The gateway into Shantivanam ashram

When the British born Catholic priest and Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths first encountered India, he felt that he had met ‘the other side of myself’. Almost immediately he felt at one with the people and began to discover, as he had hoped he would, the dimension he had found missing in the West. He felt the people were living from the unconscious: ‘from the body not from the mind.’

Griffiths aimed not only to found a contemplative Christian order, but to find this other half of his soul: the feminine; the intuitive; the unconscious – dimensions that he felt were missing from western Christianity. He wasn’t interested in imposing Christianity, nor did he want to take parts of Hindu culture and practice and build them into Christian thought – rather he wanted the two faiths to learn from one another, and understand each other at the deepest possible level. After 7 years in India, Griffiths wrote:

‘Our task in India is not so much to being Christ to India (as though he could be absent), as to discover Christ already present and active in the Hindu soul.’ He wanted this to be a two-way process, so for example he felt that Catholic theology could be enriched by being studied in relation to the Vedanta.’

Once moving to the ashram at Shantivanam, Griffiths found that Hinduism and the Indian way of life meant that he was, as he wrote to a friend back in England increasingly discovering:

‘… the intimate relation between nature and God. God is present in nature, in every created thing …. Nature comes into being in the Word and expresses the mind of God to us, and nature is moved by the Spirit, which brings all things to maturity in Christ.’

The contemplative community at Shantivanam was based on the traditions of Christian monasticism and Hindu sannyasi – the renunciation of the world in order to seek God. The community members were to live a life based on the rules of St Benedict and the eastern Fathers of the Church, while studying Hindu doctrine and methods of prayer and meditation. The community, whatever their nationality, wore Indian clothing, went barefoot and sat on the floor and ate with their hands as in the Hindu sannyasi tradition. The longing was to bring the Indian emphasis on interiority to Christian life. As one biographer writes:

‘Thus Christianity could be enhanced by the riches of Hinduism and Indian Christians would be able to bring their familiar cultural practices to their faith. It was not about conversion or triumphalism, but about exchange, respect, giving, sharing; Bede was convinced that one religious tradition should never be considered better than another, simply a different way to God.’

While preserving the Benedictine model of manual work, study, and prayer, there was less public worship and more private prayer and meditation. There were two hours of meditation at dawn and at sunset – with morning, midday and evening offices from the Breviary and an evening satsang (community meeting). The search was for a supreme reality beyond religious differences.