The Rigor of Love

AUGUST 8, 2010

Long before he embraced Christianity: received Baptism and attended the rituals of the Church, my friend and mentor, the late Dom Bede Griffiths had an experience, the force and import of which remained with him for the rest of his life. As a youth he came upon a scene , in the presence of which he heard the birds singing,  a hawthorn tree blooming and a lark descending to the meadow as the sun sank on the horizon – all of which as though for the first time. While not a believer, it was for him as though even the sky was a veil before the face of God.

In the 1960s as a teenager, years before I found my way into the Christian Church, when stationed as an employee for Hunt Oil Company, so far into the remote Australian Outback that only a small party of surveyors had ever been before me – in 1936. Out there, beyond the Warburton Ranges, and further still than the Blackstone Ranges in the Great Victoria Desert, I was struck by the silence of the days and the infinite immensity of the starry night sky. Like Bede Griffiths before me I experienced what no religious faith, to that point, could have influenced me as deeply. Yet, like my mentor, these experiences of Nature broke, as Bede wrote in his autobiography The Golden String, “through the daily routine of life” and thereby “may be a message bearer to the soul… We see our life for a moment in its true perspective in relation to eternity… Freed for a moment from the flux of time, we see the underlying  eternal order that underpins it all; we see ourselves as parts of the whole, elements in a universal harmony.”

For Bede Griffiths, it took thirty years for the full import of what he’d been through as a youth, to become clear. He realised That mysterious Presence of which all the forms and beauties of Nature are but passing reflections. As a young man he learned Plato’s description in his Symposium of the soul’s ascent to love; how we should pass from the love of fair forms to the love of fair conduct, and thence to the love of fair principles,  until we finally come to the ultimate principle of all and learn what Beauty itself is. But in his lifetime Bede learned what he said Plato could never teach him, that the Divine Beauty is not only  truth but also Love. This discovery came for him, as I suggest it does for us all if we wait long enough and reflect deeply enough and are open to the message-bearers of the divine, as a recognition that this spirit of Love is everywhere and in everyone. My old friend asserted again and again that though the differences between people of different faiths, and no faith at all, are, on the scale of multiplicity, far from each other. But the deeper we move into what lies at the core – that is its foundation in Love, the more we come together. Indeed, under such consideration it is entirely possible that those who do not share in the Christian idea of Baptism, Church ritual and Government, may have a knowledge, and experience of God that is just as real, significant and valid. Thus I have found Simon Critchley’s essay in The Stone of interest as I tease out where I stand in the matter of faith that, as he wrote, seeks to “have it done [for me, according] as [I] have believed.”

Can the experience of faith be shared by those unable to believe in the existence of a transcendent God? Might there be a faith of the faithless?

For a non-Christian, such as myself, but one out of sympathy with the triumphal evangelical atheism of the age, the core commandment of Christian faith has always been a source of both fascinated intrigue and perplexity. What is the status and force of that deceptively simple five-word command: “you shall love your neighbor”? With Gary Gutting’s wise counsel on the relation between philosophy and faith still ringing in our ears, I’d like to explore the possible meaning of these words through a reflection on a hugely important and influential philosopher … : Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55).

Paradoxically, non-Christian faith might be said to reveal the true nature of the faith that Christ sought to proclaim.

In the conclusion to “Works of Love” (1847) — which some consider the central work in Kierkegaard’s extensive and often pseudonymous authorship — he ponders the nature of the commandment of love that he has been wrestling with throughout the book. He stresses the strenuousness and, in the word most repeated in these pages, the rigor of love. As such, Christian love is not, as many non-believers contend, some sort of  “coddling love,” which spares believers any particular effort. Such love can be characterized as “pleasant days or delightful days without self-made cares.” This easy and fanciful idea of love reduces Christianity to “a second childhood” and renders faith infantile.

Kierkegaard then introduces the concept of “the Christian like-for-like,” which is the central and decisive category of “Works of Love.” The latter is introduced by distinguishing it from what Kierkegaard calls “the Jewish like-for-like,” by which he means “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”: namely a conception of obligation based on the equality and reciprocity of self and other. Although, as a cursory reading of Franz Rosenzweig’s “The Star of Redemption” — one of the great works of German-Jewish thought — could easily show, this is a stereotypical and limited picture of Judaism, Kierkegaard’s point is that Christian love cannot be reduced to what he calls the “worldly” conception of love where you do unto others what others do unto you and no more. The Christian like-for-like brackets out the question of what others may owe to me and instead, “makes every relationship to other human beings into a God-relationship.”

This move coincides with a shift from the external to the inward. Although the Christian, for Kierkegaard, “must remain in the world and the relationships of earthly life allotted to him,” he or she views those relationships from the standpoint of inwardness, that is, mediated through the relationship to God. As Kierkegaard puts it emphatically in Part One of “Works of Love”:

Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.

The rigor of Christianity is a conception of love based on radical inequality, namely the absolute difference between the human and the divine. This is how Kierkegaard interprets Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye.”(Matthew, 7:3) The log in my own eye does not permit me to judge the speck in the other’s. Rather, I should abstain from any judgment of what others might or might not do. To judge others is to view matters from the standpoint of externality rather than inwardness. It is arrogance and impertinence. What others owe to me is none of my business.

This is why it is very hard to be Christian. And maybe there are not as many true Christians around as one might have thought. Kierkegaard writes, “Christianly understood you have absolutely nothing to do with what others do to you.” “Essentially,” he continues, “you have only to do with yourself before God.” Once again, the move to inwardness does not turn human beings away from the world, it is rather, “a new version of what other men call reality, this is reality.”

The address of Kierkegaard’s writing has a specific direction: the second person singular, you. He tells the story from the Gospels (versions appears in Matthew and Luke) of the Roman centurion in Capernaum who approached Jesus and asked him to cure his servant or boy, the sense is ambiguous, “sick with the palsy, grievously tormented.”(Matthew, 8:6) After Jesus said that he would visit the boy, the centurion confessed that, as a representative of the occupying imperial authority with soldiers under his command, he did not feel worthy that Jesus should enter his house. When Jesus heard this he declared that he had not experienced a person of such great faith in the whole of Israel. He added, and this is the line that interests Kierkegaard, “Be it done for you, as you believed.”

Love is that disciplined act of absolute spiritual daring that eviscerates the old self.

This story reveals the essential insecurity of faith. Kierkegaard writes that it does not belong to Christian doctrine to vouchsafe that you — “precisely you,” as he emphasizes — have faith. If someone were to say, “it is absolutely certain that I have faith because I have been baptized in the church and follow its rituals and ordinances,” then Kierkegaard would reply, “Be it done for you, as you believed.” The point of the story is that the centurion, although he was not baptized as a Christian, nonetheless believed. As Kierkegaard writes, “in his faith, the Gospel is first agospel.” The New Testament Greek for “gospel” is euaggelion, which can mean good tidings, but can also be thought of as the act of proclamation or pledging.  On this view, faith is a proclamation or pledge that brings the inward subject of faith into being over against an external everydayness. Such a proclamation is as true for the non-Christian as for the Christian. Indeed, it is arguably more true for the non-Christian, because their faith is not supported by the supposed guarantee of baptism, creedal dogma, regular church attendance or some notion that virtue will be rewarded with happiness if not here on earth, then in the afterlife. Thus, paradoxically, non-Christian faith might be said to reveal the true nature of the faith that Christ sought to proclaim. Even — and indeed especially — those who are denominationally faithless can have an experience of faith. If faith needs to be underpinned by some sort of doctrinal security, then inwardness becomes externalized and the strenuous rigor of faith evaporates.

