Bede on Love

 

For many people Father Bede was an inspiration for his immersion in advaita or non-duality, the core of the Vedic experience of God.  This book explores Bede from another point of view, that of his experience of love.

For me this is summed up in a letter he wrote to my mother in 1946:

I don’t know whether this will mean anything to you, but I have a very definite idea of an immense power of love which is, as it were, circulating in the universe, and is gathered into the centre of our being.  We cannot stir this love ourselves and all our efforts can only frustrate it, but if we sink down into ourselves and lose ourselves in the depths, it can sweep over us and absorb us and carry us into the heart of God and of the whole universe.

Bede saw love not only as the power in the universe, but also as the fundamental experience of God.  Unlike the Vedic vision which could see the human soul, as it were, merging into the divine as a unity, Bede’s vision was that of a relationship of love in which all become one in a relationship of love in which everything retained its individuality.

I am compiling an anthology of Bede’s writings on love under six headings:

The Mystical Experience of Love

Love the Ground of Being

Living from the Centre in Love

Love in relationship: sexuality and marriage

Love and Suffering

Love as the monastic vocation

The anthology is drawn from his letters and also from his published material.  The letters give a profound insight into the way Bede loved while his published material brings out the theological and sacramental place of love in his thinking.

I hope to complete this work over the next few months and will keep you informed of progress.

 

Adrian Rance-McGregor