Bede Griffith’s Breakthrough

From The Tablet 12/09/1998

Shirley Du Boulay

All his life Bede Griffiths sought to experience fully the ‘other half’ of his soul. The story of how he came to ’surrender to the Mother’ is told by the author of a new biography, Beyond The Darkness, to be published by Rider Books and O Books.

THE life of Bede Griffiths was marked by two unforgettable experiences. The first was when, aged 17, he was wandering round the school playing-fields and had an overwhelming experience of God in nature: that was to be the catalyst of his lifelong search. The other, just over two years before his death, proved to be an extraordinary resolution of the tensions that had dogged his life. These two experiences, 67 years apart, span a lifetime of intellectual exploration, a time when he sought with his mind what he had, as a schoolboy, known with his whole being.

This tension between reason and intuition was just one of the pairs of opposites between which Bede was caught, often painfully. For much of his life he weighed the merits of industrialism and tradition; struggled to combine a scientific and a religious approach to life; sought to reach a balance between his need for solitude and his instinct to communicate. Most of all he tried to reconcile the masculine and the feminine, not least in his own person.

It was hard for him, for he was very patriarchal. He was born in 1906, educated at Christ’s Hospital, the boys’ public school in Sussex, and at Oxford, where the only woman the undergraduates saw regularly was the matron. At 27 he became a Benedictine monk and spent most of the rest of his life in all-male communities. By temperament, too, he inhabited a masculine world, living in the intellect, constantly developing his rational, masculine side at the expense of the intuitive and the feminine, abstaining from any expression of sexual feelings, ruefully admitting that he learnt more from books than from real life.

Yet his views on the place of the feminine were ahead of his time and he was frequently critical of the overwhelming masculinity of Western Christianity. Long before it was an acceptable view, he was arguing that one of Christianity’s greatest defects was that it had no concept of God as Mother, and that only when it had acquired this would women find their rightful place in the Church. So too he deplored the fact that, because the words for Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all male in Latin, we have nothing but male images of God. Indeed, when he went to India in 1955 he wrote to a friend that he was drawn there by the need to discover the other half of his soul, the feminine dimension that he felt was lacking in the Western world and in the Western Church. I wanted to experience in my life, he said, the marriage of these two dimensions of human existence, the rational and intuitive, the conscious and unconscious, the masculine and feminine.

Nevertheless, for most of his life Bede Griffiths’s longing for a balance between masculine and feminine remained in the realms of theory, for experience of his own feminine side eluded him. It was not until he was an old man that close friendships helped him to relate to the feminine in a way he had sought for a lifetime and failed to achieve, and he was 84 when his relationship with the feminine culminated in a way nobody could have foreseen.

Early in the morning of 25 January 1990, he was sitting on the veranda of his hut in Shantivanam meditating when, without any warning, he felt a terrific force hit him on the head. It was as if an explosion had shattered his brain: everything became blurred and confused as he felt himself being dragged out of his chair, which seemed to be rising from the ground. He managed to cling to it for a few seconds until, breathing heavily and very frightened, he fell on to the bed, where he lost count of time until one of the monks came and found him.

For two days his life was in the balance and for a week he lay motionless and speechless, sleeping for most of the time. The medical diagnosis was congestive heart failure, pulmonary oedema and a slight stroke, but he was too weak and fragile to be taken to hospital, so his hut was turned into an intensive-care centre. The whole focus of the ashram shifted from the temple, the refectory and the library to Bede’s hut, as those not involved in looking after him gathered round, silently praying and meditating.

Over the next few weeks he improved slowly. By the end of February he was able to take short walks, to pray, to read and write and even to see a few people. Though it was undoubtedly an extremely serious physical collapse, those who heard him talk about it were convinced that it was essentially a mystical experience. Within days he was reflecting on what had happened to him. He said that at first he had lost all sense of time and space and that his immediate reaction was fear, a fear which he compared to the Dark Night described by St John of the Cross. He had, as he put it, blown his mind. The ego had collapsed, all the barriers had broken down and he felt totally free.

During this time one of the most powerful images, constantly appearing before him, was the Black Madonna. She did not appear as Our Lady, so much as the feminine in all its forms – as the Mother of God, as Earth Mother, as the Black Madonna manifested in rocks and caves, the feminine in all nature and in the Church, in his own mother, in the hidden power in the womb, in motherhood itself. He also saw in her the Hindu concept of Shakti, the feminine aspect of divine energy. I feel it was this Power which struck me. She is cruel and destructive, but also deeply loving, nourishing and protecting.

A month after his stroke, Bede had another experience in which body, mind and spirit were inextricably woven together. He felt a tremendous pressure in his head and was convinced that he was dying. He decided to prepare for death and said the prayers for the dying, but, as he laconically put it, nothing happened.

I had some breakfast and then I felt sort of restless, disturbed, not knowing quite what was happening. The inspiration came suddenly again to surrender to the Mother. It was quite unexpected: Surrender to the Mother. And so I somehow made a surrender to the Mother. Then I had an experience of overwhelming love. Waves of love sort of flowed into me. . . . I called out, I’m being overwhelmed by love.