What sort of certainty, then, is the experience of faith? Kierkegaard writes, and again the second person singular direction of address should be noted: “It is eternally certain that it will be done for you as you believe, but the certainty of faith, or the certainty that you, you in particular, believe, you must win at every moment with God’s help, consequently not in some external way.” (Emphasis mine)

Kierkegaard insists — and one feels here the force of his polemic against the irreligious, essentially secular order of so-called Christendom, in his case what he saw as the pseudo-Christianity of the Danish National Church — that no pastor or priest has the right to say that one has faith or not according to doctrines like baptism and the like. To proclaim faith is to abandon such external or worldly guarantees. Faith has the character of a continuous “striving … in which you get occasion to be tried every day.” This is why faith and the commandment of love that it seeks to sustain is not law. It has no coercive, external force. As Rosenzweig writes, “The commandment of love can only proceed from the mouth of the lover.” He goes on to contrast this with law, “which reckons with times, with a future, with duration.” By contrast, the commandment of love “knows only the moment; it awaits the result in the very moment of its promulgation.” The commandment of love is mild and merciful, but, as Kierkegaard insists, “there is rigor in it.” We might say love is that disciplined act of absolute spiritual daring that eviscerates the old self of externality so something new and inward can come into being.

Faith is a subjective strength that only finds its power to act through an admission of weakness.

As Kierkegaard puts in earlier in “Works of Love,” citing Paul, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”(Romans, 13:8) It sounds simple. But what is implicit in this minimal-sounding command is a conception of love as an experience of infinite debt — a debt that it is impossible to repay, “When a man is gripped by love, he feels that this is like being in infinite debt.” To be is to be in debt — I owe therefore I am.

If sin is the theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the self, then love is the experience of a countermovement to sin that is orientated around a demand that exceeds the capacity or ability of the self. Love is shaped in relation to what, in my parlance, can be called an infinite demand. Kierkegaard writes, and the double emphasis on the “moment” that finds an echo in Rosenzweig should be noted, “God’s relationship to a human being is the infinitizing at every moment of that which at every moment is in a man.” Withdrawn into inwardness and solitude (“If you have never been solitary, you have never discovered that God exists,” Kierkegaard writes), each and every word and action of the self resounds through the infinite demand of God.

At this point, in the penultimate paragraph of “Works of Love” Kierkegaard shifts to auditory imagery. God is a vast echo chamber where each sound, “the slightest sound,” is duplicated and resounds back loudly into the subject’s ears. God is nothing more than the name for the repetition of each word that the subject utters. But it is a repetition that resounds with “the intensification of infinity.” In what Kierkegaard calls “the urban confusion” of external life, it is nigh impossible to hear this repetitive echo of the infinite demand. This is why the bracketing out of externality is essential: “externality is too dense a body for resonance, and the sensual ear is too hard-of-hearing to catch the eternal’s repetition.” We need to cultivate the inner or inward ear that infinitizes the words and actions of the self. As Kierkegaard makes clear, what he is counseling is not “to sit in the anxiety of death, day in and day out, listening for the repetition of the eternal.” What is rather being called for is a rigorous and activist conception of faith that proclaims itself into being at each instant without guarantee or security and which abides with the infinite demand of love.

Faith is not a like-for-like relationship of equals, but the asymmetry of the like-to-unlike. It is a subjective strength that only finds its power to act through an admission of weakness. Faith is an enactment of the self in relation to an infinite demand that both exceeds my power and yet requires all my power. Such an experience of faith is not only shared by those who are faithless from a creedal or denominational perspective, but can — in my view — be had by them in an exemplary manner. Like the Roman centurion of whom Kierkegaard writes, it is perhaps the faithless who can best sustain the rigor of faith without requiring security, guarantees and rewards: “Be it done for you, as you believed.”

Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and part-time professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He is the author of several books, including “Infinitely Demanding.” His new book, “The Faith of the Faithless,” is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2011.

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Raimon Panikkar, ‘apostle of inter-faith dialogue,’ dies

“Overcoming tribal Christology,” Panikkar said, “is the task of third Christian millennium.”

Aug. 31, 2010

A couple of years ago I sat with Raimon Panikkar at the evening meal in his home in the mountain village of Tevertet, Catalunya (Spain), with my Bavarian friend Dr Christiane May-Ropers. In the midst of our meal Raimon received a telephone call. It came in from the Vatican. It was the Pope. As Christiane and I sat with him at table, Raimon and His Holiness discussed the then still-fresh wounds opened up by the Pope’s recent unintended though regrettably inflammatory speech regarding the Prophet Mohammed. It was extraordinary to sit at the meal table while this conversation was going on. It seemed the Holy Father sought Raimon’s assistance resolving this awkward situation in some positive way. His life was like that; offering others what he had in his vast storehouse of wisdom and experience, and of course, from his unequalled experience of interfaith dialogue.

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For many years I had known of Raimon through his written work of course, but it wasn’t until my mentor, the late Dom Bede Griffiths died that Raimon and I became friends and travelled together. I’m grateful, and always will be, for his guidance and encouragement over the years. His courage and depth of knowledge, his ability with languages, his wisdom and insight – all made him a marvellous influence, not just in my life, but in the lives of all he touched, whether personally, or through his books and lectures. I shall miss him.

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And now to this excellent obituary by Joseph Prabhu . . .

Professor Raimon Panikkar, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century in the areas of comparative religion, theology, and inter-religious dialogue, died at his home in Tavertet, near Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 26. He was 91.

Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966-1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest and poet.

Panikkar was born the son of an Indian Hindu father and a Spanish Catholic mother Nov. 3, 1918. He received a conventional Catholic education at a Jesuit high school in Barcelona before launching his university studies in the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid. Shortly thereafter, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Panikkar was able to take advantage of his status as the son of a father who was a British citizen to go to the University of Bonn in Germany to continue his studies. When World War II started in 1939, Panikkar returned to Spain and completed the first of his three doctorates, this one in philosophy, at the University of Madrid in 1946.

It was around 1940 that he met Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, with whom he had a close relationship. It was at Escriva’s urging that he trained for the Catholic priesthood and was ordained in 1946. Panikkar continued to be associated with Opus Dei for about twenty years, breaking effectively with the organization only in the early 1960s. He was tight-lipped about this period of his life, saying only that he did not regret it. It is clear, however, when one compares the Panikkar of the 1940s and the early 1950s with the later Panikkar better known to the world as a pioneer of inter-religious dialogue, that he had moved a long way from his early roots.

In late 1954 when he was already 36, Panikkar visited India, the land of his father, for the first time. It proved to be a watershed, a decisive reorientation of his interests and of his theology.

