I wasn't raised in a religious household,
But I was spiritually thirsty.
My first clear sense of this came after visiting a tiny bookshop in Wiltshire when I was seventeen.
The bookshop was the size of a small bedroom.
The religion section had about ten books in it.
I was looking for a book on Zen Buddhism and,
Surprisingly,
I found one.
Next to it was a book called Return to the Centre by the Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths.
I was struck by the title,
But also by the photo of him on the front cover,
The deep peace and gentleness in his face.
So I bought them both and the world began to change.
Reading Bede led me to visit Prinish Abbey,
Benedictine Monastery in the Cotswolds a year later.
Bede was a monk at Prinish before he travelled to India in 1955,
Where he spent the rest of his life and became one of the great spiritual teachers of our time.
During my first visit to Prinish,
I took a copy of the Dhammapada,
A collection of short sayings of the Buddha,
With me.
On my last day there,
I gave it to the novice master as a gift.
At this point,
I didn't know there were many dozens of books on Buddhism in the monastery library,
Or that Prinish was famous for its involvement in interfaith dialogue.
A few hours later,
The novice master returned with a copy of the Rule of Saint Benedict,
A gift from the abbot.
Inside of the back cover of the Rule was glued a handwritten note saying,
Thanks for the Dhammapada.
Father Abbot thinks the Rule of Saint Benedict might prove profitable.
Just another way to reach the One.
Reading those words,
My world changed again.
In the Hindu scriptures in particular,
Bede found a source of wisdom and inspiration that deepened his own Christian faith.
Wearing the saffron robes and following the spiritual discipline of a Hindu monk,
A sannyasi,
Bede found the contemplative depth dimension of life and faith that Western Christianity has all but lost.
A peacemaker who worked for harmony and understanding between religions,
Bede encouraged the form of lay contemplative communities,
Like our practice community,
Where people can support each other in their search for God,
For truth,
And learn to live in peace and friendship.
Bede's vision of global spiritual friendship is of great importance for our world today.
In his words,
The goal of each religion is the same.
It is the absolute,
Transcendent state,
The one reality,
The eternal truth,
Which cannot be expressed,
Cannot be conceived.
This is the goal not only of all religion,
But of all human existence.
The original message,
The essential truth of every religion,
Is the sacred mystery,
The presence,
Which cannot be expressed in words,
Which cannot be known by sense or reason,
But is hidden in the heart and reveals itself to those who seek it in the silence beyond word and thought.
And it is through returning to our centre,
To the centre,
The deepest shared ground of our being,
That we can recognise each other as family,
As one interrelated body,
And discover the only sure foundation for peace between people.
This centre is not simply psychological balance or interior calm.
It is infinitely deeper and more radical.
It is the point within each of us where all notions of separateness and division dissolve.
Bede drew on both the Christian contemplative tradition and the wisdom traditions of India to describe this centre as the place of unity,
What both Christian contemplatives and the writers of the Hindu Upanishads recognise as the indwelling presence of God.
He saw the human problem at its root as a life lived at the periphery,
That we live without awareness of the centre,
Scattered in thoughts,
Desires,
Anxieties and strongly held notions of wholly separate identities.
We live outwardly,
Reactively,
And in that dispersion we experience a profound sense of dislocation,
From ourselves,
From others,
From God.
The return to the centre is the movement from fragmentation into unity,
From division to oneness.
It is the rediscovery of the most fundamental truth of how things are.
For Bede,
This return to the centre,
To the truth,
Happens through contemplation,
Through silence,
Through a disciplined stillness of the mind,
Through a life lived simply,
Attentively,
Lovingly.
It is not achieved by effort so much as by surrender,
By letting go of the restless surface of consciousness and allowing oneself to sink into the deeper ground of our being.
And here is where his vision becomes profoundly important for peace between people and traditions,
Because when we live from the periphery,
We live from difference,
In a mental world of strong divisions.
We identify ourselves solely by what distinguishes us,
Religion,
Culture,
Belief,
History.
These distinctions are not wrong,
They have a truth to them and can be acknowledged and celebrated.
But when we imagine that they are the ultimate truths,
When we imagine that they are the centre of our identity,
They easily harden into division.
We defend them,
We fear others,
We oppose,
Conflict arises,
But when we return to the centre,
Something changes.
At the centre we encounter what is ultimate,
What is universal.
Bede believed that every authentic spiritual tradition,
At its depth,
Leads toward this same centre,
Not in a way that erases difference,
But in a way that grounds difference in a deeper unity.
This is why he could live as a Christian monk in India,
Deeply rooted in the Gospel and also embracing Hindu wisdom with reverence and openness.
From the centre one does not abandon one's faith,
One inhabits it more deeply and more freely,
And from that depth one recognises the same movement toward truth in others.
This is the foundation of real dialogue,
Not a negotiation of ideas at the surface,
But a meeting in depth.
Bede saw that peace between religions cannot be built merely on tolerance or intellectual agreement,
It must arise from a shared experience,
Or at least a shared recognition of this inner ground of unity,
Of identity.
When a person is rooted in the centre,
Fear diminishes,
The need to defend a wholly separate identity softens.
There is space for listening,
There is room for reverence of the other.
Friendship becomes possible,
Not as a strategy,
But as a natural fruit of a new way of being.
The seeds of this understanding can be found in every impulse to love,
Even if we do not recognise it,
Says Bede.
In every human love there is a reaching out toward the infinite,
A desire to transcend itself,
To make the total surrender of self.
This tendency is present in the atheist and the agnostic,
In the ignorant and foolish,
As well as the wise,
It is what gives an infinite value to the human person.
The return to the centre is not only personal spiritual path,
It is a profoundly human and even global necessity.
Without it we remain trapped at the level where conflict is inevitable.
With it we begin to discover that the unity we seek outwardly is already present inwardly,
And with this knowledge can begin to shape how we live,
Relate and respond.
Bede's life itself was a witness to this,
A life lived at the meeting point of traditions,
Not in confusion,
But in a deep grounded clarity.
The quiet invitation of his teaching is to return again and again to the centre within,
Where all division falls away,
Where all are one in Christ,
And God is all in all.
Whatever our religion,
Whatever our path,
For Bede our words,
Our doctrines,
Are only phrases we use to express the inexpressible.
It is not by word or thought,
But by meditation on the mystery that we can pierce the veil.
This is,
He says,
Where all human reason fails.
All these words,
Brahman,
Nirvana,
Allah,
Yahweh,
Christ,
Are meaningless to those who cannot get beyond their reason and allow the divine mystery to shine through its symbol.
This is done by faith.
Faith is the opening of the mind to the transcendent reality,
The awakening to the eternal truth.
How would I try and summarise the understanding that flows from Bede's vision?
We'll be thinking about this in our half-day online workshop in a few weeks,
The marriage of East and West,
A vision of universal harmony.
But for now,
That there is one,
Infinite,
Indivisible reality,
And this reality,
Whose nature is pure awareness,
Pure love,
Pure peace,
Is the ground of all creation and all spiritual paths.
That this reality is the one source and destiny of all people,
Even as it is given different names and spoken about in different ways.
That all people,
Consciously or unconsciously,
Desire and seek to be one with this oneness.
And the purpose of all the great religions,
Of all spiritual paths,
Is to help people know this oneness and to live as one,
In spirit and truth,
With wisdom and compassion.
That the spiritual journey is a journey from division to harmony,
From separateness to oneness,
A return to the nature of our Source,
To grow,
In Christian terms,
Into the fullness of the love of God,
Through loving our neighbour and all creation,
Dissolving the artificial boundaries between us,
Realising our essential unity.
