The One Light - (Introduction, Part 1)

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The One Light

 

Introduction - Part 1

 

(p.1) Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine monk who lived for many years in

India, became a well-known spiritual teacher and author as well as a pioneer in

Hindu-Christian dialogue. Since his death in May 1993, interest in Bede

Griffiths and his vision of the " marriage of East and West " has continued to

grow. Along with such figures as Thomas Merton and Henri Le Saux

(Abhishiktananda), he marks the dawn of a new era of spirituality for the West.

Bede signals the emergence of a 'second wisdom' in which Christianity,

encountering the ancient spiritual traditions of Asia, begins to recover its own

simplicity, depth and fullness. It is in a new context that wisdom is reborn

today, however: in dialogue with the personal and critical consciousness, the

freedom and creative dynamism that have emerged in the modern West. The

significance of Bede Griffiths' life and work unfolds in the dramatic interplay

of these three worlds: Christian gospel, Asian wisdom and the contemporary West

with its desperation and its promise.

 

THE BACKGROUND

 

Bede Griffiths' long life (1906-1993) spans the twentieth century. The

significance of Griffiths and his work emerges against the background of the

dramatic changes in the world and in Christianity which have taken place within

these hundred years. It is in the twentieth century that the world has suddenly

become one world. It is the century of two world wars, in which technological

advances in communication and in transportation have suddenly contracted the

globe. Now, despite violent divisions, the world - and humanity within it -

begins to pulsate as a single huge organism. At the same time, the horizons of

the known world have been immeasurably expanded by breakthroughs in astronomy,

physics and the biological sciences.

 

(p.2) Within this twentieth century world, at once exploding and contracting,

Christianity undergoes a crucial phase of transformation which finds expression

in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The church crosses a critical

threshold to encounter the world and its religious traditions with a new

openness - signified by the appearance of a new word - 'dialogue'. Emerging from

the defensive confinement of a Postreformation Catholicism, the church seems to

step suddenly into adulthood.

 

Bede Griffiths' life and work reflect these epochal developments within western

Christianity - and particularly within Catholicism. Bede entered a Roman

Catholic Church which had been confined for centuries within a massive fortified

complex of doctrine and institution. During his life this situation began to

change dramatically. The Second Vatican Council opened the doors and windows to

interaction and interchange not only with the other Christian churches but with

contemporary Western culture and - most important for Bede - with the other

great religious traditions.

Bede exemplifies in his life and thought this movement from containment to

openness, from defensiveness to exposure, from polemic to dialogue. He himself

becomes the living model of an expansive Christianity: a faith which moves

forward and outward, confidently meeting and integrating everything that it

encounters - even the ancient religious traditions which had seemed totally

alien to Christian faith.

 

THE LIFE[1]

 

Alan Griffiths was born to a middle-class Anglican family at Walton-on-Thames on

December 17, 1906. He proved early to be an excellent student, and from 1919-24

he attended the school known as Christ's Hospital in Sussex. At the end of this

time, Alan had his first great spiritual experience, which initiated a life-long

quest for the sacred. This was an overwhelming perception of the divine presence

in nature, recorded at the beginning of his autobiography, 'The Golden

String'.[2] Alan won a scholarship to Oxford, where C.S. Lewis became his tutor.

Their friendship would continue for 40 years. At Oxford he acquired two further

lifelong friends, Martyn Skinner and Hugh Waterman.

 

With these two Oxford friends, Griffiths embarked upon an experiment of common

life. Together they rented a cottage at Eastington in the Cotswolds, and lived

there very simply for the better part of a year (1930). It was during this time

that he began a serious reading of the Old and New Testaments which would

develop into a conscious movement toward Christianity and the church. Alan was

further moved in this direction by reflecting intensely upon Newman's 'The

Development of Christian Doctrine'.

 

During the next year, in a time of solitude, Griffiths experienced an interior

conflict which culminated with his praying throughout an entire night. He was

seized by a powerful experience of conversion which would soon bring him into

the Roman Catholic church.[3] Alan formally entered the church on Christmas eve,

1931. Within a few weeks he joined the Benedictine Priory of Prinknash, where he

had been preparing for this formal conversion. He would make his solemn

profession in the monastery at the end of 1937 and be ordained to the priesthood

a little over two years later. At Prinknash, Dom Bede Griffiths (as he was now

called) served as guestmaster, a role for which he was well endowed.

 

Bede was sent in 1947 to a dependent monastery, St. Michael's Abbey at

Farnborough, as prior. His term as superior was not a successful one, and at the

end of 1951 he was removed from this office and sent to the monastery of

Pluscarden, in Scotland, where he would remain until his departure for India in

1955. It was while serving as novice master at Pluscarden that Bede wrote 'The

Golden String', which was published in 1954 and immediately found a warm

reception. Soon he became interested in the Asian spiritual traditions and began

to study their sacred writings.

 

In 1955 Bede responded to an invitation to accompany Fr. Benedict Alapatt,

O.S.B., to India, with the intention of initiating a monastic community there.

(He would continue to live in India until the end of his life.) In August of the

same year the two Benedictine monks began their new monastic experiment, which

was named Nirmalashram. This project was unsuccessful, and in 1958 Bede joined a

Belgian Cistercian monk, Fr. Francis Mahieu, in starting a Christian ashram in

nearby Kerala, at Kurisumala[4]. (p.4) Here the monks followed an Eastern

Christian liturgical tradition - the Syriac rite - rather than their accustomed

Roman tradition. Bede remained at Kurisumala, serving as novice master and

teacher, until 1968, when he was invited by Father Francis to take over the

direction of another ashram in the south of India, Shantivanam.

