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WAYNE TEASDALE
to me and I do it every day. It's wonderful, it's a contemplative form of prayer for me. A rigorous walk engages your body.
L.M.: And your heart.
W.T.: Your heart—and your mind—and your imagination.
L.M.: Do you feel the love that nature has for us as you walk?
W.T.: Yes, I do, and the integration with nature. I feel nature responding. I have a whole slew of plants in my apartment hermitage in Chicago; they are really a community. One has to be very sensitive and open to understand that level of life. I had this little European cedar which I was very attached to; I had it for a bit more than a year—and then it died. I think one of the reasons it died was because I was going away a lot for weeks at a time. I had been taking good care of it, it was doing great, and all of a sudden, boom.
L.M.: You have envisioned, proposed a universal sannyasic order. What is happening to make your vision a reality?
W..: I don't consider myself a founder of the order, but there are a number of Christian sannyasis now in America. Bede and I had talked a number of times about forming an order. He went back and forth with the idea, because the conservative Hindu establishment in India is very much against Christians taking sannyasa. Bede had second thoughts about even calling this sannyasa. But sannyasa is beyond religion. And though much of it may have grown up under the Hindu umbrella, sannyasa transcends Hinduism; it belongs to the collective experience of humanity.
L.M.: Do some of the Hindus also say that sannyasa transcends religion? It's not just Christians who say that.
W.T.: The Hindus have been saying this for thousands of years—that sannyasa is beyond formal religion, because it is focused on the Absolute—which cannot be contained by anyone. So I am encouraging this American group of Christian sannyasis.
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