Faith & Spirit Quote by Bede Griffiths

Kneeling is doing double duty here: it is both the posture of prayer and the posture of defeat. Griffiths frames conversion not as a gentle awakening but as a forced surrender, a deliberate demolition of the modern self that insists on being the story’s protagonist. “God had brought me to my knees” makes divine grace sound almost like a takedown, and that edge matters. He wants you to feel the violence of ego-loss, the way spiritual change often arrives as humiliation before it becomes relief.

The key word is “nothingness,” which in a Christian register evokes humility, creatureliness, the stripping away of false autonomy. But Griffiths was also a bridge figure between Western monasticism and Indian spirituality; the phrasing quietly nods to the apophatic and Vedantic idea that the self, as we habitually narrate it, is not the final reality. The subtext is a critique of the “centered self” that late-modern culture rewards: self-expression, self-optimization, self-importance. Griffiths doesn’t just downrank the ego; he dethrones it.

Then comes the psychological twist: losing the self doesn’t flatten the world, it sharpens it. “No longer the centre” is presented as a perceptual breakthrough, not a moral scolding. Once the spotlight stops following “me,” the field of vision widens: “God in everything.” It’s a rhetorical move with consequences. He’s not arguing for belief by evidence; he’s describing a transformation of attention. The rebirth is less about new information than a new orientation, where meaning is discovered by decentering rather than acquiring.