The effects of this experience, of being totally engulfed in love, never left him. Always when talking about it he would stress that what he had felt as a blow on his head came from the left and propelled him towards the right, and this he interpreted as being a violent assertion of the feminine, the right side of the brain. At last, in his eighty-fourth year, he felt that the left brain and the whole rational system had been knocked down and the right brain and the intuitive understanding, the sympathetic mind, had been opened up. And this was an experience of love:

Death, the Mother, the Void, was all love. It was an overwhelming love, so strong that I could not contain myself. I did not know whether I would survive. I knew I had to die, but whether it would be in this world or another, I did not know. At first I thought I would die and just be engulfed in this love. It was the unconditional love of which I had often spoken, utterly mysterious, beyond words.

So greatly did he feel himself loved, so awesome was this experience, that he wept during it as he would sometimes weep when he recalled it. He knew that with this discovery of the feminine, he had been healed. The next afternoon he sprang out of bed and for the first time began to walk without his walking stick. One of his close friends said: On 25 January the Mother came and ’struck’ him and wounded him. On 25 February the Mother came and overwhelmed him with love and healed him. The feminine had invaded him, allowed him to surrender and transformed him.

Bede had two more death experiences, each time speaking of them as occasions when he surrendered to the darkness of death and by that total self-emptying became one with the universe. More and more he began to feel the masculine mind dissolve and the intuitive feminine side begin to take its rightful place; more and more he was finding the union of the masculine and the feminine, those two opposites he had sought so long to reconcile. This led him to a new appreciation of Mary, and he found himself, though it had not been his normal custom, praying the Hail Mary constantly, finding in the Mother of God the channel through which the Holy Spirit comes into the world.

His understanding of what had happened to him grew gradually. From the very beginning he knew that it had changed him radically and later he would say that the process of change went on for months. He even said that he had grown more in the two years after his stroke than in the previous 84 years and that only now was he discovering the sexual dimension to life. There were still times of darkness, confusion and bewilderment, but even when he was unsure of what was happening he was aware of continual growth, aware that he was seeing everything in a new light.

He had a strong sense of unity, a feeling that everything was flowing into everything else – a sense of advaita, the Sanskrit word for non-duality. In fact he used to refer to his stroke as his advaitic experience. But he would stress that he did not see advaita as one in the sense of eliminating all differences, but as a state in which differences are mysteriously present in the one, as a state beyond duality. He would talk of the way we all carry memories of paradise, of how Christ pierces through every level of our being and makes us one, of how everything comes out of unity and returns to unity. This holistic understanding of the universe deepened as he saw the physical, the psychological and the spiritual as inseparable, like the Holy Trinity having three aspects but ultimately being one.

He was fascinated by this breakthrough to the feminine and all that it released in him and for the remaining two years of his life he frequently talked and wrote about it. I was very masculine and patriarchal and had been developing the animus, the left brain, all this time. Now the right brain – the feminine, the chthonic power, the earth power – came and hit me. In hitting him with such force it was taking him to realms of darkness and chaos, to the depths of the divine mystery:

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 the order comes. So the chaos is in God, we could say, and that is why discovering the 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.

He was undergoing a profound inner transformation, becoming grounded, earthed, in a way that was quite unfamiliar to him. He who had lived so much in his head was now, using the language of the chakras (the centres of spiritual power in the body), talking of his energy moving down from the head to the heart, then down to the muladhara, the root chakra, the body’s connection to the earth and to sex. So too he now saw love as the basic principle of the whole universe. The fusing of masculine and feminine in his own person brought him to the insight he had sought for so long, and his life culminated in an experiential understanding of the lines from St John’s gospel, which he felt reached to the level of pure advaita: That they may be one, as I in thee and thou in me, that they may be perfectly one.

From the New York Times of May 24, 2010:

Many Faiths, One Truth

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By TENZIN GYATSO

HH XIVth Dalai Lama & Meath Conlan, Dharamsala (1989)

WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best  and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance  it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

An early eye-opener for me was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions.

A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism. In my readings of the New Testament, I find myself inspired by Jesus’ acts of compassion. His miracle of the loaves and fishes, his healing and his teaching are all motivated by the desire to relieve suffering.

I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.

Take Judaism, for instance. I first visited a synagogue in Cochin, India, in 1965, and have met with many rabbis over the years. I remember vividly the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears. And I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In my many encounters with Hindu scholars in India, I’ve come to see the centrality of selfless compassion in Hinduism too  as expressed, for instance, in the Bhagavad Gita, which praises those who “delight in the welfare of all beings.” I’m moved by the ways this value has been expressed in the life of great beings like Mahatma Gandhi, or the lesser-known Baba Amte, who founded a leper colony not far from a Tibetan settlement in Maharashtra State in India. There he fed and sheltered lepers who were otherwise shunned. When I received my Nobel Peace Prize, I made a donation to his colony.

Compassion is equally important in Islam  and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant faith. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, pleading that we not blindly follow the lead of some in the news media and let the violent acts of a few individuals define an entire religion.

Let me tell you about the Islam I know. Tibet has had an Islamic community for around 400 years, although my richest contacts with Islam have been in India, which has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. An imam in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran.

Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.

Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers  it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is the author, most recently, of “Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together.”

This article, from the New York Times, is published in my blog-site as a contribution to interfaith dialogue efforts springing up here and there. It is due to this life-long interest of mine that I take small groups to India and beyond – as a way of discovering the depths and practice of other cultures and spiritual traditions. The retreats and seminars / workshops I present are also oriented in this direction – a way, however humble – of encouraging all to drink from the spiritual sources common to us all. Meath Conlan, PhD (meath@diversejourneys.com)

Thomas Merton
Now at the Crack of Dawn

by Br. David Steindl-Rast, OSB

We need nothing more urgently than the superfluous.

Part III: Continued from Part II

Thomas Merton - his famous smile

Contemplative life – in all its forms and on all different levels is really a quest for living from the heart.  It is a quest for the heart.  I would like now to go a little beyond the strict confines of Merton’s talk in Bangkok, exploring something that here and there in his writings comes through which seems important in context, namely, the idea of the heart as the organ for finding meaning.  The heart is the one center that unites us on the religious level with all human beings, everywhere in the world, at any time we engage in the ultimate quest for meaning.  It is not only the intellect, although it must engage all of our intellect.  It is not only the will, although all our devotion must enter into it.  It is not only our emotions, although all our emotions must reverberate with it.  It is the heart, that realm of our being where intellect, will, and emotions are still one and united, the very taproot of our whole being.

Meaning is what really counts in our lives.  If our life is filled to the brim with purpose, we may one day wake up and still wonder:  Where is the meaning of it all?  Purpose is not of itself meaningful.  We must give meaning to our purpose; we must allow meaning to flow into our purpose, opening our hearts and giving ourselves to the Word of God, to the situation.  There is more than purposefulness, and if we come to see it on many different levels, what really matters is not the useful but the superfluous!  All the great things in life, like poetry and music and friendship are totally superfluous – superfluous in the sense of superfluity, of an overflowing, of not fulfilling any particular practical need, but being gratis.  Then we come to see that the whole world is really superfluous.  Who needs it?

We create the impression sometimes that God worked hard to make himself a world.  Well, did he need it in the first place?  No.  It’s a superfluity of his love; it’s a superfluity of his enjoyment.  It’s not like someone making a woolen sweater against the cold, or a fan against the heat.  No, it’s much more like someone singing a song (in the shower, maybe, just for enjoyment).  It is like someone dancing, an image often used in spiritual tradition – God as the Cosmic Dancer.  Much more than work or purpose, all of creation is play, unfolding of meaning, celebration of the meaning that is at the root of it all.

This is where Merton’s vision of the monk at the margin of society comes in, the monk as being totally superfluous.  Nobody needs the monk, and yet, from another point of view, nobody needs anything as urgently as we need monks.  For we need nothing more urgently than the superfluous.  What would life be without poetry?  What would life be without music?  What would life be without friendship?  But real friendship goes far beyond comradeship, where you still need one another.  Comrades, like two sides of a step-ladder, hold one another up.  But when you get to friendship, it is pure gift.  It is more than practical help and support.  It is mutual enjoyment.  It implies this letting go, this freedom to let go.  I am not bound to you.  As the Sufis say, “Two birds tied to one another do not fly better for having four wings.”  That is something true friends understand.  They fly with one another, but they are not tied to one another.  They are completely free.  The realm of our life where the superfluous matters most is our contemplative life.  In that sense all of us have a contemplative life.  The contemplative life of every human being consists in the search for meaning over and beyond purpose.

We all have a contemplative life,

and so we all deserve monastic life.

One of the theses that evolves from all of Merton’s writings, but particularly from his Bangkok talk, is that the contemplative life is the secret in the heart of every human being.  It belongs to all of us.  It isn’t the specialty of monks or anything like that.  All of us are contemplatives.  The second thesis flows directly out of that:  If we are all contemplatives, and if the monastery is a controlled environment in which the contemplative life is professionally cultivated, a sort of laboratory – even Benedict called it a workshop – then everybody deserves a monastery, at least for a time.

That was another step where Merton cracked the egg of contemporary monastic life and went far beyond what his contemporaries could, or even now can, accept:  that the monastery belongs to all.  A monastery is not a kind of museum nor a place where you come and from a great distance look at the monks singing their chant down there, while you sit way up in the loft, removed from their life.  Merton said, speaking about Trungpa Rinpoche again:  “Incidentally” – for that’s one of those incidental remarks where the real essence of the talk comes through – “incidentally, he has a monastery where you can be a monk for a time.”  “Incidentally,” that is a possibility, and not only a possibility, it is a real need for our time.  Everybody has, we all have, a contemplative life and so we all deserve monastic life.

Then he speaks about monastic therapy, a very ancient concept, monastic therapy, a healing that goes on in the monastery.  God knows we all need that healing, and it isn’t only for monks.  The earliest monks in the West, the Essenes, were called “the Therapists.”  What this monastic therapy is all about is a liberation of the truth imprisoned in us by ignorance and error.  It’s not something outside, but it’s an inner liberation, a liberation of the truth.  Merton closes his talk with a very beautiful image.  It is interesting that this image occurs in the original notes for the talk, but it occurs as a subheading somewhere in the middle of the talk.  When a speaker takes something he has as a minor point and uses it as a final image, you can be sure that, either in the process of the talk or at some other point, this began to be very important to him.  Here, an hour before he died, Merton uses an image from Buddhist iconography.  The Buddha is seated, pointing toward the earth and holding a begging bowl.