He had entered a dramatically new world, religious and cultural, from the Catholic Europe of his youth. The transformation was aided by his meetings and close friendship with three monks, who like him were attempting to live and to incarnate the Christian life in Indian, predominantly Hindu and Buddhist forms: Jules Monchanin (1895-1957), Henri Le Saux, also know as Swami Abhishiktananda (1910-1973), and Bede Griffiths, the English Benedictine monk (1906-1993). All four of them, in different ways, discovered and cherished the riches and the deep spiritual wisdom of the Indic traditions, and attempted to live out and express their core Christian convictions in Hindu and Buddhist forms. To some extent this multiple belonging was made possible by their embrace of Advaita, the Indic idea of non-dualism, which sees the deep, often hidden, connections between traditions without in any way minimizing the differences between them.

One of Panikkar’s many striking sentences looking back on his life’s journey asserts: “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian.” A wealth of meaning lies in that assertion. Christianity in its historical evolution began as a Jewish tradition and then spread to the Greco-Roman world, acquiring along the way Greek and Roman cultural expressions which have given it a certain form and character. Panikkar, having grown up and having been trained in a traditional Catholic and neo-Thomist environment, had a profound knowledge of, and respect for, that tradition. This knowledge prepared him for discussions with some of the great minds of 20th-century Catholicism: Jean Danielou, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthazar, and others. He was also invited to take part in the Synod of Rome and the Second Vatical Council. But Panikkar did not confuse or conflate historical contingency with spiritual truth. In Hinduism and Buddhism Panikkar found other languages, in addition to Biblical Hebrew, Greek philosophy, and Latin Christianity, to express the core convictions (the kerygma) of the Christian tradition.

That was the main thesis of The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, which Panikkar originally presented as a doctoral thesis to the Lateran University in Rome in 1961, based as it was on a close textual comparison between Thomas Aquinas and Sankara’s interpretation of a canonical Hindu scripture, the Brahma-Sutras. Christ and his teaching are not, so Panikkar argues, the monopoly or exclusive property of Christianity seen as a historical religion. Rather, Christ is the universal symbol of divine-human unity, the human face of God. Christianity approaches Christ in a particular and unique way, informed by its own history and spiritual evolution. But Christ vastly transcends Christianity. Panikkar calls the name “Christ” the “Supername,” in line with St. Paul’s “name above every name” (Phil 2:9), because it is a name that can and must assume other names, like Rama or Krishna or Ishvara.

This theological insight was crucial for Panikkar because it provided the basis of the inter-religious dialogue that he and Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths were both advocating and practicing themselves. Far from diluting or in any way watering down core Christian beliefs and practices, such dialogue, in addition to fostering inter-religious understanding and harmony provided an indispensable medium for deepening the Christian faith. Such dialogue provides an insight and entry point into other, non-Christian names and manifestations of Christ. This was particularly important for Panikkar because together with other Asian theologians he saw how historical Christianity had attempted, especially during its colonial periods, to convert Christ into an imperial God, with a license to conquer and triumph over other Gods. This for Panikkar is the challenge of the post-colonial period inaugurated in the mid-to-late twentieth century and continuing into our present and the future. In his words, “To the third Christian millennium is reserved the task of overcoming a tribal Christology by a Christophany which allows Christians to see the work of Christ everywhere, without assuming that they have a better grasp or a monopoly of that Mystery, which has been revealed to them in a unique way.”

Needless-to-say, such striking ideas carefully and rigorously argued and dramatically expressed got the attention of religious thinkers and secular institutions around the world. Panikkar was invited to teach in Rome and then at Harvard (1966-1971) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1971-1987). He was now, as Leonard Swidler, occupant of the Chair of Catholic Thought at Temple University, called him, “the apostle of inter-faith dialogue and inter-cultural understanding.”

Conversant in a dozen or so languages and fluent in at least six, he traveled tirelessly around the world, lecturing, writing, preaching, and conducting retreats. His famous Easter service in his Santa Barbara days would attract visitors from all corners of the globe. Well before dawn they would climb up the mountain near his home in Montecito, meditate quietly in the darkness once they reached the top, and then salute the sun as it arose over the horizon. Panikkar would bless the elements — air, earth, water and fire — and all the surrounding forms of life — plant, animal, and human — and then celebrate Mass and the Eucharist. It was a profound “cosmotheandric” celebration with the human, cosmic, and divine dimensions of life being affirmed, reverenced, and brought into a deep harmony. The celebration after the formal service at Panikkar’s home resembled in some respects the feast of Pentecost as described in the New Testament, where peoples of many tongues engaged in animated conversation.

At the center of these celebrations, retreats, and lectures stood Panikkar himself and his arresting personality. People who heard or encountered him could not help but be struck by this physically small man who packed a punch and who managed to combine the quiet dignity of a sage, the profundity of a scholar, the depth of a contemplative, and the warmth and charm of a friend in his sparkling personality.

Not surprisingly, universities around the world, Catholic and non-Catholic, invited him to give lectures. To mention just a few among hundreds delivered, he was invited to give the William Noble Lecture at Harvard in 1973, the Thomas Merton Lecture at Columbia in 1982, and the Cardinal Bellarmine Lecture at the University of St. Louis in 1991. The most prestigious invitation, however, came from the University of Edinburgh, where Panikkar delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1989. These have recently been published by Orbis Books as The Rhythm of Being. Panikkar thus joined the select company of William James, Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer, and Reinhold Niebuhr to mention just a few of the most famous Gifford lecturers. He was in fact the first Indian and the first Asian invited to give these lectures.

Some of Panikkar’s other well-known books are The Vedic Experience; The Intrareligious Dialogue; Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics; The Silence of God; The Cosmotheandric Experience; and The Invisible Harmony. Jaca Books in Italy is bringing out his collected works (Omnia Opera) in some 30 volumes, and Continuum Books in England and the Untied States is planning an English edition. There is also a helpful Web site www.raimonpanikkar.org.

Ours is a new era in world history, where thanks to globalization and the increasing communication between cultures and religions it is vital that there be a well-developed Catholic theology of religions. Panikkar was one of the pioneering and paradigmatic theologians of this new era. He has left us a rich and many-sided legacy from the liturgical and pastoral to the theological and sapiential. It behooves us who follow him to notice, absorb, and extend that legacy.

[Joseph Prabhu is a professor of philosophy and comparative religion at California State University, Los Angeles.]

Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk

In the 07/20/2010 issue of the “Washington Post.”

Over the last thirty years I have had the good fortune to have visited and stayed in various monastic communities in Australia, the USA, the UK, Thailand, Nepal, India and Tibet. My monastic friends have come from such communities as: New Norcia’s Benedictine Monastery in Western Australia, St Benedict’s Monastery at Arcadia near Sydney, The Trappist (Cistercian) communities at Snowmass, Colorado and at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky, Camaldolese hermitages in Arezzo, Italy, at Big Sur, California and at the late Bede Griffiths’ ashram at Shantivanam, near Trichy in South India. I am an honorary member of ancient Dhe-Tsang Buddhist monastery in the remote Gyalrong Region of Eastern Tibet, and have completed a month-long meditation retreat at Kopan Buddhist monastery in the mountains around Kathmandu, Nepal. As a young man I sat in vipassana meditation at Suan Mokkh Forest Monastery at Surat Thani in Thailand, and at Bodhinyana Forest Monastery in the hills around Perth. I often have stayed with the yogi-monks at the Divine Life ashram in Rishikesh on the River Ganges. During the years I gave lectures on the Western Contemplative tradition in Dharamsala, in the Himalayas I was guest of the Tibetan communities at the Nechung and Namgyal Monasteries, and at Geden Choeling Nunnery.

