A Sense of the Sacred

Born into an English middle class family, educated at Christ’s Hospital and Oxford where he became friend and confidant of C S Lewis, and at one time a member of the Benedictine community at Prinknash Abbey, Bede Griffiths has spent more than thirty years of his extraordinary life in India. On the banks of the sacred river Cauvery he now lives as a sannyası. His ashram is a centre of prayer and meditation open to any who seek the universal and eternal truth at the heart of all religions.

A man of exceptional intellect who has yet been able to recog-nize the limits of reason, Bede Griffiths found in India ‘the other half of himself, a feminine, intuitive self which opened ip a new sense of the sacred and of the harmony at the heart f all things. This he had rediscovered in the East and he telt it was relevant not only to his own life but to the Western world desperately seeking not knowledge but wisdom.

As part of her work on this unique biography Kathryn Spink spent a period with Father Bede at Saccidananda ashram where he spoke with remarkable openness about his personal journey.