The background of the story is that the tempter, immediately after Buddha’s enlightenment, challenged him and said:  “That little piece of ground on which you are sitting is really mine.  You are sitting on my own little piece of ground.”  But the Buddha answered:  “No, it now belongs to me because I have been enlightened.”  I belong to it, and it belongs to me.  I belong to the world and the world belongs to me because I have been enlightened.  Merton says, “This is a very excellent statement, I think, about the relation of the monk to the world.  The monk belongs to the world, but the world belongs to him insofar as he has dedicated himself totally to liberation in order to liberate it.”

We come now to a much deeper concept of contemplatio, which is liberation of the world.  Buddha, holding the open begging bowl as a sign of total openness to everything given to him as a gift, points to the ground.  Totally liberated, he can liberate the world, give himself to the world.  That is the second half of contemplatio – putting the two temples together.  Only when you are liberated can you liberate.

Merton says, “You can’t just immerse yourself in the world and get carried away with it.  That is no salvation.  If you want to pull a drowning man out of the water, you have to have some support yourself.  Suppose someone is drowning and you are standing on a rock, you can do it; or suppose you can support yourself by swimming, you can do it.  There is nothing to be gained by simply jumping into the water and drowning with him.”  You must be liberated from the world to liberate the world.  And that is the final word with which he leaves us at this talk.  Liberation is the monastic life.  It is imperishable, an instinct of the human heart.

That is the crack of dawn, that is the crack where I see Merton standing, just at the moment when he actually passes over into that life that is hidden with Christ in God.  It is a crack that is widening these days…and tremendous things are going to come from it.

Thomas Merton
Now at the Crack of Dawn

by Br. David Steindl-Rast, OSB

Real monks live with great alertness, criticizing, sifting out what is essential, and changing life accordingly.

Part II: Continued from Part 1

Thomas Merton

Merton says that the confrontation with Marxism forces him to face what it is to be a Christian monk.  He tells a little story about meeting a Marxist student at California’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.  During a break-period conversation, the student said to him, “We are also monks.”  It really sounded like:  “We are the real monks!  Who are you?  We are the dedicated ones.”  What is essential is that the monk take a critical attitude towards the world.  The monk is a critic.  We know from Merton’s life to what extent he was a critic of our times.  The monk has this in common with the Marxist, that both Marxist thought and monastic tradition are critical of society.  But Merton says, “Marxism criticizes and tries to change the economic structure; monasticism criticizes and tries to change people’s consciousness.  While Marxism is concerned with externals, monastic criticism is concerned with the inner attitude.”

Merton sees a complete parallel between the movement in Marxist ideology from capitalistic greed to communist dedication, and, in monastic spiritual psychology, from cupiditas to caritas, from selfishness and desire to real giving love.  He calls that movement a great “yes” to reality, to love, the giving of oneself to life, to the other in service, rather than clinging and hanging onto and grasping.  Unselfishness is one of the essentials which Merton sees in confronting the monastic crisis.  We are critics, not entering some sort of frame of reference and doing what has always been done, but instead being much like those on the social forefront of what is happening in our times.  Real monks live with great alertness, criticizing, sifting out what is essential, and changing life accordingly.

This focus on change leads Merton to see a second essential of monastic life – transformation.  Marxism doesn’t simply make a comparison between capitalist greed and communist dedication; rather, it implies a call for change.  Thus, monks cannot sit back and compare selfishness with love and service; there has to be a change taking place.  It is a dynamic thing.  Merton sees this liberation – and monastic life – as a process rather than a state of life.  We have here one of those indications of a crack in the egg shell.  Before Merton’s time, monastic life was considered, on the whole, as a state of life.  After Merton, this is no longer possible.  Of course traditionally, monastic life as a process was always the ideal.  Merton is very traditional in the true sense that to be truly traditional means to be on the forefront.

In the recent and customary view, but not necessarily the most deeply traditional one, monastic life was seen as a state into which one enters, a state in which one perseveres, rather than a process in which one goes forward dynamically to conquer new ground.  Merton hinges this notion of progress and of transformation to what he calls the central monastic vow of conversio morum, conversatio morum.  It is very interesting to note that he uses here the term conversio morum, translated as “conversion of life,” which is one of the three Benedictine vows.

There has been a great controversy in the history of the Benedictine Monastic Order, Trappists included, about whether Saint Benedict wrote:  conversio morum or conversatio morum.  Conversio is a conversation that takes place once and for all; conversatio is a conversion that is expressed over and over again.  It does seem that even Saint Benedict’s original text vacillated between conversatio and conversio.  Our own monastic tradition emphasizes the fact that, regardless of what the original word was, we monks are to live in conversation – in constant renewal and constant conversion, which is the very essence of monastic life.  Merton, too, considers conversion, a constant turning, to be the very essence of monastic life.  This is how he came to take a very critical attitude toward the structures of monastic life.  He formulated this clearly when he said that the time for relying on structures has come to an end.

