Motherhood Quote by Bede Griffiths

Griffiths is describing conversion as a kind of inner coup: not a new idea arriving, but an older, deeper reality slowly annexing the self. The striking move is that he frames the divine not as a remote patriarch but as an emerging presence he calls "the Mother" - then immediately complicates it. "It is not the Mother alone". He catches himself before the metaphor hardens into doctrine, widening the image into a paired, living polarity: Mother and Father, male and female, a "marriage" unfolding within consciousness.

The intent feels pastoral and strategic. Griffiths spent decades trying to translate Christian mysticism into an Indian setting, where the feminine face of the sacred (Shakti, the maternal aspect of reality) is culturally legible in a way Western Christianity often resists. By letting the "Mother" take the lead, he's prying open a tradition that has historically masculinized God; by insisting on the Father as well, he's signaling fidelity to orthodox structures even as he stretches them.

The subtext is psychological as much as theological. "Taking over" hints at ego-reluctance: surrender is not romanticized; it's slightly unnerving. The "marriage" metaphor suggests integration - not erasing difference, but reconciling it - a mystical version of wholeness where the opposites we weaponize socially (gender, authority, nurture) become mutually indwelling. In a clerical voice, that's quietly radical: he's not arguing for a new gendered God so much as proposing a God big enough to dissolve the fight over whose image gets to dominate.