Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar

Early formation

I think I learned in those early days to understand that love and learning go together. And that, you know, we were taught again and again that, in school, in choices you make as a student, you're using your talents, you're learning, you're studying. And then you're also preparing yourself to be someone who not only loves your family, but can love other people, love people in need in their times of trouble. And I think those held together in my early life, even before I had any slightest idea that I might end up going to India or Nepal. And play was like the add-on because…it’s part of the wonderful book Love, Learn, Play: A Simple Formula for a Happier, More Meaningful Life Akhil Gupta wrote. And it opens with the idea that there’s a—it could be just playing, playing around, playing sports, dancing, singing, whatever one does for enjoyment—but it’s also a sense that loving and learning open into a kind of freedom in your life. You can play because you’re not constricted entirely or bound by rules. You can enjoy life, you can sort of play around, even if you’re studying, even if you’re in church or temple, and so on.

Defining comparative theology

[Comparative theology] I define as kind of faith seeking understanding by crossing religious borders. So you don't just study—I mean, again, it's wonderful to study the Bible and the Christian tradition—but you also study Buddhist suttas, the Koran, the great books of Hinduism, the Tao, Confucian texts, African oral traditions. You begin to study outside what you grew up with. All of that, bringing that into faith seeking understanding, and on the other hand, not simply the objective scientific study of religion, but right out there in the middle of it.

Roots and imagination

[HDS students are] you know, 25, 27 years old. What their experience of religion is, or the religion and the spiritual—it’s all over the place. And being at Divinity School, you can study it in the classroom, and you can also join a multi-faith prayer group. The Wednesday noon service that groups still take time with: you can go to a Roman Catholic service one week, a Neo-Pagan group another week, a Theravada Buddhist group, an Orthodox Jewish group, and on and on and on. And I think that’s good for all of us, to be kind of exposed to different ways of looking at the world and imagining. And Harvard Divinity School, I think, you know, celebrates that. You know, the thing about BC, it was so deeply rooted in Catholic tradition, it had to keep reminding itself to open up. I think Harvard Divinity School is opened up to the extreme, and has to remember it’s really good to have roots somewhere. Where do you actually stand? Who are you? And to try to get back to that as well. And I think the love and the learning part of LLP would be about, you know, what do you really love deeply? And when you learn, where are you learning from? And then play in the classroom, use your imagination, intuit, take it out in different directions, and then see where it goes. And that’s the freedom of a university. We’re able to do that.

Jesuit structure and freedom

The very austere little book that guides Jesuit life, that Ignatius Loyola, our founder in the 16th century wrote based on his own mystical experiences, is a kind of very dry little book, more like a cookbook than a mystical treatise, in which he says, you know, you get up in the morning, you do this, you have a second meditation, a third meditation, a fourth meditation. This is the way you should meditate in the evening. You should restrict what you're eating. You should think about your sins. You should look every day at the life of Christ and realize you could be like that. It's all very kind of, you know, rule-oriented. And yet, as you say, what he's really saying is, here's, like…the skeletal structure. Here’s the structure of the day. Now go and do something with it […] Use your imagination and make it mean something for you, because when the retreat is over, you have to go back out into the world. You have to go out into the world and serve God's people, and learn and live and love in all kinds of new ways. And there's not going to be anybody there telling you what to do. And I think that's where the play comes in. Again, it could sound like spoilsport, like this isn't really play, this is sort of like having imagination when you do your work. But it's supposed to be ultimately sustaining and life-giving.

Krishna and Shiva Nataraj

[There are] stories of the boy Krishna in the village in Brindavan, playing with the other kids, putting dirt in his mouth, and it turns out the universe is inside him in some way, playing the flute, dancing, as I said, with the girls. And then one day he’ll be whacking a demon and killing a demon who’s been out to get him. And then he’ll be smiling again and dancing. And certainly think of the image of Shiva, Nataraj: one of the great images of Indian art, Shiva, with his foot raised and holding his the drum, and the flame in his hand, and the fire around. It’s meant to be an entirely dynamic image. And in most of the portrayals of the Nataraj, there’s a smile on the face of Shiva. He’s enjoying it. And the world is somehow that dance. And you’re basically invited to become part of the dance and to join in.

David dancing

In one scene, [David] is outside the temple. I’d have to look it up to get the details exactly straight, but he breaks into a dance in the Lord’s presence. Um, and he’s dancing kind of wildly, whether he’d been drinking a little wine or not, I forget. But one of the women, and it might be his wife, but again, I’d have to look it up, scolds him, saying, this is not becoming of a king. You’re dancing like a madman, your garments are falling off, and so on like that. That’s so embarrassing, please don’t do that again. And he says, but I’m dancing before the Lord, and the Lord you dance for…you do it with your whole body, mind, soul, everything. And many of the Psalms in the Bible, the 150 poems of the Psalms are attributed to David. And so many of them are full of joy and dancing.

The wedding feast

In the first chapter of John, it is stressed that the Word [Jesus] became flesh, the Word dwelt among us, the Word was there with God in the beginning. The first thing the Word does really is go to a wedding party […] Somehow, John is saying, in the midst of the solemnity and seriousness about the word and the world. Jesus is the one who’s there at a wedding feast, just like he’s the one who has so much bread for the people that they have baskets left over. Eat, drink, and be merry in a certain way. There’s a certain kind of joy there. And Christian tradition, down through the ages. have taken that as a cautionary reminder. As you said earlier, you can end up thinking of the Christian life as very austere, very solemn, people doing penance constantly with a sour face. And yet, remember, the first sign that he gave in the Gospel of John was to make an abundance of wine at the wedding feast.