The moment we stand on our own two feet, the moment we find contemplative life at the root of monastic life,

deep down in our own hearts, we go beyond division.

This may have become particularly evident to him through his visit with the Tibetans, which was the most important experience of his Asian trip.  His visit with the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan monks impressed Merton more than all other Asian encounters.  Of course, these Tibetans have experienced Marxism as a force that destroyed much of their monastic structure.  And Merton is confronting Marxism also as a political force that destroyed all structures.  What happens when these structures are destroyed?  In the future, he says, we will not rely on structures.  We cannot be sure whether any of the structures with which we are familiar will outlast even our lifetime.  What then are we supposed to do?  What is the essence of monastic life?

Here is the high point of his whole Bangkok talk, the background of which is the story of Trungpa Rinpoche, who moved to the U.S. and founded a number of lively, prospering meditation centers.  Merton met him on his Asian journey and was impressed.  When the communists invaded Tibet, Trungpa Rinpoche was abbot of a large monastery, but was out on a visitation and got caught by the invasion at some farmhouse.  Now the question was, what should he do?  Should he go back to his own monastery, or should be flee across the border?  He sent a message to a nearby abbot-friend to ask, “What shall we do?”  The abbot sent back a message which Merton found most significant:  “From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet.”

Merton goes on to say, “To my mind, this is an extremely important monastic statement.”  (Remember, this man is now speaking in the last hours of his life!)  “If you forget everything else that has been said, I would suggests that you remember this for the future:  ‘From now on, each one will have to stand on his own feet.’”  He throws everything back on each monk personally:  “Don’t rely on structure; stand on your own feet.”  Then Merton expresses his relationship to structures:  “Yes, we do need structures; we are supported by structures.  But they may be destroyed at any moment by a political power or a political force.  We cannot rely on structures.  Use structures, but do not rely on structures.”

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The moment we stand on our own two feet, the moment we find contemplative life at the root of monastic life, deep down in our own hearts, in our own center, we go beyond division. That is the third essential that Merton sifts out in facing the monastic identity crisis:  that the Christian monastic calling is one that unites us with all monks.  There again is this crack where he breaks out from the enclosed shell of a Trappist, Christian, monastic structure into universal monasticism.  Monks East and West share the same quest, the contemplative quest of the human heart, in which we are all united.  We go beyond division to an inner liberty which no one can touch.

Merton sees the essence:  “What is essential in the monastic life is not embedded in buildings, not in a habit, not necessarily even in a rule.”  (That must sound like enormous heresy to some.)  “It is somewhere along the line of something deeper than a rule.  It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation.”  Once we have reached that last quest for total inner transformation, to quote Saint Paul, “there is no longer slave or free-born, there is no longer Jew or Gentile,” there is no longer Asian or European, but we have transcended these divisions.  “This kind of monasticism,” Merton said in his last talk, “this kind of monasticism cannot be extinguished.  It is imperishable; it represents an instinct of the human heart.”

(To be continued …)

Saint Moses the Abyssinian (Abba Moses the Robber): Patron of Deir Mar Mousa Monastery, Syria

Interior: Deir Mar Musa Monastery, Syria

Moses, a black Ethiopian, had been a house servant, possibly a released slave, to some official in the administration. His master discharged him for stealing. He then became the head of a gang in Nitria (on the Nile Delta), and was generally believed to have been a murderer as well as a robber. He exercised a lot of muscle in that area and people were greatly afraid of him. In the midst of his desultory life he suddenly came to his senses, though it is not recorded how. Nevertheless, he abandoned his gangster mates and his drinking, then took himself to a place where small groups of monks and hermits lived. So began his journey of self-transcendence.

If there is one ‘desert trait’ that is said to be classically portrayed in Moses, it is the virtue of complete renunciation. What he once lived as a robber, he now tried to reverse as a monk. After he withdraw to his monastic life he committed himself to appreciation and application of the inner work of repentance and resurrection. Having broken the force of his old habits, and, after many years softened his earlier hardness (which had become like a second nature with him), abba Moses was described by abba Macarius as “a very sensitive man.”

The earliest Christian monks inhabited the desert land of the Middle East from the end of the second century AD onwards. Known as the “Desert Fathers”, they left a coherent doctrine mostly expressed in the rules and traditions, which they passed on to their disciples. These are the foundations upon which later monastic legislators, including St Benedict, built their way of life. Many of the important points of the “Desert Fathers” teachings are expressed in the form of anecdotes. There are around twenty stories related to abba Moses’ life and teaching. Here are some of them:

Abba Moses’ Example to Some Robbers

When Moses was still quite young in his new life, four robbers, not knowing who he was, attacked him in his monastic cell. But he tied them all together, put them on his back like a bundle of sticks, and took them to the church where the other brothers had gathered. He asked, “Since I may not hurt anyone, what do you want me to do with these?”

