Anthony De Mello

Anthony de Mello was an Indian Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who turned parable and paradox into a spiritual method, teaching seekers across the world through story rather than doctrine. Born in Bombay on 4 September 1931, he entered the Jesuit seminary of Vinalaya at sixteen, studied philosophy in Barcelona from 1952, then returned to India for theology at De Nobili College in Pune, where he was ordained in March 1961 (Wikipedia). Colleagues who knew him in his early Jesuit years describe someone fairly conservative in theology and wary of other religions; it was Spain, they say, that loosened him (Wikipedia).

He didn’t stay loosened halfway. In 1972 he founded what became the Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counselling in Pune, and in 1978 published his first book, Sadhana: A Way to God, which recast Ignatian exercises through Eastern contemplative practice (Wikipedia). Through the 1980s he led retreats at Jesuit institutions like Fordham, weaving in Rumi, Kabir, Nasreddin tales, episodes from the Buddha’s life, and mindfulness principles he’d absorbed on retreat with S. N. Goenka (Wikipedia). Books like The Way to Love, Seek God Everywhere, and Contact with God carried that same voice: playful, unsparing, allergic to pious abstraction.

It’s this same reach across traditions that later drew formal Vatican scrutiny. In 1998 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification judging his later work to have drifted from Christian orthodoxy, faulting his treatment of God as impersonal void and his framing of Jesus as one awakened teacher among others (Vatican). Whatever one makes of that judgment, it’s also a measure of how far his stories traveled, and how uncomfortable institutions can get when someone insists that light doesn’t belong to one house alone.

De Mello died of a heart attack in New York City on 2 June 1987, at 55 (Wikipedia). His brother Bill later wrote that his body was found curled in a fetal position.