Daily Inspiration Quote by Bede Griffiths

A “citadel” is a telling choice: Griffiths frames the self not as a gentle interior but as a fortified stronghold, engineered for control, defended by habit, pride, and intellectual certainty. The drama of the line isn’t in a tidy conversion story; it’s in the terror of not knowing what surrender even means. He’s being “called” (passive voice, external summons), yet he’s “in the dark” (no map, no doctrinal checklist), which makes the moment feel less like moral bookkeeping and more like an existential stripping-down. Repentance, in this telling, isn’t remorse for a catalog of sins; it’s the collapse of a whole way of occupying the world.

That’s the subtext: the real thing being relinquished is mastery. The insistence that he “did not really know” reads like a deliberate rejection of the cerebral faith that can name every concept and still avoid transformation. For a clergyman in the early 20th century - educated, formed by institutional Christianity, trained to articulate repentance - admitting confusion is quietly radical. He’s confessing that the standard vocabulary didn’t reach the actual problem, which was the ego’s architecture.

Context sharpens it. Griffiths later became famous for bridging Christian monasticism and Indian spiritual traditions; this passage foreshadows that trajectory. Before synthesis comes surrender. The “turning point” isn’t a moment of certainty but a moment when certainty stops being the point. It works because it refuses triumphalism: the conversion hinge is not clarity, but darkness endured long enough for the self’s defenses to open.