The robbers confessed, and found out then that he was Moses, the onetime notorious robber. They glorified God and spurned the world because of his conversion. For they reasoned thus, “If he who was such a strong and powerful thief fears God, why should we put off our own salvation?”

Do Not Be Discouraged

The demons attacked Moses, trying to draw him back into his old ways. He was tempted to such an extent, that he nearly failed in his resolution. So he went to his mentor, abba Isidore, and revealed all the details of the contest to him.

Isidore said, “Do not be discouraged. These are the beginnings, and for this reason they are the more severe as they attack, since they are testing your character. A dog does not by nature stay away from a meat market, but only if the market is closed up and no one gives him anything does he stop coming by. So also in your case. If you stand firm, the demon will have to leave you in discouragement.”

A Lesson in Forgiveness

A brother at Scetis committed a fault. A council was called to judge him, to which abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. So the priest sent another messenger to Moses, urging him to come, since all the brothers were waiting for him. So Moses took his oldest, worn-out, leaky basket. He filled it with sand, placed it on his back, and went to join the council of judgment. When the brothers saw him arriving, they went out to great him, asking him why he had arrived so burdened. Abba Moses said, “My many sins run out behind me, and I do not even see them, and yet today I have come to judge the sins of someone else.” The brothers relented, called off the council, and forgave their erring brother.

On Not Judging Others

When abba Moses was instructing one of his disciples, who was to become the great abba Poemen, he taught: “The monk must die to his neighbor and never judge him at all, in any way whatever. The monk must die to everything before leaving the body, in order not to harm anyone. If the monk does not think in his heart that he is a sinner, God will not hear him.” Young Poemen asked, “What does this mean, ‘to think in his heart that he is a sinner?’” Abba Moses answered him, “When a person is occupied with his own sins, he does not see the sins of his neighbor.”

Abba Moses’ Final Surrender

The brothers were told to disperse and head into the hills, for the barbarian hordes were coming. But abba Moses chose to stay there until the end came, saying that it was the day he had been expecting and awaiting. He said that it would be in this way that the Lord’s word would be fulfilled: he who takes up the sword (as abba Moses had when he was a gangster and murderer) would also perish by the sword. A few other brothers stayed with him when the rest fled. One of the brothers, who hid in a pile of rope during the carnage, and was not killed, saw the angels descend with crowns for the abba and the other brothers with him.

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Note: Adapted from: www.orthodox.net and John Chryssavgis, 2003. “In the Heart of The Desert: The Spirituality of The Desert Fathers and Mothers.” World Wisdom, Bloomington, In. pp. 28-29.

Photo Credit: www.homsonline.com

Notes for travellers to Deir Mar Mousa:

The ancient Syrian monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian (Deir Mar Musa el-Habashi), also called Abba Moses The Robber (he died in 375 AD), overlooks a harsh valley in the mountains east of the small town of Nebek, 80 km north of Damascus, and about 1320 metres above sea level. A monastery on the top of a mountain in the middle of the desert. Ten christian monks and two nuns stay here. All visitors are welcome – please click on the link below for more specific directions and instructions. Interfaith dialogue is important here. The new foundation of the monastic community started in 1991. On a social level, the community of Deir Mar Musa works to develop services which facilitate inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue and harmony.

http://www.deirmarmusa.org/page/howtovisiteng.HTM

Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi

P.O. Box 178

Nebek — Syrian Arab Republic

Tel. (00963) 011 7280137

Fax. (00963) 011 7230335

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Swami Abhishiktananda’s Spiritual Journey

Founders' Memorials, Shantivanam

Early in January 2010, at Shantivanam in South India, there will be an international convocation of scholars and spiritual leaders to celebrate the memory and work of Benedictine Monk, Dom Henri Le Saux, known more commonly as Swami Abhishiktananda, the name he adopted when he became a sannyasi, a renunciate in the Hindu tradition. He was one of those rare figures, a Hindu-Christian mystic, who lived an intense interior life and became a bridge figure for both Hindus and Christians at the deepest level of contemplation. It is recognised by many that his principle contribution to cross-cultural understanding was in exploring the interface of Advaita (non-duality) and Christian personalism as represented in the trinitarian vision.

Abhishiktananda was born on August 30, 1910 in Brittany, one of seven children, into a devout Catholic family. He desired to be a priest from childhood, and in particular felt drawn to the monastic life. In 1929 he entered the Benedictine community at Kergonan on the Western coast of Brittany, where he remained until his departure for India in 1948.

He was a zealous and generous monk who took Ordination at the end of 1935. He briefly served in the military from 1946-8, after which he returned to the monastery and his position as librarian. As such he developed a keen interest in the Early Church Fathers and their spirituality. His Mother died in 1944; his Father passed away in 1955.

Henri Le Saux experienced an intense desire to go to India. Correspondence with the saintly and learned French theologian Jules Monchinin, who was, since 1939, already in India as a missionary.  As a first step they went on pilgrimage to a number of Hindu holy places. The Bishop of Trichy suggested they visit Tiruvannamalai and have an audience (darshan) with the famed saint and sage Ramana Maharshi. This they did in January 1949.  In 1950 they decided to initiate their vision of an ‘inculturated’ ashram by the banks of the sacred River Cauvery, near Trichy – on land given by the family of a religious sister now living and working in Perth, Australia.  Very soon he felt that rather than make converts to Christianity, his call was to relate India’s spiritual to Christianity’s theology and spirituality.

