posted December 24, 2007 03:20 AM         

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Vulnerable to the Truth: Lives of Encounter
Chou En Lai was once asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution to which he replied, ‘It is too early to tell!’

The life of the French Catholic monk, Henri Le Saux, who became Swami Abhishitananda, was lived out in relative obscurity and sought for solitude. Since his death in 1973, through the diligent care of his friends, his life and work has become more widely and deeply known: a knowing to which this wholly admirable biography is a major and welcome contribution.

Through that knowing we can begin to see that the significance of the life of this monk has only begun to unfold. That like the mustard seed in the Gospel, this 'small', particular life, lived with great humility and suffering, has the ability to send forth mighty branches.

It was a life fully lived in two identities: the faithful Catholic monk from a comfortably, sustaining Breton home and a traditional Benedictine monastic life lived out in the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century and as a practitioner of advaita vedanta, whose life was transformed, on coming to India in 1948, by an encounter with Sri Ramana Maharishi and with the sacred mountain: Arunachala, that was Sri Ramana's home. These two identities resonated with one another in ways that both exalted and cast down as he wrestled with the consequences of living two paths in one breast, as he sought reconciliation in the 'cave of his heart', within his own experience, between the way of Christ that had claimed him as a young man and of the path of non-dual consciousness, that is the vedanta, that lay hold of him mid-way through his life.

In an age of spiritual consumerism, where we mix and match spiritual tools with apparent ease, one of the virtues of Shirley du Boulay's biography is both to describe, wholly sympathetically, the suffering that following these two paths caused Swami Abhishiktananda and make it vividly comprehensible.

Comprehensible both as an intellectual struggle to align Christian understanding with that of the Vedanta but, more crucially, by recognising that in the actual encounter with the reality of another tradition, and if you are to engage in genuine dialogue, you must take the risk of having your whole life and understanding rewritten - you must find that kind of vulnerability. Abhishiktananda is precisely a living witness to that risk, and to its costliness and rewards.

But, more importantly yet, the whole path of the contemplative life is to bring you to a place that is the 'right place', that is your only home, an arrival that is not achieving a particular state of 'mystical consciousness' (over against other states) but being placed in vulnerability towards all that is and all that unfolds from that suchness.

‘The heart of his message was...to 'lay hold of eternity in the present moment,' to have the blazing...of God's presence in the actual situation we find ourselves. That only is real, 'the present moment, in which I am face-to face with God. ... The Expresso bar on the corner of the ghats is no less 'brahmic' than the arrati or the ecstatic Mass. This is precisely what you have to discover and live now; the expression of the inmost and unique mystery in the most commonplace action or meeting.’

This path to 'the cave of the heart' where, to quote Meister Eckhart, we 'find our being in God' is a path that walks through suffering, of ourselves and others, not away from it or around it. It is the great virtue of Brian Pierce's 'We Walk the Path Together' to recognise that both Christianity and Buddhism begin with a recognition that life dwells in suffering and that any path of transformation must begin there, ‘learning to touch suffering’, to use Thich Nhat Hanh's phrase, and to see into its nature and origin. It is the virtue of the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity in this book that it honestly confronts the differences in the way in which the two traditions approach suffering in a way that enables them mutually to enlighten each other and find places of common ground, where we discover our shared vulnerability to what is - the reality that addresses us and elicits our compassionate response.

The significance of both Swami Abhishiktanada's life, and the honest, open dialogue that weaves through Brian Pierce's work is that we arrive at common ground by embracing that which is particularly, uniquely ours, and by doing so find a place that frees us into a vulnerability to meet the unique, particular place of another. Our commonality will be found beyond finding similarities in the patterns of our thought and practice - in enjoying the freedom of that vulnerability, being present, and recognising it has a singular nature: a compassion that strands through all that is.

Both witness to the words of the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner when he said: we will have a church of mystics or we will have nothing. Everything else has been seen through and found wanting. This is the next step to which Swami Abhishiktanada's life gracefully points the way.

Nicholas Colloff is Oxfam's country manager in the Russian Federation. A student of philosophy & religion he has spent prolonged periods in Christian ashrams.