The Golden String: An Autobiography [Paperback]

After Oxford Bede Griffiths started life as an atheist who felt the need for 'something more.' He first found it in nature and the English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He pursued this further with the study of philosophy, went through Descarte, Kant and into Coleridge's synthesis with Platonic concepts. Griffith believed he was also a communist, or certainly a socialist, in the pre-World War II days.

Richer experiences with nature led him to a belief that what he found in nature was what he also had heard preached from church pulpits in his childhood. This led him first to the Anglican Church, then to the Catholic church because he wanted to become a Benedictine monk.

Once taking his final vows he remained content in a monastery in England. Eventually he was invited to help out at a Benedictine monastery in India. There he began to learn Sanskrit and study Hindu and Buddhist scriptural classics. He left that monastery after a few years at an invitation to join an even stricter Cistertian monastery in another part of India.

He became strongly influenced by the spirituality of the principle religious philosophy of India, Vedanta. He combined Vedantic spiritual practices with Christian monastic practices and eventually established a Christian ashram with overtones of Indian Hinduism. There he and his monks' practices include meditating twice a day, praying the eight Benedictine monastic hours, and reading the scriptures of the three principle religious traditions -- Judeo-Christian bible, Hindu-Buddhist scriptures and Moslem Koran -- at each of the eight canonical hours. This ashram/monastery has become famous for its broad ecumenical practices.

The Golden String is one of the great spiritual biographies of the world.

by Heinrich Hora, Connels Point 2221, Australia (see more)

This autobiography covers nearly all important thinking including atheism, the centre of religions, Chistianity and Catholicism as well about the main statements of philosophers, but also showing the author's steps from early search about the beauty of nature, culture, civilisation and experience with socialism and dictatorships. Though no final answer can be given, the synthesis of science and believe is discussed in a purified way free from esoteric or dubious speculations. Bede Griffiths has deeply bridged the world of East and West "together seeking to recover the wisdom which has been lost and to advance into the new age" by devoting his life to his worldwide known centre of an Indian ashram under the roof of his Benedictine order. The way he was led to this topic was transparent and a honest search distancing himself from modern fashion and degeneracy, exchanging his critical views with other inspired followers, down to earth life including craftsmanship and not missing a chance that he nearly got married. He underlined the new hope: "It is a movement towards a science and a technology which will cease to exploit nature and will learn to live in harmony with nature. It is a movement also towards a more human way of life...an attempt to reconstruct science and technology on a new basis."
"To discover God is not to discover an idea but to discover oneself " is the question. "We have progressed from rejection of the Church at the Reformation, to the rejection of Christ at the French Revolution to the rejection of God at the Russian Revolution". Being born 1906 into a middle class English family he lost Anglican tradition and became an atheist when moving to own judgment and listening to the various texts like Fielding and Jane Austin, or Measure for Measure and King Lear. His discovery of the beauty of nature was the revelation which never lost him. Studying at Oxford "I had ceased to practice any form of Christianity, and regarded Christianity as a religion of the past". "Oxford had been commercialised...a sense of beauty which had been lost...beyond the reach of modern man" or an "inconsistency of the Industrial Revolution" what led him and few fellows to search for alternatives while carefully studying and discussing Plato, Aristotele, Spinoza or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. St. Thomas Aquinas's and St. Augustine's works were compared with Buddha and Mark Aurelius along with Christ's sermon on the Mount. Moving then to a village taught to "distinguish between civilisation and culture", the first being "connected with continual extension of material luxury". "Our civilisation was not merely an offence against beauty and truth, against that rational order of life upon which human culture is based".
Years later in the ashram I was mentioning the stainless steel plates in his kitchen as technological progress, but he did not accept this and preferred to take his meal from banana leaf. What showed him that "the source of evil was to be found in the human mind rising up against God and seeking to build up its civilisation without reference to God, the supreme arbiter of destiny and...human happiness". "Remember the Creator" are the steps how he found his happy way to finally become a Benedictine priest. "In the Roman Empire...the significance of manual labour had been lost through the introduction of slavery, just as it has been lost in the modern world through industrialism". His solution: "the monastic life restored it to its proper place in human life" by combining labour and continuous praying.
It is really an adventure to follow Bede's way and read why "to sacrify is literally to make a thing sacred...to make it over to God" and "then we realize that the whole universe is a sacrament". It should be added that Bede could formulate with the blessing of the wide consciousness of the Vatican that all religions have a centre of divine origin..(dedicated to the celebrations of Prof.Dr.jur. Georg Romatka, Munich)

There is a formative sense to his writings, a recollection in faith and God that is delicately wrought and said with a sense of the imminence of God in his life as a young man, and the beauty of poetry. I like that Bede Griffiths comes to the subject of generations and of the various human forces of mankind in twentieth century history with a willingness of being open to some imaginative life that seems touched with the Holy Spirit.

I wonder about this man of Christ, and his life that is lived in a way that is really
outside my experience and observation (saintly); here in this work "The Golden String," is Dom Bede's genuineness in faith and his own religious devotion.

When reading the work, I sought inspiration, understanding of a man's search for God and the Holy, and the way in which he lived this quest and the very living of a life that is religious. I want some of that richness that is tenderly present as it is unfolded in this work, for after all this is a man of peace.

I understand this to be Bede Griffith's first book. One reason to read the work for me I found is to look for the initial book of his life to open me to an unusual contemplative and the contemplative life, and I found a kind of widening of the vista where there is a wind that blows that says this presence of God and the Holy Spirit is a strong current in our lives. This is not a book solely about rare experience, but an examination and narrative of where is God's call in the life of a man. That this is true for all men is what I suppose, for I am interested in the special but mainly in the everyday possibilities of life with Christ. One finds such recognition in this book. I did.

Here in this book, an autobiography of a man of God, there is a larger sense of the Christian faith ecumenical, a to-be of our future, yet with the promise of Christ that says we are this unique group, Christian.

The book is about the modern world. So "The Golden String" comes to me that way, and as I go through it I sought some taste of the wisdom that is inherent in what is a life that is gifted with the grace of God. This is a modern man living a contemporary life in the modern world as contemporary creature and within a span of my own life. I wanted to know about such relationship and journey to and with the Lord. For with Bede Griffith, God is present and as many know God is present whether we know it or not in all men's lives. So is the subtext of the autobiography of this extraordinary work. Admirable is a way to describe the book in its way of grasping the holy, for so many of readers of religious works will find this descriptive autobiography remarkable in its tale itself.

Certainly there is the inter-religious. One finds the universality of the religious experience in this Roman Catholic monk and priest's journey, along with notes to understanding what is the inner dialogue of the dialogue of prayer.

The reader needs to want to read this kind of work to enjoy it in that light of the inner dialogue and the dialogue of prayer.

The slim volume is good for reflection and meditation. One reflection it offered me was newly awakened: to think of charity. This "Golden String" is a holy kind of history. For me I continue seeing it as a religious record and writing. The book was recommended by a monk to me. He said it was like reading something by Thomas Merton.

--Peter Menkin, Mill Valley, CA USA