Kurisumala : symbol of the meeting of spiritualities.

When I started to work on this series of pictures on the Song of Songs, I had gone back to Kurisumala, which is a hill in the Cardamom hills in Kerala. Here the Apostle Thomas is meant to have passed over the hills to go to Tamilnad. A hill in this area is called the Hill of the Cross (Kurisu mala), where St. Thomas is supposed to have camped. It is here that an Ashram was founded at the foot of the mountain by two monks from the West—Dom Bede Griffiths, and Francis Acharya (Mahieu), who came to India in 1955. The Ashram was formally established in 1957. It is here that I felt that a meeting of two spiritual traditions took place, one from the Contemplative tradition of the West, and the other an Eastern approach to the spiritual quest. It is in this spirit that Dom Bede Griffiths was to write of the “Marriage of East and West”