The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions (review)

The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions. By Wayne Teasdale. Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999. 292 pp. $23.95.

Wayne Teasdale was initiated into sannyasa--renunciation, the way of the solitary monk--by Dom Bede Griffiths, who was for many years the director and spiritual guide of the famous Shantivanam Ashram in south India. Griffiths himself had come to Shantivanam in 1968 to replace Fr. Henri Le Saux, who had left for the Himalayas to pursue in greater solitude his vision of a radical Christian nondualism; and it had been in the late 1940s that Le Saux had accepted the invitation of Fr. Jules Monchanin to travel to India to cooperate in establishing a monastic community and set down deeper roots for Christian contemplative spirituality in Indian soil, thus liberating the Church from its persistent image as a foreign and activist religious establishment. Their initiative, coupled with those of other foreign priests but also significant Indian figures, has been somewhat successful, and today it is widely accepted that Indian Catholic spirituality must be nourished by the contemplative traditions of India. Teasdale became a part of this tradition when he began corresponding with Bede Griffiths in 1973; and he enlarged the program and ambitions of this new monasticism by leaps and bounds in opting for an intermonastic life--that of a solitary monk drawing nourishment from all tradition, knowing everyone, traveling widely--that reaches well beyond the boundaries of both the Christian West and India. What seems to have been implicitly operative in his early life--childhood mystical sensitivities--and what became explicit through encounter with Griffiths, Teasdale has come to propose as the goal: a universal interspirituality, a global intermonasticism that draws on all religious traditions and invites everyone everywhere to drink deeply from the spiritual and mystical streams flowing through all religious traditions.

In Part I, Teasdale explores the common heritage of an interspiritual wisdom that cannot be limited to or by any particular tradition because it is the fruition of human consciousness and the common goal of all faiths. In Parts II and III, this vision is expanded with reference to contemplative practice and natural mysticism. Finally, in Part IV, it concludes with a vision of the culmination of the intermystical journey in a global intermystical community, and even in a set of values and vows appropriate to a universal order of sannyasa. The preceding generation's effort to root monastic spirituality in India has now spread everywhere, a global green revolution of the soul. There is a practical side to all of this, too; in the face of the evils of our world, Teasdale plausibly asserts that the human problem requires a spiritual solution, deeply rooted in a richer and transformed sense of being-human. The book thus reflects Teasdale's own work for the harmony of religions during the 1993 Parliament of the World's Religions and in helping to draft the Universal Declaration on Nonviolence.

It is almost impossible not to respect The Mystic Heart, and Teasdale has evoked many favorable responses to his vision. The book is warmly recommended on its cover by fellow pilgrims and visionaries Thomas Berry, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Jean Houston; inside, it is prefaced by Beatrice Bruteau, who writes extensively on themes similar to Teasdale's, and by the Dalai Lama himself. How the older figures Teasdale admires--among Christian heroes such as Monchanin, Le Saux, and Griffiths, but also Thomas Merton, Raimundo Panikkar, and Ignatius Hirudayam--would have responded to this call is an interesting question. One can suppose that some would have been more enthusiastic, others frowning at this fast moving global project.

Because the book's goal is admirable and urgent, we must at least resist its charms long enough to ask whether the roots of this interspirituality are deep enough to make it...