Bede Griffiths: Holy Man for Our Time

Copyright 1995 by John R. Mabry

This article previously appeared in an issue of Creation Spirituality magazine.

The holy man of our time, it seems, is not a figure like Gotama [Buddha] or Jesus or Mohammed, a man who could found a world religion, but a figure like Gandhi, a man who passes over by sympathetic understanding from his own religion to other religions and comes back again with new insight to his own. Passing over and coming back, it seems, is the spiritual adventure of our time.

More than any other single person I know of, Bede Griffiths exemplifies the above statement by John S. Dunne. He is a quiet man, yet with a powerful undercurrent that charges the air with electricity in his presence. He is unusually tall, and frighteningly thin. He wears the saffron robe of the Hindu sannyassis (holy men), and is respected as such by Hindus and Christians alike.

Bede's story really begins with two priests from France, Jules Monchanin and Henri Le Saux who had a dream of founding the monastic life in India in 1947. They soon found that what monks in the West considered poverty was relatively luxurious in comparison with normal Indian life. Monks are used to being limited to a bed, table, chair, and bookshelf. Possession of such luxuries separated them from the people, and so even the most basic furniture was prohibited. The two monks ate only vegetarian food, which they begged for, and were forbidden alcohol--another Hindu prohibition. They ate on the floor on plates of leaves, and could be distinguished from Hindu sannyassis only by the rosaries they wore around their necks.

Jules Monchanin eventually took the name Swami Parama Arubi Anandam (the Bliss of the Supreme Spirit) and Henri Le Saux was called Swami Abhishiktananda (the Bliss of Christ). They also tried valiantly to bridge the gap separating the two traditions. The two monks met with dubious success. There were a number of false starts and outright failures for their efforts. In fact, at the time of their deaths, they had little to show for their many years of hard labor. Their work would not reach fruition until they had passed their mantle to a monk named Bede in the 1960s.

Bede was born in 1906 to a young English and properly Anglican couple. His life was pretty uneventful until he went to Oxford and began to study under one of the twentieth century's greatest Christian theologians, C.S. Lewis. Neither of them was Christian at the time, but both of them were driven in that direction through transcendental aspects of English literature. Bede had a whole religion based on Wordsworth as prophet. Even after he left school, he and Lewis, both undergoing profound spiritual transformations, corresponded regularly.

Bede found that he wanted to get as close to the primal as possible, to live in the pristine state of Nature that his poetry conjured for him. So, with a couple of friends, he moved into a cottage in the Cotswolds. They lived spare lives there. No cars, radios, phonographs, or any other convenience devices. They walked where they wanted to go and read poetry aloud as their sole entertainment and inspiration. Then Bede made a mistake: he decided to read the Psalms as poetry. He never recovered, and finding that he loved monastic life--since it was essentially what he was already doing--he eventually decided to become a Christian monk. He tried to be Anglican, for his mother's sake, but it didn't sit well with him, and despite great familial turbulence, became what many Protestant mothers fear worst of all: a Roman Catholic.

He joined Prinknash Abbey near Gloucester. He took to the mode of life quickly, and loved it. It was here that he began to study Eastern philosophy, and fell in love with it. So when an opportunity came about to help secure the monastic life in India, he responded eagerly. It wouldn't do to go into the long list of various ashrams and their permutations that he and the other monks went through. Suffice to say, in the late seventies, something incredible had taken shape in the community known as Shantivanam. It was Bede's hope to have created a center where people of different religious traditions could meet together in an atmosphere of prayer and learn to grow together towards that unity in Truth which is the goal of all religion. A visitor describes it thus:

The sun rising over the River Cauvery would find individuals and small groups meditating on its banks. Breakfast was preceded by community worship in the temple. The vegetarian meals were eaten Indian style, without utensils, on the floor of an unfurnished dining hall, and though ample they were simple to the point of austerity. Five times a day the community gathered in the temple to meditate and chant Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian prayers. The Mass of the Indian rite which was used in the ashram reflected the cosmic symbolism of Hinduism. At the offertory water was sprinkled around the gifts and the altar, then upon the people. The celebrant himself took a sip to purify himself within. In the bread and wine, the fruits of the Earth and the work of human hands were offered to the Divine. Next eight flowers were placed around the gifts in the eight directions of space to signify that the sacrifice offered was at the center of the universe. Then incense was waved over the gifts as was fire, the flame of burning camphor. The fourfold offering of the elements was used to signify that the Mass was a cosmic sacrifice. Christ had assumed the whole Creation and was offering it in and through himself to the Creator. It was also a reflection of the fact that in India everything is acknowledged to have a sacred character.

In the temple here, as in Hindu temples throughout India, worshippers could mark their foreheads with colored powders steeped in symbolism. In the morning, a paste of sandalwood, a very precious wood which spreads its fragrance to others even when cut with an axe, was used to signify the grace of God; at midday a red powder, kumkum, was used to mark a third eye upon the forehead, the eye of internal knowledge and intuitive experience of God; in the evening vibhudi, ashes, served as a reminder of human mortality and of the purified self for in ashes all impurities had been burnt away. The design and symbolism of the building itself belonged to another world of symbols strange and bewildering at first to the western visitor (Kathryn Spink, A Sense of the Sacred).

Fr. Bede believes that it is no longer possible for religious traditions to exist in isolation. They must now enter into dialogue with each other. "It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith," he says, "but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.... God has graced every tradition with insight into the divine mystery, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated--each has a gift to bring to the world." Bede says that his goal has been to "set the orthodox tradition of the Christian faith alongside the orthodox tradition of Vedanta and to see how they can mutually enrich one another."

Bede has published many series of lectures on the Upanishads and Vedanta, and has written a commentary on the Bhagavhad Gita. Most rewarding as far as understanding his own position though, is his own commentary on the various Vedantic commentators, Sankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva (Bede's book Vedanta & Christian Faith, Dawn Horse Press, 1973, is highly recommended).

In a way, one could say that Bede has attempted an impossible task: to build a bridge between two of the most diverse traditions the world has ever known. His work has been twofold, to represent Christianity to non-Christian faith communities without the typical sneer of superiority, and to represent Hinduism to Christians in a way that is neither threatening nor heterodox. For these awesome accomplishments he deserves great thanks and recognition for the true missionary he has been. He has also broken much ground upon which we must build as we begin a third millennium, learning to share our wisdom with our sister faith traditions, and perhaps more importantly, learning to receive theirs.