Bede Griffiths
A Life in Dialogue

By Judson Trapnell

New York, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001; 269 pp. + xvii; $16.95 paper

Completing the reading of this book was like having swallowed a fire-ball! Its contents are much and weighty and still burning within. Judson Trapnell, the author, was fascinated with the mind and heart of Bede Griffith, and he traveled far to India and other places to question this wisdom figure who drew forth such awe from him. These interviews, questions he and others asked, and the in-depth responses received, play an invaluable role in understanding and interpreting the sacred history of Bede Griffiths, both individually and collectively and in the writing of this book.

This volume, Bede Griffiths: A Life in Dialogue, is an ingenuous spiritual biography of Bede Griffiths, tracing the evolution of much of his thinking, his intuitions, and resulting changes in lifestyle from youth to death, spanning most of the twentieth century. Trapnell begins and ends the work with a moving description of Bede’s life in climax, his final total surrender; then the author shares throughout the volume insightful indications from Bede of his lifelong, unswerving intention to surrender‹body, soul, and spirit‹to the Lord at every step along the Way. Viewing the monk’s life in three definitive stages of this lifelong surrender: God in nature (his conversion); God in Christ and the Church (his encounter with Hinduism and Sannyasa); and advaita or nonduality (the new scientists and his strokes), the author draws from books, articles, unpublished manuscripts, taped talks, and interviews to lay bare and share the most pertinent and deepest intuitions and convictions in Bede’s heart. “Given the primacy of experience in his method of inquiry, surrender is, for Griffiths, not only an intellectual act; it is necessarily holistic, engaging body, mind or soul and spirit—an anthropology he derived from the apostle Paul and from the early Fathers of the Church” (6).

With his own profound literary questions the author challenges Bede, posthumously, in every chapter, anticipating and responding to the inevitable critics of our day. Perhaps some will find the author’s prolific literary questions off-putting, but they do serve as a litmus test in this journey so unique and blessed, so pain-filled yet ultimately rewarding. Perhaps some of these same questions were unconsciously purifying the prophet of whom he writes. Judson sees Bede as a true prophet of our times, who, “while loving the Church as the Body of Christ,” was undeterred in recognizing and openly lamenting her faults.

Judson further sees Bede with St. Augustine as a veritable culture bearer for our times. Fr. Bede was a bridge between the East and the West, Hinduism and Christianity, the masculine and the feminine, the rational and intuitive, science and religion. The author finds a vibrant dialogue that went on in this English Sannyasi between each of these facets of his own life, “dialogue being the praxis through which that surrender was fostered” (7). The forms of this dialogue were multitudinous and simultaneous, interdependent and vibrant, on levels of the intrapersonal, intercultural, interreligious, and cosmotheandric. Fr. Bede, writing of interreligious dialogue insisted:

Dialogue, when properly understood, is not a compromise with error but a process of enrichment by which each religion, and the two parties grow together in the common search for truth. Each religion has to hold the fundamental truth in its own tradition and at the same time allow that tradition to grow, as it is exposed to other aspects of that truth. Thus we begin to realize that truth is one, but that it has many faces, and each religion is, as it were, a face of the one Truth, which manifests itself under different signs and symbols in the different historical traditions (7).

For Fr. Bede and for the author, dialogue constitutes full engagement in mutuality as a means to surrender to a truth that is greater than and incorporates self and others. Judson provides helpful insights into Fr. Bede’s intrapersonal inquiries even pre-dialogical: “Inquiry into his experience of God in nature thus ignited a conflict (not yet a dialogue) within him between rational and nonrational forces that would later be recognized as an intercultural tension as well.” One notes insufficient clarity for the surrender at such stages. Yet, at the end of the first “period” of Fr. Bede’s journey Judson discovers that “by surrendering to the dialogue inherent in relationship at several levels in his life,” Bede “opened to new possibilities of insight” (40). Fr. Bede envisioned a “marriage of East and West” not only within himself but also in his ashram at Shantivanam, in the Catholic Church, and in the entire global community. The individual living in dialogue thus becomes a symbol of the collective‹even for Fr. Griffiths, according to Judson, a symbol of the divine, expressing and communicating God’s nature and activity. And for Fr. Bede that divine nature and its activity are experienced as a communion in love, a dance of self and other that is reflected intrapersonally, interpersonally, interculturally, interreligiously, and cosmically for the person and through the person who surrenders to that love (8). Judson learned in his pursuits of Fr. Bede’s spiritual journey how central symbols are to human knowledge, and how vital religious symbols are to the surrender that alone brings spiritual transformation. Symbols, he agrees with Fr. Bede, are signs through which a reality becomes present to human consciousness.

While without TV or radio, Fr. Bede “remained in touch with Western cultures through his lecture tours in Europe, the United States, and Australia, as well as through his reading of current books and periodicals” (53). But this same monk entered with “both fascination and suspicion the flowing life of ideas that defined Western societies”(55).

One must read the book to glean its riches from Fr. Bede, and the author reflecting on Bede. To conclude, Judson identifies Bede as a “culture-bearer,” using the language of Christianity and Bede’s understanding of symbols:

Those individuals who through grace are deeply transparent to the Spirit give voice to ideas that express the loving will of that Spirit for humanity as a whole. These ideas, in turn, serve as symbols, drawing the minds of others toward their common source in the ground of consciousness, for some effecting a spiritual transformation that reflects the changes needed throughout the culture. The essential attribute that such individuals embody, then, is the very same to which Griffiths often returned in his self-understanding: surrender. Through surrendering ever more thoroughly to the Spirit within, the individual may become a more concrete expression of the change being stirred in a culture by that Spirit. Such persons not only express symbols that mediate cultural change, they themselves become living symbols who through their transparency allow the healing light of the Spirit to touch the culture. (207)

A book for monastics and scholars, laity and clergy, well worth the effort to swallow the fire-ball!

Sister Pascaline Coff, O.S.B.
Osage + Monastery
Sand Springs, Oklahoma