I have learned a number of lessons from the monks and nuns who live this way – according to the Rules as set by their various founders. Though living a far less ‘active’ life than me, I can say that the values and practices that inspire, underpin and motivate their lives have informed much of what I do and how I do it – and above all how I imagine the type of leadership I offer – to myself and others. Stephen Martin, who wrote the following article in the Washington Post, succinctly enumerates and describes five ‘secrets’ that point to their success as members of communities that have thrived, somewhere in the world, continuously for many centuries.

Stephen Martin, who explores leadership as a speechwriter and as a business columnist for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, has written for America, Commonweal and U.S. News & World Report.

Trappist monks live apart from the world. But their rich and ancient traditions also offer vital lessons on leadership for those of us living in it. The Roman Catholic order, founded in Citeaux, France, has practiced prayer nonstop for nearly a thousand years. Responsible for supporting themselves, they have been entrepreneurs for just as long.

As times and market conditions have changed, Trappists have kept up by reinventing their businesses continually. Since the founding of Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, S.C., in 1949, for example, the monks there have sold cinnamon buns, ventured into logging, run a large egg farm and, most recently, started selling native plants. How have Trappists thrived through the centuries? Here are five of their secrets:

1.Get (really) disciplined. As in waking up at 3 a.m. every day for the rest of your life. That’s when Trappists rise for Vigils, their first community prayer of the day. They will gather for worship five more times before turning in at 8 p.m. In between, they work, study and pray some more. Their schedule almost never varies. Their meals rarely change. They talk as little as possible. Everything about their lives is ordered toward their mission of praising God.

On the surface, this routine seems like a soul-killing exercise in boredom. But tremendous focus paves their path to salvation. “The monk has a feel for the stark and the spare,” writes Michael Downey in his book, Trappist. “Fasting, abstinence, and keeping vigil are disciplines embraced so as to stay alert, awake for the coming of God.”

2.Throw away the key . At Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., where I recently made a weekend retreat, the doors to the guest rooms lock only from the inside. When you go out, there’s no way to secure your laptop or Blackberry or car keys. It’s a rather discomfiting reminder of what makes the Trappist world go round: trust, in God and your brothers. Spiritual growth doesn’t happen when we’re holding back or playing defense. It takes openness.

“Anytime you get put together with 15 or 20 people you don’t know, you’ll find things about them that are objectionable, and they’ll find them about you,” said Daniel DeVoe, the guest master at Holy Cross Abbey who is seriously thinking of becoming a Trappist himself. The trick is learning to appreciate the strengths of others, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to acknowledge your own shortcomings and work to fix them. It’s all about building trust, the ancient glue that, against all odds, holds together monastic organizations to this day.

3.Know your customer. During a retreat several years ago at Mepkin Abbey, I found myself alone in the gift shop with Brother Stephen, an elderly, startlingly fit, lifelong monk. He rang up a few items, swiped my credit card and asked how I was doing. I asked customers the same thing all the time when I clerked at a grocery store in high school. Unlike me, however, he actually cared about the answer.

I confessed, frankly, to being tired with a busy job, grad school, a young son and another child on the way. There wasn’t a lot of time for prayer, which was what I probably needed most. He nodded and remarked that perhaps helping raise my family was a form of prayer in itself. We talked for another 10 minutes. More insights, tailored just for me, followed — and I shouldn’t have been surprised.

As Michael Downey explains, the work of monks “is not to be understood primarily as a product for consumers in a marketplace. …The fruits of the monk’s labor are sold as a means of livelihood, but they are sold to persons, real people with deep needs, not bottom-line consumers.”

4.Shut up. A monk’s life is a study in humility. It’s about setting aside personal plans and ambitions for the good of the community, saying goodbye to worldly pleasures and doing highly repetitive work with few tangible rewards. It’s a daily exercise in probing your flaws and coming to terms with your own insignificance. This adds up to a perpetual assault on pride, and it starts with quieting down and listening to what your brothers have to say.

“We’re all so impressed by what we know,” said DeVoe, the Holy Cross guest master. But rather than overestimating our own abilities, he said, real knowledge comes from paying attention to those around us. Monks have a longstanding tradition of turning to spiritual directors for guidance in the contemplative life. The feedback they get gives them a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses and serves as a spark for change. “You learn things about yourself that you wouldn’t know otherwise,” DeVoe said.

5.Live in the margins. In his book Leaders Make the Future, futurist Bob Johansen notes that “true innovations are likely to come from the margins that are stretched, rather than from the mainstream.”

Trappists make their home in the margins. They labor in obscurity, their chosen path makes little sense to most people, and they’re criticized, sometimes even by fellow Christians, for closeting themselves away when they could be out in the world helping people with urgent problems. They have Web sites and use e-mail judiciously, but they take care not to swamp themselves with information and distraction. They remain, in other words, as counter-cultural as ever, and therein is their strength.

Over the centuries, as Downey writes, monasteries around the world (and not just Trappist ones) have served as “renowned centers of peace and refuge, the focal points of culture and education.” That’s surely because they have stood beside the mainstream and observed it carefully but never immersed themselves in it. Their perspective is always a bit out of step with the times and refreshingly original as a result.

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men,” Thomas Merton, America’s most renowned Trappist monk, wrote in his landmark autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.

More than 60 years since its publication, and centuries since their founding, Trappists still go their own way, focused and unhurried, free of the need for the world’s approval. By training, they’re too modest to say their experience with leadership can teach us anything, but we’d be wise to learn all we can from them anyway.

If you wish to have more information about Meath Conlan’s spiritual tours to India and beyond, please view my TOURS page here, or email Meath at: meath@diversejourneys.com

FRIENDSHIP IN AN AGE OF ECONOMICS

By: Todd May, in The New York Times

Todd May is Professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “The Philosophy of Foucault” and “Death,” and is at work on a book about friendship in the contemporary period.

My old friend Dom Bede Griffiths in the 1970s communicated with two of his closest friends, Martyn Skinner and Hugh Waterman, how lonely he had become. He clung to their friendship, as they were probably the only people who had a real insight into his heart. He said that “apart from you two I have very few friends left now – so many have died and others have ceased to write. Your letters are so full of feeling and make me feel one with you more perhaps than ever before.” in Shirley du Boulay’s (1998) book, “Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths,” Rider, UK. p. 151

This little insight into the character of my old friend forms the backdrop to this article in the New York Times, by Todd May. It was because I enjoyed such a refined quality of friendship with Bede over many years that May’s article drew me in contemplation of friendship generally, something which for most of us, if we are graced with it in its true form, remains a mystery; something that we value and are grateful for in whatever measure it is given to us, yet we can hardly fathom as to why we have been so privileged by it. Now for Todd May’s essay:

When I was 17 years old, I had the honor of being the youngest person in the history of New York Hospital to undergo surgery for a herniated disc. This was at a time in which operations like this kept people in the hospital for over a week. The day after my surgery, I awoke to find a friend of mine sitting in a chair across from my bed. I don’t remember much about his visit. I am sure I was too sedated to say much. But I will not forget that he visited me on that day, and sat there for I know not how long, while my humanity was in the care of a morphine drip.We benefit from our close friendships, but they are not a matter of calculable gain and loss. While we draw pleasure from them, they are not a matter solely of consuming pleasure.

