, The New Consciousness, The Tablet, 16 January 1993, p. 70.

53. Judson B, Trapnell, Multireligious Experience and the Study of Mysticism, in The Other Half of My Soul, p. 203.

54. B. Griffiths, Return to the Centre, op. cit., pp. 36, 71, 72, 74.

55. B. Griffiths, The New Creation, op. cit., p. 87.

56. Teasdale, op. cit., p. 142.

57. B. Griffiths, Benedictine Ashram, op. cit, p. 7.

58 W. Johnston, op. cit., p. 124.

59. Ibid., p. 124.

60. R. Pannikar, Hinduism & Christ, in "in Spirit and in Truth: Essays Dedicated to Father Ignatius Hirudayan. S. J. (Madras. Aikaya Alayam, 1985). p. 115.

61. B. Griffiths, The New Consciousness, op. cit.,

62. S. A. M. Adshead, Griffiths: Twilights of the Raj, , quoted in "Philosophy of Religion in Nineteenth Century England and Beyond".

63. S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 209.

64. B Griffiths, Return to the Centre, op. cit., p. 116.

65. Ibid., p. 118.

66. B. Griffiths. letter to Nigel Bruce. 5 March 1960.

67. S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 208.

68. Ibid.. p. 208.

69. John Swindells, op. cit., p. 28.

70. S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 235.

71. Quoted by Hugh Waterman, letter to Martyn Skinner, 24 December 1970.

72. S. Du Boulay, op. cit. p. 238.

73. B. Griffiths, letter to M. Skinner, 18 September 1987.

74. R. Paul, interview with S. Du Boulay. op. cit., p. 238.

75. B Griffiths's Statement. My Relationship with Russill, 6 September 1992.

76. S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 242.

77. B. Griffiths, letter to R. Paul and Asha, 4 May 1990.

78. S. Du Boulay'. conversation with Andrew Harvey. op. cit., p. 243

79. B. Griffiths. letter to R. Paul and Asha, 13 Januarv 1991

80. S. Du Boulay op. cit., p. 244.

81. S. Du Boulay. op. cit., p. 246.

82. Ibid., p. 246.

83. Ibid.,  p. 248

84. Ibid., p. 249

86 S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 247.

87 John Swindells, op. cit., p. 101.

88. Ibid., p. 99.

89. B. Griffiths, letter to Sr. Pascaline Coff, 15 April 1990.

90. B. Griffiths, letter to Sr. Pascaline Coff, 15 March 1990.

91. L. Freeman, Homily at Dom Bede Griffiths' Memorial Service, Westminster Cathedral, 15 June 1993.

92. S. Du Boulay' op. cit., p. 292.

93. Odette Baumer -Despeigne, A Way of Initiation, in The Other Half of My Soul, p. 44. 94. S. Du Boulay, op. cit., p. 2.

Author

Frank Gerry is a Divine Word Misssionary, who has worked in the Philippines and is now living in Boronia, Melbourne. In the past he was involved in priestly and religous formation. Over the last number of years he has been involved in interreligous dialogue and especially its effect upon one's own 'inner life'. This is his second contribution to AEJT.

Email: gerrysvd@gmail.com

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This article has been peer reviewed, and is deemed to meet the criteria for original research as set out by the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training.