Motherhood Quote by Bede Griffiths

A jolt of devotion, not a slow burn: Griffiths frames surrender as something that arrives unbidden, almost like weather. That matters. By stressing it was "quite unexpected", he sidesteps the suspicion that mystical experience is self-induced, wish-fulfillment, or pious theater. The language of passivity ("came suddenly", "somehow I made") casts him as a recipient rather than an author, which is a classic strategy in credible religious testimony: the less control the speaker claims, the more authority the experience can carry.

The capital-M "Mother" is doing heavy cultural work. For a 20th-century Christian clergyman, invoking "Mother" signals a widening of the sacred beyond patriarchal God-talk, nodding toward Marian devotion, the feminine face of the divine, and (in Griffiths' specific life) a lived dialogue with Hindu traditions where the Mother is a central spiritual figure. He doesn't argue for syncretism; he smuggles it in through experience. The theology arrives as sensation.

"Waves of love" is deliberately untechnical: not doctrine, not metaphysics, but a bodily, flooding metaphor. It translates the ineffable into something almost physiological, suggesting the experience isn't primarily about belief but about being re-patterned from the inside. The subtext is a quiet critique of a faith reduced to ideas. Surrender here isn't moral defeat; it's consent to be overwhelmed, a voluntary relinquishing that paradoxically produces expansion. The quote works because it treats the mystical as both intimate and disarming: sudden, uncontrollable, and emotionally undeniable, but narrated with enough restraint to feel like witness rather than performance.