The official discourses of our relations with one another do not have much to say about the afternoon my friend spent with me. Our age, what we might call the age of economics, is in thrall to two types of relationships which reflect the lives we are encouraged to lead. There are consumer relationships, those that we participate in for the pleasure they bring us. And there are entrepreneurial relationships, those that we invest in hoping they will bring us some return. In a time in which the discourse of economics seeks to hold us in its grip, this should come as no surprise.

The encouragement toward relationships of consumption is nowhere more prominently on display than in reality television. Jon and Kate, the cast of “Real World,” the Kardashians, and their kin across the spectrum conduct their lives for our entertainment. It is available to us in turn to respond in a minor key by displaying our own relationships on YouTube. Or, barring that, we can collect friends like shoes or baseball cards on Facebook.

Entrepreneurial relationships have, in some sense, always been with us. Using people for one’s ends is not a novel practice. It has gained momentum, however, as the reduction of governmental support has diminished social solidarity and the rise of finance capitalism has stressed investment over production. The economic fruits of the latter have lately been with us, but the interpersonal ones, while more persistent, remain veiled. Where nothing is produced except personal gain, relationships come loose from their social moorings.

Aristotle thought that there were three types of friendship: those of pleasure, those of usefulness, and true friendship. In friendships of pleasure, “it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people, but because they find them pleasant.” In the latter, “those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other.” For him, the first is characteristic of the young, who are focused on momentary enjoyment, while the second is often the province of the old, who need assistance to cope with their frailty. What the rise of recent public rhetoric and practice has accomplished is to cast the first two in economic terms while forgetting about the third.

In our lives, however, few of us have entirely forgotten about the third ­ true friendship. We may not define it as Aristotle did ­ friendship among the already virtuous ­ but we live it in our own way nonetheless. Our close friendships stand as a challenge to the tenor of our times.

Conversely, our times challenge those friendships. This is why we must reflect on friendship; so that it doesn’t slip away from us under the pressure of a dominant economic discourse. We are all, and always, creatures of our time. In the case of friendship, we must push back against that time if we are to sustain what, for many of us, are among the most important elements of our lives. It is those elements that allow us to sit by the bedside of a friend: not because we know it is worth it, but because the question of worth does not even arise.Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic.

There is much that might be said about friendships. They allow us to see ourselves from the perspective of another. They open up new interests or deepen current ones. They offer us support during difficult periods in our lives. The aspect of friendship that I would like to focus on is its non-economic character. Although we benefit from our close friendships, these friendships are not a matter of calculable gain and loss. While we draw pleasure from them, they are not a matter solely of consuming pleasure. And while the time we spend with our friends and the favors we do for them are often reciprocated in an informal way, we do not spend that time or offer those favors in view of the reciprocation that might ensue.

Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic. Consumer pleasures are transient. They engulf us for a short period and then they fade, like a drug. That is why they often need to be renewed periodically. Entrepreneurship, when successful, leads to the victory of personal gain. We cultivate a colleague in the field or a contact outside of it in the hope that it will advance our career or enhance our status. When it does, we feel a sense of personal success. In both cases, there is the enjoyment of what comes to us through the medium of other human beings.

Friendships worthy of the name are different. Their rhythm lies not in what they bring to us, but rather in what we immerse ourselves in. To be a friend is to step into the stream of another’s life. It is, while not neglecting my own life, to take pleasure in another’s pleasure, and to share their pain as partly my own. The borders of my life, while not entirely erased, become less clear than they might be. Rather than the rhythm of pleasure followed by emptiness, or that of investment and then profit, friendships follow a rhythm that is at once subtler and more persistent. This rhythm is subtler because it often (although not always) lacks the mark of a consumed pleasure or a successful investment. But even so, it remains there, part of the ground of our lives that lies both within us and without.

To be this ground, friendships have a relation to time that is foreign to an economic orientation. Consumer relationships are focused on the momentary present. It is what brings immediate pleasure that matters. Entrepreneurial relationships have more to do with the future. How I act toward others is determined by what they might do for me down the road. Friendships, although lived in the present and assumed to continue into the future, also have a deeper tie to the past than either of these. Past time is sedimented in a friendship. It accretes over the hours and days friends spend together, forming the foundation upon which the character of a relationship is built. This sedimentation need not be a happy one. Shared experience, not just common amusement or advancement, is the ground of friendship.

Of course, to have friendships like this, one must be prepared to take up the past as a ground for friendship. This ground does not come to us, ready-made. We must make it our own. And this, perhaps, is the contemporary lesson we can draw from Aristotle’s view that true friendship requires virtuous partners, that “perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good.” If we are to have friends, then we must be willing to approach some among our relationships as offering an invitation to build something outside the scope of our own desires. We must be willing to forgo pleasure or usefulness for something that emerges not within but between one of us and another.

We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning. They render us vulnerable, and in doing so they add dimensions of significance to our lives that can only arise from being, in each case, friends with this or that particular individual, a party to this or that particular life.

It is precisely this non-economic character that is threatened in a society in which each of us is thrown upon his or her resources and offered only the bywords of ownership, shopping, competition, and growth. It is threatened when we are encouraged to look upon those around us as the stuff of our current enjoyment or our future advantage. It is threatened when we are led to believe that friendships without a recognizable gain are, in the economic sense, irrational. Friendships are not without why, perhaps, but they are certainly without that particular why.

In turn, however, it is friendship that allows us to see that there is more than what the prevalent neoliberal discourse places before us as our possibilities. In a world often ruled by the dollar and what it can buy, friendship, like love, opens other vistas. The critic John Berger once said of one of his friendships, “We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.” To be able to sit by the bed of another, watching him sleep, waiting for nothing else, is to understand where else we might be.

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.

The Renewal of the Contemplative Life

by Shirley du Boulay

Shirley du Boulay and I met in Oxford where she then lived. Since then we have become friends. Shirley faithfully recorded some of my memories of my friend and mentor, the late Dom Bede Griffiths whom I had known since 1977. She selected some of these and included them in her massive biography of Bede – “Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths”, first published by Rider. I am delighted to post this article by Shirley from the Bede Griffiths Trust website: www.bedegriffiths.com

Bede Griffiths was often consulted by people seeking spiritual guidance. A young woman still remembers asking his advice, and … what he said: ‘I can only tell you one thing – meditate.’ Bede’s life was held firm on the rock of his meditation practice; everything else faded into insignificance by comparison. In meditation he found the still point beyond the world of duality, the reconciliation of opposites for which he longed. The regular practice of meditation was the single thing that most attracted people to Shantivanam; the effect that years of meditation had on Bede was what drew people to him.

How then, did he come to practice meditation? Had it been part of his life since his first steps towards God? As a young man he had powerful experiences in prayer, living through a turbulent period that brought him close to breakdown. He would stay up all night in prayer, knowing that it would leave him weak and exhausted and driven into further confusion by considering Hindu and Buddhist mysticism. Was God a person, as Christians believe, or could he be conceived impersonally, like the Hindu Brahman? Was Absolute Reality a state, like Buddhist Nirvana? His mind was in chaos; he thought he was going mad.

