Time & Perspective Quote by Bede Griffiths

The jolt in Bede Griffiths's line is the reversal of agency: the seeker discovers he was never driving the search. That pivot does two things at once. It punctures spiritual ego - the flattering modern story where religion is an accessory to self-improvement - and it restores an older, more unsettling Christian grammar in which grace arrives first and the self follows, reluctantly, after.

Griffiths frames the revelation as sudden, not reasoned. The drama is psychological: a mind that thought it was pursuing meaning catches itself performing for itself. "I had made myself the centre" is less confession-booth piety than diagnosis of a cultural habit: the self as headquarters, the world as mirror. The next clause, "my back turned", makes the image bodily. It's not that God is absent; it's that attention is mis-aimed. The sin is orientation.

Context matters here. Griffiths spent his life moving between traditions - a Benedictine who became a key bridge figure between Western Christianity and Indian spirituality. In that setting, the line reads as a corrective to spirituality-as-consumption, the kind of eclectic seeking that can become another way to curate identity. Yet it also echoes contemplative Christianity and even the bhakti idea of a divine initiative: the beloved pursuing the lover.

The intent, then, isn't to shame the search but to dethrone its narrator. By flipping the direction of desire, Griffiths invites a different posture: not mastery, not achievement, but being found.