Advent Day 14: Bede Griffiths
Mystic in the cave of the heart
Love giving itself, losing itself and finding itself in love, and Love returning to itself, giving itself back in love—this is the eternal pattern of the universe.
Advent Day 14: Bede Griffiths (1906-1993)
Nothing in the early life of Bede Griffiths predicted he would become one of the great Christian sages of the 20th century. Born in 1906 to a middle-class English family, Bede was the youngest of three children. Shortly after his birth, financial disaster struck when his father was cheated by a business partner, leaving the Griffiths penniless. The resulting strain caused Bede’s father to suffer a breakdown. Soon, the family fell apart and Bede’s mother moved her children to another town where she struggled to make ends meet. By twelve, Bede had left his mother’s home and was living in a boarding school for poor boys.
At seventeen, Bede’s stellar academics earned him a scholarship to study journalism at Oxford. There, C.S. Lewis became his tutor, though neither master nor student gave any indication of the spiritual geniuses they would become (in fact, Lewis identified as an atheist at the time).
Bede, by his own description, was a shy and repressed boy who’d adopted a clipped Edwardian accent to fit in with his wealthier classmates. But in 1929, shortly before graduating Oxford, he had a spiritual awakening.
One day…I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard…at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before… If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing, I could not have been more surprised. A lark rose suddenly from the ground…and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground…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.
This moment of conversion—of awakening to God’s presence as a Love that was over, through and in all (Ephesians 4:4-6)—pierced Bede’s soul and changed him forever.
God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the center of my life and therefore I could see God in everything.
This awakening to God-in-everything sent Bede in a new direction. Rather than journalism, he pursued a simple life in the countryside where he rented a primitive cottage with friends. In this back-to-the-land move, he joined a small but significant number of young people from the post-World War I generation who rejected the dehumanizing forces of industrialization and the corruptions of the new mass consumer culture which had sprung up in the 1920s. Bede’s experiment in primitive living ended a year later when one of his friends got married.
He turned next to the church, setting his sights on becoming a Benedictine monk, over the objections of his anti-Catholic mother and the, by now, staunchly Anglican C.S. Lewis. On December 29, 1932, he was received as a novitiate into Prinknash Abbey.
However, Bede soon saw that modern Western life, which only accepted as true and valid what could be proven by scientific rationalism, had seeped even through the thick monastery walls. For Bede, faith was not a “provable” system of checking off boxes next to creeds or doctrines. It was a heart-centered way of life. By that definition, most of the brothers at Prinknash Abbey lacked faith, for nearly all of them lived completely in their heads, having forgotten the wisdom and intuition of the heart. The contemplative spirit of the order (and the culture) had been sapped, leaving behind only dry practices and prayers.
The European Enlightenment, for all its scientific and social advances, had left the Western world, including the monks, spiritually poor. For Bede, this meant Christians were leaving an entire part of their souls untapped.
We were living from one half of our soul, from the conscious, rational level and we needed to discover the other half, the unconscious, intuitive dimensions. I wanted to experience in my life the marriage of these two dimensions of human existence, the rational and the intuitive, the conscious and the unconscious, the masculine and the feminine.
In contrast to the West, the East of the mid-20th century still retained a sense of the sacred in everyday life. Religion was in the very air people breathed. Bede was intrigued by this. So, in 1955 when he was offered the chance to co-found a monastery in India, he jumped at it.
…I felt the need of something more which the East alone could give; above all the sense of the presence of God in nature and the soul, a kind of natural mysticism which is the basis of all Indian spirituality. I felt therefore that if a genuine meeting of East and West was to take place, it must be at this deepest level of their experience and this I thought could best come through the monastic life.
The friendships he formed in India, and the generosity and beauty he experienced in the people there, caused him to reflect on the nature of Christ. Most Christians Bede had ever known located Christ solely in the person of Jesus. But Bede began to contemplate the Christ as described in the gospels, particularly in John, as the living Word that had been from the beginning, who was with God, and who was God (John 1:1).
This Word that gave birth to creation and which permeated everything was Love. So it followed that, if Love was the blueprint of all creation, then it was the foundation of everything: all people, all creation, all religions. Though the religions in their expressions contained big differences, Bede saw them as blooming from the same Word.
…as you move toward the source in any tradition, the interrelatedness begins to grow. As one might say, we meet in the cave of the heart. When we arrive in the center, we realize the underlying unity behind the traditions.
For Bede, that unity found in the cave of the heart was Love, and the best way to describe that Love was through the Trinity.
The Father gives himself in the love to the Son, who is the very form of his love, and this love returns to the Father in the Holy Spirit, who united Father and Son in the eternal embrace of love.
This is the divine circle dance of the Trinity in which we all participate. We are made out of God’s love, in order to receive God’s love, so that we might act through God’s love in loving others and, ultimately, return that love to God.
Bede saw this pattern repeated in all nature and the cosmos, and believed that no one was outside of it. His exposure to and engagement with Hinduism didn’t water down his Christian faith but deepened it, and provides an example for all people living in a modern, pluralistic world who seek to stay in their traditions but without the cultural baggage and exclusivity of the past.
In her book Christ In Evolution, biologist and theologian Ilia Delio sums up Bede’s spiritual contribution:
The import of Bede Griffith’s works lies in the capacity of the human person for divine life, for the fullness of love and the unity of all things in love. The mystery of Christ is a mystery of unity in love, and by becoming oneself in Christ does the unifying love of Christ become reality in the world… Bede found this love and thus found the center of the universe within his soul.
For Bede, faith in the end was living with curiosity and compassion, and the opening of the mind to the transcendent Reality, the awakening to the eternal Truth.
Practice
Read Ephesians 4:4-6:
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God who is over all and through all and in all.
This text expresses the mystical truth that Christ permeates and unites all creation. For many of us raised in dualistic religions and cultures that divide everything into neat categories of good/bad, sacred/profane, true/false, who’s in/who’s out, this non-dualistic, unitive idea is a challenge.
In the past year, where have you seen personal growth in moving beyond strict binaries? Where have you been challenged to move into deeper soul territory not by having answers but by not having them? When have you been hard on someone for not being as far in their spiritual or social development, forgetting that you were once where they are? Is there a particular area or subject around which you face stumbling blocks as you journey toward a more unitive way of feeling, thinking and being?
Light a candle. Take time to pray for the grace, courage and resilience it requires to move into new soul territory. Give yourself credit for just showing up and trying. Take heart in the fact that you are on this soul journey with countless others, all united in Christ.
Holiday Happenings at Life In The City
Dec. 11, 11:15 am: LITC’s original musical, Make Room In Your Heart.
Dec. 21, 7:30 pm: Blue Christmas, an intimate service for the longest night of the year.
Dec. 23, 7:00 pm: Our annual Christmas Eve-Eve service.
Dec. 25, 11:15 am: Celebrate Christmas morning with your church family.
Jan 1, 11:15 am: A quiet, contemplative service to welcome 2023.
Feedback
This is a first draft of a book that will go to publishers in 2023. If you spot typos or have suggestions, leave them in the comments below or email Greg Durham at greg@lifeinthecityaustin.org.
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