The Roots of Christian Mysticism Session 21
Summary of Shirley du Boulay's "Bede Griffiths" talk, The London Christian Meditation Centre, St Mark's, Clerkenwell, 21 March 2006

Bede Griffiths

Bede Griffiths lived fully the inner life. By his life and writings he affected not only a great many people but also the general spiritual climate. As Newton said: “we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants”. Bede Griffiths might be regarded as a giant.

He was born in 1906. A reserved and inhibited man. He lived in the south of England. He was very English, very middle class with a precise Oxford accent which he never quite lost. He had the air of a patriarchal, donnish figure. At seventeen he had the formative experience of his life which he recounts at the beginning of his autobiography The Golden String:

One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year 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 and I wondered whether they sang like this all the year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked on I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness 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. I came then to where the sun was setting over 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, 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.

The effect of this experience on him cannot be underestimated. The rest of his life was lived out of it. He could not at first see the connection between this God of the nature mystics and the God of the Church. He had to wait until he was over eighty years old before he was able to recapture this experience in its fullness.

The influence of the classics was very strong on him. In 1925 he went up to Oxford to read them. His two great friends at Oxford were Hugh Waterman and Martyn Skinner. (Their correspondence can be read in the Bodleian library in Oxford.)

He was a great intellectual and it is possible that he had to wait so long to achieve his mystical goal because of the weight placed on the intellect. His learning may have delayed his joy but it has enriched his legacy to us.

He changed from classics to English Literature hoping that the poetic imagination would help him to recover the experience of his youth and this is when he met C.S. Lewis and the Inklings group. He did not become a full member of the Inklings group. He was regarded as too serious.

The other great experience of his early life was his experiment with community life in the small village of Eastington with his two great friends from Oxford. They were in their early twenties and decided they would live as if the industrial revolution had not taken place. Sadly, the community broke up after a year through disagreement.

Throughout this time Bede was not a practising Christian though he had been brought up an Anglican. However through his friendship with C.S. Lewis Bede became a Christian along with Lewis in the 1950s.Bede became a Roman Catholic and Lewis a Protestant. Bede said at the end of his life that there had been few things more precious than his friendship with ewis. Lewis had always said that their friendship had begun with dispute and ended with argument.

Bede became a Benedictine monk but was dissatisfied with the West. He went to live in India at the age of 49 years and became a pioneer of a marriage between East and West. He went to India to find the “other half of his soul”. Almost immediately he began to find it:

Whether sitting or standing or walking there was grace in all their movements and I felt that I was in the presence of a hidden power of nature. I explained it to myself by saying that these people were living from the “unconscious.” People in the West are dominated by the conscious mind; they go about their business each shut up in his own ego. There is a kind of fixed determination in their minds, which makes their movements and gestures stiff and awkward, and they all tend to wear the same drab clothes. But in the East people live from the body not from the mind. As a result they have the natural spontaneous beauty of flowers and animals, and their dress is as varied and colourful as that of a flower-garden. (from The Marriage of East and West: A Sequel to the Golden String (London: Collins, 1989, p. 8)

In short he found exuberance, sense of colour, sense of the sacred and a respect for the earth. He tried to learn Sanskrit and had a go at Tamil though he was not really a linguist. He had an excellent grasp of the underlying theologies and philosophies of the Eastern religions. He often used the phrase “A New Era of Consciousness.” This is quite close to our expression “New Age” although the former expression is to be preferred. “New Age” is an expression which has become tarnished. Writing in 1966 Bede believed that we were in a state of transition between cultures and in 1972 he felt that we were very much on the eve of a breakthrough in consciousness from patriarchal, rational, domination to one of dialogue, intuitive consciousness where feelings are acknowledged and man is seen as steward of creation.

Bede felt that the only way to evolve spiritually was by meditation. He regarded method and posture as important. Many in the West still resist these Eastern methods dismissing them as techniques rather than prayer. Meditation is the ancient ideal of ontemplation. The aim of meditation for Bede was to pass beyond the limits of rational consciousness. Bede mostly used the Jesus Prayer but he greatly admired John Main’s approach.

In 1990 Bede Griffiths suffered a stroke which led to his greatest mystical experience. He felt totally free all barriers seemed to have been broken down:
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.” (quoted in film “The Human Search“)

He lived another two years and then died after suffering another stroke (the result of excitement following the making of the film!

His greatest legacy was perhaps his understanding that there are many ways up a mountain.