Finding his vocation as a Benedictine monk brought him stability and comfort, but though he valued the meditative reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers, increasingly he found that this was not enough. In fact he never found his ideal of contemplation, a direct experience of God in prayer, in the monastery, eventually realising that this tradition had been obscured by the emphasis on philosophy and theology. For him true meditation was not an exercise in discursive reasoning, its aim should be ‘to pass beyond the limits of rational consciousness and awake to the inner life of the Spirit, that is to the indwelling presence of God.’

He was also saddened that western Christianity gave scant attention to the position of the body in prayer and indeed that so few Catholics taught meditation in the sense in which he was coming to understand the word. He was deeply in sympathy with all who felt the need for contemplative prayer, recognising that they were no longer satisfied with theories about God, they longed for direct experience, longed to learn a method of meditation, a way to reach the centre, the point beyond thought. He was impressed by people like Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington [and their work for Centering Prayer] and most of all his fellow Benedictine John Main; indeed it is largely thanks to their influence that a Christian contemplative life is now within reach of all.

What then, was his own method of prayer? He would sit outside his hut for at least an hour in the morning and again in the evening, his practice being the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner’,) which, after many years, he had come to find ‘goes on almost always when my mind is not otherwise occupied.’ He explained his own practice of meditation with great precision:

‘To answer your questions 1) My meditation period is normally an hour in the morning & an hour in the evening, but it is sometimes shortened slightly (3/4 hour) & sometimes lengthened to 2 or 3 hours, but not commonly.

2) I find that the words of the Jesus Prayer normally repeat themselves. Sometimes it goes on rather mechanically, the mind wanders; sometimes it seems to gather strength & one prays in a concentrated manner.

3) Sometimes the words ‘fade out’, but rarely completely so. They seem to go on in the ‘heart’. One may not notice them, but one finds them going on, as it were.

4) If thoughts really intervene and cut off the prayer, then I renew the mantra again – or it renews itself, as soon as I realise what has happened.

5) Yes, I regard the concentration on the person of Jesus as very important. I feel that it puts one in touch with the concrete reality of his person, & ‘focuses’ the mind. To me this is the difference between Christian & Buddhist & Hindu prayer. Christian prayer reaches the Centre in & through Christ.’

Towards the end of his life Bede’s great desire and vision was the renewal of the contemplative life. He felt we needed both small groups that meet regularly and centres where people can go for longer periods. He also wanted to found lay communities and drafted documents on the life he envisaged. He suggested that the people meditating in the tradition taught by John Main were setting an example, as groups of meditators, usually meeting once a week, were established all over the world. Bede wanted to take this idea further, forming small communities of men and women, married and single, secular and religious, dedicated to a common life of prayer and meditation while continuing to work in the world. He envisaged independent communities with no central authority, united in some kind of network. They would be primarily Christian, though open to visitors of any tradition and having contacts with a wide variety of religious organisations. Most important was that members of these communities should recognise a transcendent reality, which he saw as the greatest need in the world today.

‘Unless human life is centred on the awareness of a transcendent reality which embraces all humanity and the whole universe and at the same time transcends our present level of life and consciousness, there is no hope for humanity as a whole. The aim of every community should be to enable its members to realise the transcendent mystery in their lives and communicate their experience to others.’

Bede Griffiths died in 1993 leaving us his inspiration. Now it is up to us to bring his vision to reality.

The Author:

Shirley du Boulay is a free-lance writer living in Oxford, England. She was for many years a producer for the BBC, first with radio, then in the Religious Department of Television. She is also a contributor to various collections of articles and to the International Catholic magazine The Tablet. Her books include biographies of St. Teresa of Avila, Desmond Tutu, Dame Cicely Saunders and Father Bede Griffiths – “Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths” 2003. O Books, Hants. UK. Her most recent book is The Cave of the Heart: The Life of Swami Abhishiktananda, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY 2005

“I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its songs above my head, and then sank still singing to rest … I remember now the feeling of awe that cam 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.”

Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 9

Bede Griffiths encouraged all visitors to the ashram to remember the past, especially the times when we became conscious of spiritual depths. Typically he supported people when they shared with him how they recalled joy; favourite possessions; significant adventures, and; favourite fantasies. He saw recalling the past as a way of bringing positive influence into the present and future.

Early memories of childhood tend to focus around my maternal grandparents’ farm. This place, and the people who lived there, provide me with my roots. I agree with Simone Weil who said that, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and the least recognised need of the human soul.” This farm is still memory-fresh with familiar “presences” of the wider family connections: grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Certain rooms within the main house I remember more than others. Secret places in the bush; dead, fallen trees that I turned into castles or spaceships; listening to bird sounds, and animals; the extensive garden where I used to play and make-believe – is the soil in which originates my personal and spiritual roots. They are among those things that form the ground, or a kind of “golden string,” enabling me, when thrown back on the world or surrounded by darkness, to find my way to the light of meaning and self-transcendence.

Someone once said there is nothing more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially the memory of childhood, and of home. People talk a great deal about education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man or woman carries with them many such memories into life, they are safe to the end of their days.

In the last few years I returned to that place in the country, “Wensleydale Farm” in the South West of Western Australia, and recorded it in my journal.  Memories are true, that is, they are memories and not inventions or fantasies. Whether they accurately represent past events or not, however, is irrelevant; the process of construction of the meanings of those events is the focus on memory work.

I was excited by the prospect of seeing those old walls of a house that was, from time to time, my childhood home. An entry in my journal of the visit to our old farm follows:

Upon entering the farmhouse, which was in the Australian Federation architectural style, I noted that the ballroom is now a home for birds, lizards and mice, which make their nests in the dried leaves. I wanted in particular to visit my favourite place of retreat; the tiny music room with its ‘English Roses’ carpet and deep, disappear-into lounge chairs. Although relatively tiny, it was the main room in which my grandmother stored the presents before Christmas. I recalled old monotint photographs, a small table with figurine and tall glass lamp, such as the one I carried to bed every night. There were also the high walls on which hung oil paintings in the style of the day: of cranes and white swans on mystic lakes with bull-rushes and distant mountains. Such items evoked a feeling that there was a larger world to be explored beyond the outer fences of the farm.

Looking down, I dropped below the line where the floor once was, into the weeds. That cool, dark, wood-polish-smelling refuge, silent in summer days and glowingly warm in winter’s crisp coldness, was now a floor-less husk of mildew-blooming walls. As a once-upon-a-time place of Christmas wonder, it had all but crumbled away, though, for a while, the main body of the house would continue to support the little shrine it held. For “the old place”, as we used to call it, there was no escaping its future of decay and eventual disappearance. I knew that as long as I had the power to remember those bright, happy family Christmases, this place and its people would not be forgotten, and that they would continue to be always real and enduring.

My early years were coloured by a number of evocative themes. For instance: the sense of connection to extended family and friends; the sense that there was always more than what could be seen or talked about with ordinary sight and limited rational perspectives; experiencing the solitary human need to be bodily and spiritually refreshed in silent spaces; the desire to explore beyond the boundaries; the sentiment of seeking out, being in, and needing to hold memories of safe, familiar friendly places; the sense that some places more than others, are safe and draw us because of the heart-skills of those who created them; the struggle to make sense, and the realisation of life being in inevitable and continual change; the attendant lesson that life brings us all sooner or later – of the necessary and personal realisation in one’s life of letting go and surrender.