Losing a grip

That’s a very good question for all of us, because if you have too rosy, optimistic a picture and say your life is one big party and everything is fine, first of all, you’re rather clueless about the suffering of the people around you […] I didn’t leave a religious order. I didn’t have any great health crisis, et cetera, et cetera. So nothing very dramatic. But I think at various points, it was like losing a grip on the environment I was in.

A crisis time

I was in South Asia. I saw really poor people. I was aware of the problems of the real world. And here I am in another comfy house in comfy Cambridge, Massachusetts, reading scholarly works about the Bible, reading scholarly theological texts. What’s the point of all this? Is this really what religious life is about? And it was kind of a sense of maybe I’m losing my way and maybe it would be better to put this aside and, again, do what Mother Teresa did. She didn’t know what she was really doing, leave the convent and go out into the streets and then see what happens. And that’s when she founded her own order, you know, to work with the poorest of the poor. So I think that that time was kind of a crisis time. Do I really want to be a Jesuit? And do I really want to stick with this?

Where you need to be

But I think what happened, I found — and this is, again, in my memoir — another experience after that first year of crisis a sense of God saying, you are where you need to be. Don’t give up on it. And so I think, because it could have turned into an unhappy life, like always wishing I had done something else. Or it could have turned into a failure. You should have done something else because you can’t do this. But somehow, this sense, I strongly believe, and it’s in the Gospels, but also the Gita and elsewhere. What God calls you to, God enables you to do. And God enables you to do it with a certain joy and happiness, too. And so, you know, for some people, I think it was, you know, they’re called to do something they really don’t want to do, and they’re afraid to do it because it’s really dangerous. And other people, when they were young, they had great hopes they were going to change the world, and everything would be different, and they realized. I’m not going to be able to do all that. But if you have spiritual grounding, you go back to that and say, God, who got me this far? We’ll get you all the way. And so that was 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago now. And I think I’m still at it doing what I do. And I think I’m happy doing what I’m doing. Flourishing. And that’s a great gift because, as I said, I’ve had a fortunate life, but to be able to flourish and as best I can to help other people, including students at HDS.

Olympic training

There are some ways in which you could say that spiritual life is like Olympic training. And you’re an athlete, and you’re training. And there’s the fasting. I’m certainly not an athlete at all, but I mean people who are very disciplined about their exercising, their weightlifting, their diet, et cetera, et cetera, all of that, and they get to the Olympics, or they’re in the World Cup, whatever, all of that. Somebody who’s, you know, in the process. Then it, in a sense, becomes the end in itself, and they’re so intense about it, and so caught up in it. And I’m going to be, you know, the best faster in the world. And I’m going to be the most ascetic person in the world. They forget that this is part of a larger game. You’re part of something. You’re going to be playing the game. You’re part of something larger. And if you quantify and say, for x number of years now, I’ve been anesthetic in the following way. And therefore, I perfected fasting. I perfected chastity. I perfected being obedient. That’s not what it’s for.

Love of God and neighbor

As we would say in Jewish and Christian tradition, other traditions too, love of God and love of neighbor. You know, this intense kind of concern and love for God, the transcendent, the mystery, the greatness, and then kind of a growing love for the people around you in larger and larger circles. If that love is not there, then…you could be the best at this and the most famous at that, um, you could be the most wealthy, but what is it for? You’re not even happy at the end of it. You’re not flourishing, you’re not happy […] And the Gita says this endlessly about, you know, looking into the inner self and the entanglements of the mind and heart. And I think, you know, what Akhil’s book, Love, Learn, Play, is really about, on all these levels, not only showing yourself as different, but actually becoming a different person, and allowing that to happen within you. And that’s hopefully what every religious person and people who are spiritual and not religious seekers are trying to do. But realizing that eventually it’s not just something you can just snap your fingers and it happens. You have to, like, do what you can and then allow what you can’t do to happen to you. And once you think I’ve got it together and figured it out, then you probably screwed up again.

Books of wisdom

Because [Akhil Gupta] and I are good friends, and I think despite so many differences in our lives we have something in common, reading Love, Learn, Play and Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar side-by-side would be really good. If somebody has nothing else to do in the summer, read The Brothers Karamazov, the great novel by Dostoevsky, which is…inspiration, and on and on with the scriptures and so on. So I think it’s amazing. We talked today about people spend all their time on their phones, all their time busy, this and that. To put that aside and read a—it sounds trivial, but read a good book. And it could be read a gospel, read the Gospel of John, read the Bhagavad Gita, uh, the Dhammapada, read a surah of the Koran, read the Psalms of David, on and on, these books of wisdom, and then modern stories, you know, novels and stories by, you know, young people who are writing today about the meaning of their life in kind of a…post-religious, post-Christian world in America: people looking for meaning. There’s so many inspirational stories. So a lot to read. And then I would say probably people are happier, too, if they write something—to not be afraid and say, I, too, have a story to tell. I, too, can put my word to paper and then share it with other people.