Please join us for a very special evening on Bede Griffiths OSB Cam. Fr Bede was a British-born Catholic priest and Benedictine monk who lived in ashrams in South India and became a noted missionary. Griffiths was a part of the Christian Ashram Movement and pivotal to the founding of WCCM- a close personal friend of John Main OSB.
We will be joined by Fr Antony Kalliath who also knew Fr Bede to talk about the pioneering interfaith narrative of Bede, known latterly as Swami Dayananda and the ashram movement which still abides today in the likes of Shantivanam and Vidhyavanam.
Fr. Bede had, through and through, been a seeker to the core; he was not stuck with set patterns and paths. His life evolved in the sequence: an agnostic – a Protestant – a Catholic – A benedictine monk – a priest – a sannyasi (Advaitin). Naturally, his option was Eternal India, the land of seekers of innumerable religious strands and stripes. For him, Truth was processual, ever-evolving, and enhancing, and he endeavoured to sync with the Flow of Life. His story of life was an ever-unfolding narrative of confluences and inflows of knowledge, visions, experiments, and explorations, so much so that religious pursuits, the science of divergent disciplines, cultures, history, tradition, cosmology, and mysticisms transformed into a playful multilinear and pluralistic Incarnational Presence. Or, his life was like a river of various tributaries and was ever flowing. Still, the integrity and the integration of the river were sustained by being inclusive, non-conclusive, and dialogical. Thus, his life spins out as an evocative living parable, which one can comprehend only when one coheres to the intelligibility of the storyline. Thereby, Fr. Bede becomes a Middle-Path or a Tao and a genuine referral in today’s world of liminality, multiple belonging, enormous influx of knowledge, and cultural encounters virtually as well as geographically. The constant of his river of life is paradoxically the very Flow itself to the extent that the very Flow churns out the real referral of the identity construction in today’s eros and pathos. Fr. Bede’s witness illustrates how to be in the Flow meaningfully, skilfully, and competitively. As Fr. Bede says, his witness to the Truth is cultured in his three “Vision Quests” corresponding to three stages of his life, namely, “God in nature,” “God in Christ/Church,” and “Non-Duality” (advaita). In this process, a rare, vibrant, and alive witnessing to Truth dawns in Fr. Bede’s spiritual Odessey as the ‘seeker,’ ‘seeking,’ and ‘sought’ are configured in the ‘seer’ – the ‘Witnessing-I’ to the Truth- the zenith of self-realization.
Booking is now closed for this event