Bede Griffiths found no words to really get to the heart of and convey adequately his experience on the playing fields of his school days. He could only point in the general direction and “suggest what it meant.” But he is sure that it was one of the decisive events of his life, for up to that time he “lived the life of a normal schoolboy, quite content with the world as he found it.” From this event on he became aware of another world of beauty and mystery that he thought existed only in poetry. With reinvigorated access to his physical senses he describes his new perspectives: “The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge, the scent of lime tree blossoms caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle came to me like visitations from another world.” As well as the physical senses being awakened, his emotions were also overwhelmingly enlivened, so that Nature began to wear a kind of sacramental character for him, the result of feeling “the presence of unfathomable mystery … [that was] drawing me to itself.”

Bede constantly returned to this theme in the course of his spiritual direction to ashram visitors. He reminded people to be open to the often hidden moments of grace in their everyday lives. To not attend to these is to lose them. He regarded these moments as a kind of “golden string” of grace which is given to everyone, but only if they don’t let the “old habits of thought reassert themselves” and the world returns to its so-called normal appearance. By recognising the “golden string” of these everyday grace-filled moments we are “freed from the flux of time and see something of the eternal order that underlies it.” We are, he writes in his autobiography, “no longer isolated individuals … [but] parts of a whole, [and] elements in a universal harmony” and urges us to keep this in mind when “we are thrown back on the world, to live in its light and shape our lives by its law … is to find our way out of the labyrinth of life.”

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I have a number of spiritual tours to India that included visiting Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in December 2010, and then in January and February 2011. If you would like to know more about these, please visit my Tours page in this website, or email me, Dr Meath Conlan: meath@diversejourneys.com

I am also available to present retreats and workshops / seminars on Bede Griffiths and his contemplative vision. Please send for a form if you wish to discuss with me about this possibility for your organisation or region, or advise me if you would like to receive my periodic newsletter.

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BEDE GRIFFITHS: FRIEND & GIFT OF THE SPIRIT

Dom Bede Griffiths, Saccidananda Ashram. 17 December 1988 - Photo taken by Dr Meath Conlan

ISBN – 087243270X

ISBN-13: 9780872432703

A Spiritual Journey with Meath Conlan

From the Australian wilderness to the tropical landscape of South India, Meath Conlan traces his spiritual journey under the guidance of the late spiritual master Bede Griffiths. He shares with us a fascinating and intimate portrait of this humble and holy man, who was not only a mentor but friend and confidante. Bede’s conversations and wisdom come to life through Conlan’s recollections and vivid pictures which chronicle their years of friendship. The twenty-eight full color photos from the author’s private collection include public celebrations, interfaith meetings with world religious leaders, as well as private moments of contemplation and worship.

“What a unique and sacred school of learning . . . Since, as Bede Griffiths insists, God’s call to contemplation is universal, everyone should find practical and profound guidance in these pages.” From the Foreword by Sister Pascaline Coff, OSB

Meath Conlan has represented the Holy See’s Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions to the People’s Republic of China and at the invitation of the Dalai Lama, lectured on Christian Spirituality to Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayas. In addition to his publications, Dr. Conlan has a private practice as a spiritual director.

Paperback

128 pages

EXCERPTS: “The search for meaning and self-transcendence is a significant human experience that requires description. It is my hope that the following memoir vignettes will provide sources of reflection for people who find themselves at spiritual crossroads. I hope those who knew Father Bede will enjoy revisiting their friend through the following incidents. Finally, I trust this book will be an encouragement for seekers, who, without having met him personally, have been inspired by his life and thought.”

“But quite honestly I believe that any serious accident, disease, or loss in life can be a means of breakthrough. One lives in one’s world in the family and at work in personal consciousness. Everything seems happy enough. But then, suddenly one is overtaken by tragedy, which can be a means of transformation. Everything seems appalling and fearful at the time. But if one accepts it as Providence and surrenders to the process, one finds the emerging of the deep Self. One looks back on the event, and sees that at such a time there seems to be a spiritual power entering, a kind of enlightenment and healing . . . It takes different forms for different people, but underneath the seeming tragedy, there is always the spirit of Love operating in and through it all for the good of the individual.”

Review by Professor Lawrence S. Cunningham

When I was in graduate school, I happened on The Golden String by Bede Griffiths. It described his conversion, first, to the Christian life and then to monasticism, a form of religious life, usually conducted in a community under a common rule.

After nearly two decades as a Benedictine monk in England, Griffiths left for India to embrace a life that would link monastic living to the model of the Hindu ascetics. Over the decades, he gained a worldwide reputation, not only as a prolific author, but also as a champion of interreligious dialogue.

Meath Conlan from Australia, wrote to Griffiths about his own work in the desolate outback of Australia, and from that initial correspondence sprang a long friendship, including a sabbatical Conlan spent with Griffiths in India. Later, Conlan invited the old man to lecture in Australia, which happened to coincide with a tour by the Dalai Lama and led to their meeting [ their second meeting in 1992].

Conlan has written Bede Griffiths: Friend & Gift of the Spirit, not a biography but a series of vignettes about Griffiths gleaned from their time together in India and Australia. Each of the brief chapters includes photographs pertinent to the subject Conlan is describing. The book is easy to read, and in addition to its biographical elements, it includes a brief analysis of the thought and spiritual practice of Griffiths. First-time readers of Griffiths may find this the perfect introduction to the master’s works. Conlan also supplies a brief bibliography of Griffiths’ works in print.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Available in Australia through: www.mosaicresources.com.au

“Sometimes an experience can break suddenly into our lives and upset their normal pattern and we have to begin to adjust ourselves to a new kind of existence …”

Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 11

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master…”

— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

Barrow Island and The Mary Anne Passage, Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia. Showing the proposed Gorgon Gas Project

In 1967 as a late teen, I worked at sea off the coasts of Western Australia in the Indian Ocean for Western Geophysics – an American geophysical company. It is near where the contemporary proposal for the Gorgon Gas Field project is to be developed. My first encounter with the ocean was during a storm in the Mary Anne Passage between Barrow Island and the coast at the settlement of Onslow: transferring from one ship to another as the waves heaved below and around us. In the course of time fear was only overcome when, through continual adjustment, trial and error, perseverance, and learning-by-observation from older, more experienced seamen, my fear was overcome and I gained the necessary self-confidence to stay at this new kind of existence for the full year of my contract.

Together with learning from the ship’s Master and other experienced sea-men, I also learned to observe the state of the weather, wind and cloud formations. I took note of any waves breaking ahead over shifting sand bars or hidden outcrops of coral and oyster reef. I ‘listened to’ the rhythms of the sea. I became an ardent student of human nature: watching the ways in which my fellow shipmates related in a small space for weeks on end. Because of the cramped conditions, I became alert to how people can make room for and work together in spite of difficulties. There was also a sense, which I felt among others on board of living in the present. The ocean, with its fickle ways and constant change encouraged each crewman to enjoy the fine weather when it was sunny and calm, and work through the storms when they crashed over and around us. In other words, co-operate with each other in this moment now. Out there on the often unpredictable Indian Ocean I learned about the necessity of living simply, of not having unreal expectations of life, especially if my demands had the potential to diminish my neighbours’ right to the basic requirements of life at sea: modest comfort, space and privacy, and well-earned rest.

