The gift of insomnia... Reviving an 'old project', a book on Bede Griffiths

I have never slept particularly well (my dad tells me that even as a baby I slept badly). Over the years the doctors suggested various reasons, most commonly it seems to do with a deficiency of melatonin. I don't really mind - every now and then I feel the effects of lack of sleep, but on the whole it is more of a gift than a curse! I am capable of getting by on about 4 hours of sleep.

This has meant that a lot of my thinking, writing, planning, praying, and working, happens late at night, or early in the morning.

Over the last two weeks I have not been sleeping particularly well, so I have revived a project that I had been working on some years ago - a book on Bede Griffiths' Christology (that is, what Bede Griffiths believed about Jesus, for those who are not familiar with the jargon).

Bede Griffiths was a remarkable man. He was born in England, educated at Magdalen College in Oxford (a lovely place! I've visited it). He was converted under the guidance of CS Lewis and entered the Benedictine Order. He spent most of his life in India in a unique and special Benedictine community that offered a fresh expression of faith in Christ to many Indian Christians, and also to many westerners who had given up on traditional Christianity.

What is of particular interest to me is the way in which Fr Bede adapted the daily rule of St Benedict to match his incredible theology. Both (the rule and his theology) were fundamentally influenced by his mystical spirituality. Fr Bede believed that the mystical experience of God was his primary goal for existence - this experience of the divine achieved two significant purposes. First, it offered devotion to God the source of all that exists. Second, it formed the substance of God's revelation to humanity (i.e., revealing God's nature, God's will, and God's mission in the world).

I did a Masters degree under Professor Felicity Edwards many years ago in which I studied Bede Griffiths spirituality. It was a significant milestone in my spiritual and theological development. It was from Felicity, and Fr Bede, that I came to understand and love the rich insights that theology can gain from science, and vice versa. However, Fr Bede's fundamental approach to the Cosmos as an expression of the nature of Christ (divine and human, physical and spiritual, non dual, and permeated with the sacred intention of God) has remained a central thrust in my life. It has informed my theology, ethics, and daily life.

My Masters Thesis was published by the Bede Griffiths trust in California and now forms part of the archives. It wasn't a brilliant piece of scholarship, even though I got a distinction for it. It needed reworking and refining.

So, in my sleepless nights I have been reworking it into a book. At this stage it will not be a very large book (perhaps 130 or so pages). It is a Christology, discussing the significance and contribution of Fr Bede's Hindu-Christian approach to the Cosmic Christ for spirituality and theological discourse. I think the title is likely to be Discovering the Cosmic Christ - a Hindu-Christian approach to Christ in the spirituality of Bede Griffiths.

So, watch this space! I am about two thirds of the way with my edits - perhaps in a week or so I will have the first draft done.

Technorati tags: Bede Griffiths, spirituality, Christology, book, insomnia