Daily Inspiration Quote by Bede Griffiths

Griffiths pulls off a paradox that only a cleric steeped in both discipline and mysticism would dare: obedience, the posture most people associate with surrender, becomes a route to the deepest kind of freedom. The trick is in his definition. Obedience isn’t framed as mindless compliance to an institution; it’s framed as detachment from the ego’s reflex to clutch, defend, and self-authorize. That’s why he calls it “radical.” It doesn’t merely prune bad habits; it targets the very mechanism that insists on being the author of every decision.

Then he pivots with a strategically destabilizing question: “But what is the self?” He refuses the modern default where “self” means desire, identity, and personal preference. Instead, he offers an older, more Catholic (and quietly Thomistic) anthropology: the self as “reason and responsibility.” In that framing, obedience is not the erasure of personhood but the training of it. You detach from impulsive self-assertion so that a truer self - capable of accountability - can act.

The subtext is a defense against the standard indictment of religious obedience as dehumanizing. Griffiths anticipates the charge and answers it by relocating the battle line: what actually threatens freedom is not submission to a demanding moral order, but captivity to the unstable, reactive “self” we confuse for liberty. Context matters here: Griffiths spent decades experimenting with contemplative life and interreligious dialogue (notably with Indian spirituality). The quote reads like a bridge between monastic obedience and Eastern detachment, but with a pointed Christian insistence that the end state isn’t dissolution. It’s a human being sharpened into responsibility.