It impressed me that the ship’s captain Frank Foster, had, for many years, kept a small picture in the wheel-house showing Jesus standing behind a sailor at the helm in storm-tossed seas. Upon my inquiry, he shared with me his daily prayer: “Stay with me Lord! My ship is small and the ocean is vast!” This simple example of a daily spiritual practice showed me how the idea of the holy permeated some members of seafaring society.  The example of this one man was like the lifting of a veil, exposing a larger whole, a broader connectedness. It was, for me, like a breakthrough, challenging old patterns of thought and shifting my thought and life, as Bede Griffiths would say, ” to a new kind of existence”. This one man, Master of our ship the Heremia Star, and a former boxing champion of Western Australia, was a Soul mate. Like other Soul mates, rather than being there for the long term, Frank Foster came into my life just to reveal another layer of myself to me, and then leave. His task, albeit unknown to him, was simply to ‘break open my heart’ and shed some enlightenment in those depths that might otherwise have remained in darkness; the significance of which I might have been ignorant.

Thereafter my year at sea made more sense. Reflecting on these experiences I perceived spirituality as a normal part of everyday life, a stance that never really left me and that was a preparation for the meeting, a decade or so later, I was to have with the sage Bede Griffiths, who lived across the ocean in South India.

This new kind of existence initiated a deeper vision of life for me: the patterns I observed included connectedness to a larger whole; the feeling of self-transcendence; of finding a sense of spiritual meaning in daily activities; discovery of the ultimate aloneness / solitude of myself and each person; a growing respect for the cosmic order of things, and how most things seem to holistically ‘hang and work together’. It seemed to me that in this vision of life there is nothing which is not holy, and that all work is a ‘mystery’, not merely a practical concern but a means of  initiation into the mysterious laws of nature and of co-operation in her creative activity.

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I have a number of spiritual tours that included visiting Bede Griffiths’ Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in South India – in December 2010, and then in January and February 2011. If you would like to know more about these, please visit my Tours page in this website, or email me, Dr Meath Conlan: meath@diversejourneys.com

I am also available to present retreats and workshops / seminars on Bede Griffiths and his contemplative vision. Please send for a form if you wish to discuss with me about this possibility for your organisation or region.

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“There is nothing, which is not holy. The simplest action of eating and drinking, of washing and cleaning, of walking and sitting … have a sacramental character; they signify something beyond themselves and are intimately related to religious rites. So also every form of work … is part of a sacramental mystery, by which we enter into communion with the rhythm of nature and take part in that ritual by which human life is continually renewed.”

Bede Griffiths, The Golden String p. 152

Bede Griffiths appreciated what he owed his spiritual forebears, mentors, and guides. In the course of his spiritual direction of others, or during his homilies, he referred especially to the great and wise spiritual teachers of the early church when speaking with others about the riches of his faith.

HH The Dalai Lama, Bede Griffiths & Meath Conlan. Perth, 1992

On the last day of The Dalai Lama’s 1992 spiritual journey to Perth, Western Australia, I received a phone call from his private secretary Tenzin Geshe Tethong inviting Bede and myself to a private audience before His Holiness left for other capitals. What was meant to be a short courtesy visit lasted ninety minutes.

Warmly welcomed, Bede and I sat in  the three-seater lounge and His Holiness in a single arm-chair nearby. The atmosphere was extremely friendly and relaxed. Almost immediately the conversation turned to the mystery of God. His Holiness was genuinely interested in how Christians conceptualised and spoke of the God and God’s nature.

In the course of the morning Bede shared how Christianity inherited the typically Hebrew understanding of God as a Being of utter transcendence, a holy mystery that no one could approach, a Being of absolute moral perfection and justice and yet of infinite mercy. By the time of the New Testament God is spoken of as in intimate relation to humankind, but generally speaking it is not until the Greek Fathers that there is a development of the divine nature. His Holiness was fascinated with Bede quoted Saint Clement of Alexandria: “The deity is without form and nameless. Though we ascribe names, they are not to be taken in their strict meaning; when we call him one, good, mind, existence, Father, God, Creator, Lord … we use these [names] of honour in order that our thoughts may have something on which to rest.”

But His Holiness’ interest piqued when Bede talked of the sixth century monk who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. For the first time we find the whole problem of the nature of God and human understanding of this mystery systematically worked out. He held that God can only be known in ecstasy, when the mind passes beyond itself, transcending speech and thought … indeed his doctrine included the notion that God is as much above all being as it is above all thought. It is “above everything that exists.” Bede developed the thought of passing beyond every thought and existing thing so as to reach the supreme Godhead, yet all energy, all life, all consciousness, reason and will comes from this source and are therefore in some way contained in it. To attain knowledge of the supreme Godhead we must pass beyond all images and concepts into a kind of ‘unknowing,’ where we leave behind human notions of god-like things, as well as human means of expressing the divine nature.

While His Holiness had thought that Christians insisted on their words as permanent and definitive explanations of the mysteries, he was encouraged during this morning’s conversation, by the discovery that as Bede said, “in the abyss of the Godhead, that divine darkness, there is a mystery of personal communion in which all that we can conceive of as wisdom and knowledge, love and bliss, is contained, yet which infinitely transcends our conception … [for] the Godhead remains unfathomable, transcending human thought.” He quoted from the works of Dionysius: “I counsel you … leave your senses and the activity of the intellect … that your understanding being laid to rest, you strive toward a union with him whom neither being nor understanding can contain. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and all things … you shall be released from all, and so be led upwards to the Ray of that divine darkness, which exceeds all existence.”

There were other aspects of Christianity shared that morning, but Bede constantly returned to the doctrine of Dionysius and the Fathers of the Church.

At this stage His Holiness sprang up from his arm-chair and joined us on the lounge. He held Bede’s hand and while looking him in the eye, said: “You know Father, I never knew Christians could think like this.” We remained sitting clumped together for the rest of the morning. I found the Dalai Lama’s interest in everything Bede said to be sincere and engaged. Towards the end of our visit Bede remarked: “Your Holiness, as sad and painful as the history of the Tibetan Diaspora has been, it may very well be the means whereby Christians will take up meditation and recover their own contemplative riches.” His Holiness was fascinated, and agreed, while also restating his belief that for him there will never be one world religion for everyone, that there is goodness and truth to be found in all spiritualities of the world.

When we finally departed His Holiness’ presence we were both elated. I thanked Bede for his teaching and for providing the Dalai Lama with the opportunity for clarifying what perhaps was his somewhat incomplete understanding of Christianity. I believe he had given of himself at least as whole-heartedly as in any of his larger lectures before thousands. I recall one of the nicest touches at the end of this wonderful experience when Bede took me by the elbow as we walked from the audience. He remarked with, I felt, an unusual level of emotion: “You know, I really do think he likes me.”

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I have a number of spiritual tours that included visiting Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in December 2010, and then in January and February 2011. If you would like to know more about these, please visit my Tours page in this website, or email me, Dr Meath Conlan: meath@diversejourneys.com

I am also available to present retreats and workshops / seminars on Bede Griffiths and his contemplative vision. Please send for a form if you wish to discuss with me about this possibility for your organisation or region.

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