Fr. Bede Griffiths
Priest and Sannyasin (1906-1993)
by Meath Conlan

At a particular time of crisis in my life, I discovered Fr Bede through his books, and started to write to him at his ashram in India. He took my lack of ease seriously and addressed my concerns with sympathy, grace and intelligence. He said I should plan one day to come and spend a year with him at the ashram. Meanwhile, he said, I should seek "ways of discovering a sense of unity and meaning in the day-to-day experiences" of nature’s wilderness in my part of the world.

He exhorted me to seek solitude: some time each day, some each week and some each month in which to listen to nature, and to the sounds of silence. He urged me to stop and watch intensely the daily play of nature and the individual aspects of my own life; and to get a sense of others who long to find their own sense of meaning and purpose in everyday life. From these observations, he said, I should recall the poet William Blake’s "golden string", and keep it in mind when thrown back again on self-doubt and confusion, living its light and shape my life by its law. In this way I would "wind the string into a ball, and find my way out of the labyrinth of life."
- Meath Conlan, Ph.D.

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

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

Years after his experience at school, he created a small garden in front of his single-room mud hut at Shantivanam ashram in south India. The yellows, reds, whites, and mauves of the bougainvillea and marigolds, and their bright green stems and leaves threw sutras of colour against the dull ochres of his hut.  They led the eye up to the glassless window, from which Bede would gaze in contemplation, appreciating the beauty of his garden plot, perhaps waiting for his next visitor or writing a letter to one of his many friends. He told me that he had created this colorful space because it reminded him of the way the natural entanglements of color in a garden constantly surprised him with the sense of unity to be found there. For him a garden provided wondrous opportunities for breaking the daily routine and adjusting to some new experience or demand on his time and energies. Most of all it filled him with a sense of gratitude.  Anything that can do that, he said, is "a message bearer" to the soul, allowing us to see the interiority of things, "as though a veil has been lifted."

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

For Bede the "golden string" led on after that evening long ago at his school.  He had, he felt, to keep seeking and learning in a spirit of gratitude. He said that "every step in advance is a return to the beginning" and that the beauty to be found in nature, the cosmos, "is not only truth but also Love".

Fr Bede said that he discovered the divine not only in the life of nature, but also in the minds and hearts of human beings. He found that he had "sought the divine in the solitude of nature, and in the labor of his mind," but eventually he found the answer in his community and the spirit of charity. His sense of gratitude was indeed profound, as until then he felt he had been "wandering in a far country and had returned home;" that he "had been dead and was alive again;" that he "had been lost and was found."   

Fr Bede closed his autobiography, The Golden String, with some words from the prior in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. I feel these describe beautifully the way Bede tried to live his life for 86 years. They also present a vision: one in which I would like to live my life: "Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of it . . . . If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love."

Meath Conlan is an Australian spiritual director and author of Bede Griffiths: Friend & Gift of the Spirit” (Templegate 2006). He is the founder of Diverse Journeys, and takes small groups of explorers to unique places of cultural and spiritual richness, including Fr. Bede’s Shantivanam and select ashrams of India.

Additional Resources
See:  The Bede Griffiths Trust