 

While a student Bede had begun to align himself with the English working class,

and his concern for the poor found expression during the early years of his

monastic life in India. Strongly influenced by the work of Vinoba Bhave, a

disciple of Gandhi, Bede initiated projects to build up the rural village life

and its economy around Madurai. These efforts would continue later on behalf of

the villagers who lived in the vicinity of Shantivanam.

 

By the early 1960's, Bede was beginning to be known internationally through his

writings. In 1963 he made his first trip to America - a symbolic beginning of

his re-integration of that western world upon which he had so firmly turned his

back when he went to India eight years earlier. A first collection of Bede's

articles, published in 1966 as 'Christ in India', manifested his lively concern

not only with the project of an Indian Christian monasticism and the interaction

of Hinduism and Catholicism, but also with such public issues as social justice,

peace and the nuclear threat.

 

It was in August 1968 that Bede went to Shantivanam in the southern state of

Tamil Nadu, as superior. Shantivanam, or Saccidananda Ashram, had been founded

by Jules Monchanin and Henri Le Saux (Abhishiktananda), who had preceded him in

the project of an Indian Christian monasticism. Under Bede's direction and in

the warm radiance of his personality, the little monastery took on new life and

gradually became, for the Indian church, a model Christian ashram. Before long

Bede was joined at Shantivanam by two brothers from Kurisumala who would long

remain his disciples and companions: Amaldas and Christudas. Bede continued to

write, when time permitted. In 1973, 'Vedanta and Christian Faith' was

published, followed by the enchanting 'Return to the Center' in 1976. At the

time of the silver jubilee celebration of Shantivanam, in 1975, opposition to

Bede's program of inculturation at the ashram (e.g., the liturgical use of Asian

sacred texts, of Hindu ritual gestures and religious symbolism) burst into

public controversy. He was not unequal to the challenge, defending with vigor

and intelligence this new way which had been authorized by the Second Vatican

Council.

 

Bede travelled to America once again in 1979, this time to stay at Osage

Monastery in Oklahoma, a little Shantivanam in North America. The community had

been founded by Benedictine Sr. Pascaline Coff after living for a year (in 1976)

at Bede's ashram. He would continue to travel to North America and to Europe

until the end of his life. In 1985 Bede toured Australia, where he addressed

large audiences and left a deep and lasting impression. In 1980 Father Bede

became a member of the Camaldolese Benedictine congregation, and in 1982,

Shantivanam itself was incorporated into the Camaldolese family - a small,

thousand-year old contemplative congregation including not only monasteries but

also hermitages. Shantivanam gradually became a spiritual center for western

pilgrims. The ashram would become an influential model in the inculturation of

Christian monastic and liturgical life in the forms of Indian religious

tradition.

 

In 1982, Bede (as well as Mother Teresa) accepted an invitation to address the

conference of the International Transpersonal Association in Bombay; 'East and

West: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science'. This event signaled another important

turning point in the evolution of Bede's thought, as we shall see: an

integration (already begun several years earlier) of the 'new science' into his

vision.

 

The impression of spiritual freshness that Bede left with others is confirmed by

his own words. When almost 70, he said, " I always feel about 21, just beginning

to explore life and always finding new things. " The most enduring and

significant friendships that colored Bede's life were the three that he had

begun at Oxford - with Martyn Skinner, Hugh Waterman and C.S. Lewis - and a

newer relationship with Russill D'Silva, who came to Shantivanam as a candidate

in 1986. While Russill soon left the ashram and married, he and his wife Asha

continued to be very close to Bede in his last years. (p.6) Bede's biography[5]

by Shirley Du Boulay admits us to the affective side of his life which does not

appear often in his own writings: the joys and emotional tensions that rarely

broke through his exterior composure. So strong and coherent was Bede's persona

- English as well as monastic - that one would assume without thought that he

had transcended these common struggles.

 

In late January of 1990, Bede experienced his first stroke. This marked a

turning point not only in his exterior life (he retired as prior of Shantivanam

soon afterwards) but in his spiritual development as well. He described this

physical crisis as the occasion of his 'discovery of the feminine.' Together

with this came a new realization of a dark side of human life: personal

experience of emptiness, of mental and emotional chaos, of a disintegrating

body, of an impending return to the earth. On recovery, however, Bede found new

energies within himself. During 1991 and 1992 he traveled widely, going to

America, Europe and Australia. He spent some months with his friends Russill,

Asha and Wayne Teasdale in an experiment of a simple contemplative lifestyle in

the United States. In July 1991, Bede led the 'John Main Seminar' in Indiana,

lecturing on meditation in the world of today.

 

In December 1992 and January of the next year, Bede experienced further, severe

strokes. His left side became paralyzed and he discontinued his daily teachings

in the little temple at Shantivanam. During the following months, confined to

his cell, Bede endured a long and painful ordeal. He was continually surrounded

by devoted friends and disciples, however, and cared for with great tenderness

by those at the ashram. He died at Shantivanam on May 13, 1993, at the age of

86. In his later years Bede had become for people all over the world a prophet

and icon of the universal spiritual wisdom upon which he had centered his life.

 

The One Light - Bede Griffiths' Principal Writings

Introduction, p.1-6

Edited and with Commentary by Bruno Barnhart

Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-254-8

 

Notes:

 

[1] See Shirley DuBoulay, 'Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths',

New York, Doubleday, 1998.

 

[2] 'The Golden String', 9-10, see text n.1.

 

[3] Ibid, 102-132, see texts n. 9,18.

 

[4] 'Kurisumala': lit. 'hill of the cross.' This was already the name of the

place when the two monks arrived. DuB 122-3.

 

[5] 'Beyond the Darkness', ch. 17, 'Friendship, " 217-226.