“Perhaps this is the deepest impression left by life in India, the sense of the sacred as something pervading the whole order of nature. Every hill and tree and river is holy, and the simplest human acts of eating and drinking, still more of birth and marriage, have all retained their sacred character… In the West everything has been “profane”; it has been deliberately emptied of religious meaning… It is there that the West needs to learn from the East the sense of the “holy,” of a transcendent mystery which is immanent in everything and which gives an ultimate meaning to life… Then everything is sacred. That is what one finds in India; everything is sacred – eating or drinking or taking a bath; in any of the normal events in life there is always a sacred action… We have lost that awareness… this sacramentality of the universe. The whole creation is pervaded by God.”
Bede Griffiths, aka Swami Dayananda (1906 – 1993), monk and yogi, quoted in Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox
King Edward Street Chapel 