They incorporated the Tamil and Sanskrit languages into their liturgy and read passages from the scriptures of religions other than Christian. Their life was simple, poor, contemplative and vegetarian.

Henri was a gregarious renunciate, so after Jules Monchanin died in 1957, Henri took more and more time travelling, giving retreats, meeting sannyasis, and residing at his hermitage at Uttarkashi in the High Himalayas. More and more drawn to silence and solitude, and, so that he could write more, he gave the ashram to the community at Kurisumala ashram. Then, Dom Bede Griffiths eventually came to establish himself at the ashram. As for Henri, especially after his advaitic experience, he wanted to “disappear into the Himalayas.” Abishiktananda died of a heart attack on December 7, 1973.

It seems Abhishiktananda paid a high price for his inter-cultural mystical journey. He thought he may lose his faith, and wasn’t sure if he was deceiving himself or not. His struggle began when he met Ramana Maharshi in 1949. He saw the Mystery of the Trinity as true, yet he also saw Advaita as true, and so, was conflicted in trying to reconcile them in his own being. While loyal to the Church, Christ and the Sacraments, he saw himself as an Advaitin too. The inner experience at Arunachala made it clear to him that the venture at Shantivanam was only a step along the way; he had to go all the way. Of this he expressed in a note he penciled in 1973. He said of Advaita:

“In this annihilating experience the person is no longer able to project in front of himself anything whatsoever, to recognise any other ‘pole’ to which he will refer himself and give the name of God. Once he has reached that innermost centre, he is so forcibly seized by the mystery that he can no long utter either ‘Thou’ or ‘I.’ Engulfed in the abyss, he has disappeared to his own eyes, to his own consciousness. The proximity of that mystery, which the prophetic traditions call ‘God’ has burnt him so completely that there is no longer any question of discovering it in the depths of himself or himself in the depths of It. In the very engulfing, the gulf itself has vanished. If a cry were still possible – at the moment perhaps of disappearing into the abyss – it would be paradoxically: ‘But there is no abyss, no gulf, no distance.’ There is no face-to-face, for there is only That-which-Is and no other to name It. ‘Advaita!’”

Meister Eckhart also describes such states of consciousness: returning to the abyss, and desert of the Godhead, and that when he returns to the Ground, the Godhead, God passes away! If there is ultimately only God, or the Godhead, how can we speak of God as an Identity to which we are related? The God beyond God is the Godhead, the Source that is personal and transpersonal. With such thoughts Abhishiktananda struggled.

I recommend Shirley du Boulay’s (2007) splendid biography of Abhishiktananda: “The Cave of The Heart: The Life of Swami Abhishiktananda,” Orbis Books, NY

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This story is adapted from an article by Meath Conlan that first appeared in the London Newspaper, The Tablet, 2 June, 2001

There comes a time in everyone’s life, when sooner, or later, perhaps through a crisis of some sort, or a blessing, a man or woman comes to realise that he or she can no longer skim along on the surface of things. At such times, especially when trouble strikes, we could ask ourselves how we can turn such times into good; how to make from one bitter root a garden of flowers. One has to find the golden string that leads through life’s labyrinth. In my case, when I needed, I turned for guidance to the late Bede Griffiths.

In his autobiography The Golden String, Bede spoke of an experience when he was in his final year at school. It was while he was walking along in the evening, as the sun was setting over the playing fields. He wrote “as I walked on, I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before”. It was as though he had chanced upon the Garden of Paradise and in that moment, he recalled, “a lark rose suddenly from the ground, poured out its song above my head, and then sank, still singing, to rest”. At this point, he remembered, a “feeling of awe” overcame him, such that even the sky seemed “but a veil before the face of God”.

For many years Bede Griffiths tried to recapture and express that experience. He began to see what the poet Wordsworth meant when he described the world with “the freshness of a dream”. Even the smallest details of nature drew him beyond himself and helped him become aware that “we are no longer isolated individuals in conflict with our surroundings; we are parts of a whole, elements in a universal harmony”.

Years later, he created a small garden in front of his single-room mud hut at Shantivanam ashram in south India. The yellows, reds, whites and mauves of the myriad flowers and their bright green stems and leaves throw sutras of colour against the dull ochre of his hut; they lead the eye up to the glassless window, from which Bede would gaze in contemplation, appreciating the beauty of his garden plot and perhaps waiting for his next visitor, or writing a letter to one of his many friends. He told me that he created this colourful space because it reminded him of the way the natural entanglements and riots of colour in a garden constantly surprised him with the sense of unity to be found there. For him a garden provided wondrous opportunities for breaking the daily routine and of adjusting to some new experience. Anything that can do that, he said, is “a message bearer” to the soul, allowing us to see “as though a veil has been lifted”.

