In the Bosom of the Father

Swami Abhishiktananda was a French Benedictine monk who lived in India for more than two decades and strove to understand and live his Christian faith through the enlightening teachings of Hindu Advaita Vedanta. Even as he remained a faithful Catholic monk, he increasingly longed to live his life from the depths of both Christian and Hindu understandings of the ultimate Real. In contrast to his many powerful prose works for which he is known, Swami Abhishiktananda also employs free verse to explore, exhort, and expound, reporting in poetry on his long journey of interreligious spiritual discovery with little desire to justify himself systematically. In these poems, a fervent and devoted Christian mystic plunges into the riches of the Hindu religious genius and brings forth ecstatic, colorful, and profound wisdom charged with an acute awareness of the non-duality between the innermost self of the human being and the Absolute Reality. These poems, collected together for the first time, search and hope with the dire honesty characteristic of the greatest of the world's mystics.