IN THE YEAR 2000, New York played host to the
State of the World Forum, an unusual gathering of
scientists, activists, authors, philosophers, business leaders,
spiritual teachers, politicians, and world leaders. I spent four
days there as a journalist among hundreds of the world's most
progressive luminaries, interacting with leading-edge thinkers
in their respective fields. I remember hearing Gorbachev's
inspiring opening address, watching the cameras and admirers
pursue Jordan's Queen Noor up and down the hallways, bumping
into someone in the lobby only to find myself apologizing to
Deepak Chopra, walking in a door and suddenly realizing that the
president of Indonesia had just walked out, talking to a
scientist and then learning that he was the one who had
discovered “dark matter,” discussing religion with
an African participant who I would see years later accepting the
Nobel Peace Prize, having someone sit down next to me in a
session only to turn and recognize the distinguished Sufi
spiritual teacher Pir Vilayat Khan. It was that kind of
conference.
Amid all the excitement of that fascinating week in New York,
there was one meeting that stood out above the rest. And it
wasn't with a world leader, a renowned scientist, or a celebrity
activist. It was with an unpretentious Catholic monk whose name
was Brother Wayne Teasdale. He and I spent a remarkable day
together, and although we never saw each other in person again,
I can still remember our conversations as if they happened
yesterday, clear and compelling even amidst the noisy clatter of
a thousand memories that have come and gone in the intervening
years.
Teasdale died this last October, succumbing finally to a long
battle with cancer. With his passing goes a personal friend, a
supporter of this magazine, and a true light that helped
illumine, however briefly, a significant part of this shadowed
world. There have been many great mystics in the last century,
many passionate activists, and many humble saints. But seldom
have all those qualities been combined in one and the same
person. Brother Wayne Teasdale was that rare breed.
Born in 1945, Teasdale was raised in a traditional Catholic
family, but his true spiritual calling was not to be discovered
until the late sixties, when he met Trappist monk Father Thomas
Keating. It was in retreats led by Keating that Teasdale, then a
college student, would directly contact the transformative power
of mystical experience, and his life would never be the same
again. “The Divine completely took me over,” he
writes in his autobiography, describing his experience at the
time. “I was often taken out of myself, my consciousness
enlarged. . . . Space and time were suspended—I couldn't
think, analyze, remember, imagine, or speak. I hovered between
fear and awe. . . . Saturated by [the Divine's] incomparable
love and mystery, all I could do was to assent to its presence
within, around, and through me. . . . Fired with urgency and
expectation, I gave myself to the Divine.”
Enlivened by his initial forays into the mystical life,
Teasdale eventually
found his way to India, where he took vows
with the Benedictine monk Father Bede Griffiths. Griffiths was a
religious pioneer who founded an ashram in south India and built
a spiritual path that resided somewhere between Hinduism and
Christianity but which embraced the mystical essence of both.
This unique form of cross-cultural spirituality—which
Teasdale came to call inter-spirituality—would inspire
Teasdale's many efforts over the years to bridge the gaps not
just between different religious traditions but between
individuals and the deeper sources of their own faiths.
In 1993, Teasdale's work took a significant leap forward as
he played an essential role in the resuscitation of the
Parliament of the World's Religions, helping to mold it into a
rich forum for dialogue and discussion between traditions. More
recently, he helped initiate the innovative Synthesis Dialogues,
bringing together a highly select group of spiritual and
religious leaders from around the planet for experiments in
collective inquiry. Along the way, Teasdale taught and traveled,
wrote a number of books, befriended the Dalai Lama, and became a
passionate advocate for the Tibetan cause. Yet despite his
eclectic mystical tastes and his adventures on the cutting edge
of religious faiths the world over, at the time of his death he
was living in a traditional theological seminary in Chicago,
struggling with the conservative turn of the Catholic Church,
writing, teaching, and caring for the homeless on the streets of
the Windy City. As much the simple monastic as he was the
jet-set activist, Teasdale had renounced the world completely
only to find himself more dedicated than ever to saving it.
“I find myself becoming more and more aware of the Source
as 'inherently warmhearted,'” he once explained in an
interview. “The vast consciousness that is the Divine is
not a cold analytical intelligence. It emanates from its very
core a concern. Heidegger said that the essence of being is
concern, and this is what many of the traditions have tried to
communicate.”