More than 30 years ago I realised how much I liked skimming along on the surface of life. One day, however, I became disconcerted by the experience of my many personal handicaps: I was yet many years from discovering how, through them, I would find myself, my work and meaning. But in those early days, I discovered Bede Griffiths through his books, and started to write to him at his ashram in India. We began to correspond regularly. He took my questions seriously and addressed my concerns with sympathy, grace and intelligence. He said I should plan one day to come and spend a year with him at the ashram. Meanwhile, he wrote, I should seek “ways of discovering a sense of unity and meaning in the day-to-day experiences” of nature’s wilderness in my part of the world.

He exhorted me to listen to crows cawing and blowflies droning: and to the sounds of silence. He urged me to stop and watch intensely the heat hazes shimmering on the vast horizon, ancient landforms that host surprising flora and fauna, sun-baked soil that becomes unfriendly for seeds to take root in, floods that wash away hopes and dreams; and to get a sense of the farm families who long to find their own sense of meaning in the intense and sometimes unforgiving isolation of the Australian outback. He quoted the “golden string” in William Blake’s poem. I should follow up the inner vision that I had seen in the “wilderness” of my parish, he said, keep it in mind when thrown back again on self-doubt and confusion, live its light and shape my life by its law. In this way I would “wind the string into a ball, and find your way out of the labyrinth of life”.

The loveliness of the vision imparted through his letters and books touched me. But I don’t think I did so well at putting his exhortations into practice. I was far too focused on myself: just at this time I was still groping for the light and was for the moment inwardly unfree. Yet, here and there, there were signs that Bede’s vision was having an effect.

Bede assured me that the individual inner spiritual journey of discovery is “something that calls for all our energies, and involves both labour and sacrifice; each one approaches it from a different angle and has to work out his own particular problem. Each alike is given a golden string and has to find his own way through the labyrinth.” If I glanced into his room on my way down the path near his hut from around 2.30 a.m. in the pre-dawn, I would see him sitting deep in contemplation, as part of his several hours of preparation for the coming day. Bede lived for more than 30 years his simple life at Shantivanam ashram, all the while trying to break through the rational mind. It was, he related later, well into his eighties, only through suffering a stroke in the last couple of years of his life that he “won through” the labyrinth. As a result, he said to his listeners one day: “I have learnt more in the last two years than in all of the rest of my life to this point.”

For Bede the “golden string” led on from that evening at his school: he had to keep seeking and learning. He said that “every step in advance is a return to the beginning” and that the beauty to be found in nature, the cosmos, “is not only truth but also Love”.

I resonate with his experience. Bede said that he discovered the divine not only in the life of nature, but also in the minds and hearts of human beings. He found that he had “sought the divine in the solitude of nature, and in the labour of his mind”, but eventually found the answer in his community and the spirit of charity. Until then he felt he had been “wandering in a far country and had returned home”; that he “had been dead and was alive again”; that he “had been lost and was [now] found”.

Perhaps for me it is not so clear. Well, not yet, anyway. I wonder, too, if my own tangle of doubts and questioning is in some way necessary for my being open to those who are likewise searching? I suspect it all paints a picture, the ultimate outcome of which I shan’t see while looking only at the small perspective.

I find my thoughts returning to my years in the bush. Now I remind myself not of the dismay that everyday life “does not fit like clockwork”, but of the insight that, as the poet Annie Dillard said, “it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it surges in such a free, fringed tangle”. What for me was once such a struggle, has gradually, as the years progressed, become an icon for me: a land that was tough enough to bring out here and there rugged plants of spiritual survival; a depth of soil in which friendships that stand the test of time flourish; an open, clean air that carries the experience, thoughts and hopes of there being a deeper unity to this whole “fringed-tangle” cosmos.

In remote and particularly nutrient-depleted soils of South West Australia, there are little plants called verticordiae, which, by their very existence are at once teachers and the things taught about. I used delight in exploring the south coast in hopes of finding a patch here or there. Once discovered I would sit down and draw them in great detail. I hope that their “free fringed-tangle” of teachings will continue to be a source of inspiration for me, though the years have separated us in so many ways. I can say this also of the friends I have made in those remote regions. In a way, the families of the Australian bush are a microcosm of the larger society – at least, as I remember them. Perhaps from them we can learn survival skills they had to find and test a long time ago: community, making do, self-sufficiency, gratitude for what is today – whether it be the climate, scarce resources, loneliness and isolation, not being part of the mainstream, accepting limitations, and so on.

The ordinary people of the bush will continue doing what they have always done: they will carry on. They are not overcome or daunted by the absence of services that city-folk take for granted. They have, dare I assert, already found new ways of growing and thriving spiritually in depleted soils. They, in their tiny, isolated, yet caring communities, may even be discovering the inevitability of George Simon’s words: “In the end, God manifests not as some kind of super floor show, but as a human being.”

Bede Griffiths closed his autobiography, The Golden String, with some words from the prior in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. I feel these aptly describe the way Bede tried to live his life for 86 years. They also present a vision: one that I have seen also echoed in the lives of men and women in the Australian outback:  “Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of it . . . . If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

If you or your friends would like to receive my periodical newsletter, which contains articles of human interest and spirituality, as well as information about forthcoming seminars and retreats, and journeys to India, Nepal, and Bali then please kindly send word to me: meath@diversejourneys.com