Love is the Golden String

A posting to the Australian outback produced a crisis in Doug Conlan?s life. He could no longer skim along on the surface of things. He had to find the golden string that leads through the labyrinth. He turned for help to Fr Bede Griffiths.

IN HIS autobiography The Golden String, the late Bede Griffiths spoke of an experience when he was in his final year at school. It was while he was walking along in the evening, as the sun was setting over the playing fields. He wrote that as I walked on, I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. It was as though he had chanced upon the Garden of Paradise and in that moment, he recalled, a lark rose suddenly from the ground, poured out its song above my head, and then sank, still singing, to rest. At this point, he remembered, a feeling of awe overcame him, such that even the sky seemed but a veil before the face of God.

For many years Bede Griffiths tried to recapture and express that experience. He began to see what the poet Wordsworth meant when he described the world with the freshness of a dream. Even the smallest details of nature drew him beyond himself and helped him become aware that we are no longer isolated individuals in conflict with our surroundings; we are parts of a whole, elements in a universal harmony.

Years later, he created a small garden in front of his single-room mud hut at Shantivanam ashram in south India. The yellows, reds, whites and mauves of the myriad flowers and their bright green stems and leaves throw sutras of colour against the dull ochres of his hut; they lead the eye up to the glassless window, from which Bede would gaze in contemplation, appreciating the beauty of his garden plot and perhaps waiting for his next visitor, or writing a letter to one of his many friends. He told me that he created this colourful space because it reminded him of the way the natural entanglements and riots of colour in a garden constantly surprised him with the sense of unity to be found there. For him a garden provided wondrous opportunities for breaking the daily routine and of adjusting to some new experience. Anything that can do that, he said, is a message bearer to the soul, allowing us to see as though a veil has been lifted.

More than 20 years ago I was posted as pastor to a remote region of Western Australia. This happened at a time in my life when I was enjoying what I judged to be some success and popularity in my work. I moved around, had a sizeable congregation, laughed a lot and liked skimming along on the surface of life. As the reality of my new appointment sank in, however, I became disconcerted in contemplating the looming prospect of lonesomeness and isolation. It was then that I discovered Fr Bede through his books, and started to write to him at his ashram in India. He took my lack of ease at being sent to the bush seriously and addressed my concerns with sympathy, grace and intelligence. He said I should plan one day to come and spend a year with him at the ashram. Meanwhile, he said, I should seek ways of discovering a sense of unity and meaning in the day-to-day experiences of nature?s wilderness in my part of the world.

He exhorted me to listen to crows cawing and blowflies droning: and to the sounds of silence. He urged me to stop and watch intensely the heat hazes shimmering on the vast horizon, ancient landforms that host surprising flora and fauna, sun-baked soil that becomes unfriendly for seeds to take root in, floods that wash away hopes and dreams; and to get a sense of the farm families who long to find their own sense of meaning in the intense and sometimes unforgiving isolation of the Australian outback. He quoted the golden string in William Blake?s poem. I should follow up the inner vision that I had seen in the wilderness of my parish, he said, keep it in mind when thrown back again on self-doubt and confusion, live its light and shape my life by its law. In this way I would wind the string into a ball, and find your way out of the labyrinth of life.

The loveliness of the vision imparted through his letters and books struck and moved me. But I don?t think I did so well at putting his exhortations into practice. I was far too focused on what I deemed I?d lost in another life and another place to be really present to the people of the wilderness or the wild, free, fringed-tangle cosmos around me. Just at this time I was still groping for the light and was for the moment inwardly unfree. Yet, here and there, there were signs that Bede?s vision was having an effect.

Fr Bede assured me that the individual inner spiritual journey of discovering is something that calls for all our energies, and involves both labour and sacrifice; each one approaches it from a different angle and has to work out his own particular problem. Each alike is given a golden string and has to find his own way through the labyrinth. If I glanced into his room on my way down the path near his hut from around 2.30 a.m. in the pre-dawn, I would see him sitting deep in contemplation, as part of his several hours of preparation for the morning Eucharist. Fr Bede lived for more than 30 years his simple life at Shantivanam ashram, all the while trying to break through the rational mind. It was only through suffering a stroke in the last couple of years of his life that he won through the labyrinth. As a result, he said to his listeners one day: I have learnt more in the last two years than in all of the rest of my life to this point.

For Bede the golden string led on from that evening at his school: he had to keep seeking and learning. He said that every step in advance is a return to the beginning and that the beauty to be found in nature, the cosmos, is not only truth but also Love.

For me too the search goes on. Fr Bede said that he discovered the divine not only in the life of nature, but also in the minds and hearts of human beings. He found that he had sought the divine in the solitude of nature, and in the labour of his mind, but eventually found the answer in his community and the spirit of charity. Until then he felt he had been wandering in a far country and had returned home; that he had been dead and was alive again; that he had been lost and was found.

PERHAPS for me it is not so clear. Well, not yet, anyway. I wonder, too, if my own tangle of doubts and questioning is in some way necessary for my being open to those who are likewise freely searching? I suspect it all paints a picture, the ultimate outcome of which I shan?t see while looking only at the small perspective.

I find my thoughts returning to my home in the bush. Now I remind myself not of the dismay that it all does not fit like clockwork, but of the insight that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it surges in such a free, fringed tangle. What for me was once a wilderness of unpopularity compared to the so-called popularity I thought I?d previously known, a barren land of few parishioners and long, hard, lonely miles in my hermitage-car, a nutrient-depleted soil that could hardly keep a hitherto comfortable, frothy spirituality going ? very gradually, as the years progressed, became a kind of home for me: a land that was tough enough to bring out here and there rugged plants of spiritual survival; a depth of soil in which friendships that stand the test of time flourish; an open, clean air that carries the experience, thoughts and hopes of there being a deeper unity to this whole fringed-tangle cosmos.

By their very existence, those little plants in a remote Australian wilderness are at once teachers and the things taught about. I hope that their free fringed tangle of teachings will be a source of inspiration for me all my life. I can say this also of the friends I have made in those remote regions. In a way, the families of the Australian bush are a microcosm of what lies before the Church. Structures are collapsing and the experience of bush people may be pointing the way to how others may spiritually adapt in the future.

As the institutional Church struggles to fill vacant parishes, the ordinary people of the bush will continue doing what they have always done: they will carry on. They are not overcome or daunted by the absence of clergy. They have already found new ways of growing and thriving spiritually in depleted soils. They, in their tiny, isolated, caring communities, may even be discovering the inevitability of George Simon?s words: In the end, God manifests not as some kind of super floor show, but as a human being.

Fr Bede closed his autobiography, The Golden String, with some words from the prior in Dostoevsky?s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. I feel these describe beautifully the way Bede tried to live his life for 86 years. They also present a vision: one that I have seen also echoed in the lives of countless men and women in the Australian outback. It is a vision in which I would like to live my life: Love all God?s creation, the whole and every grain of it. . . . If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.