I was pleased to read the August 10 post in the Universal Enlightenment & Flourishing Newsletter on the theme, “A Lifelong Quest: How We Learn Religion Differently Through Life Stages”. As I get older — I just turned 74 — I appreciate the theme of “a lifelong quest” all the more. As I look back over my long and mostly happy life, I have been asking myself what kind of learner I have been, including as a religious person, all these decades. As a boy, I started reading novels at about six years old, and I still read them now (invigorates the imagination). In high school, I was a lover of language learning, and as a double major in philosophy and classics, I read widely in the ancient and medieval Christian tradition in college and a few later, in seminary, preparing to become a Catholic priest (I was ordained in 1978), I learned much Christian theology.
But not all my learning was book learning. I grew up in a fairly devout family, and we learned by practicing our faith, but the dynamic changed in my early 20s, after college, when I traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, to teach at St. Xavier’s High School in Kathmandu for two years. I learned simply by being there and paying attention to the “new” world around me, amid so many temples and stupas, and during the festivals of Dashain and Shivaratri and Lord Matsyendranath. I learned by reading as much as possible about the deities of Hindu tradition and Nepali and Tibetan Buddhism. But most of all, I learned from the boys I taught, all Hindu and Buddhist, and not so young as me. I taught them, and they taught me. Because of that teaching, I became a better Catholic, and they became better Buddhists and Hindus. Those years in Kathmandu changed my life as a religious learner and paved the way for my many trips to South Asia over the decades. I tried to keep alive my learning in a big way: after I was ordained a Catholic priest, I pursued my PhD studies at the University of Chicago in South Asian Studies so that I might balance my knowledge of Catholicism with at least some depth in the Hindu wisdom. All that learning has prepared me for the life of a scholar and professor, even until now, when I am entering my 41st year of teaching at the university.
To keep on learning is indeed a lifelong quest. It is an art form, making something beautiful out of what you have at hand when you are young and starting, consolidating your views in midlife, and recollecting with joy and regret in old age. Young and old, I have had to balance fidelity to my roots and where I came from — my Catholic upbringing — with my studies of classic literature East and West, with early and later travels around India and other parts of Asia, with visits to countless temples and holy places. I had to keep learning how to be a Catholic priest saying Mass in the parish while at the same time being a professor, now for twenty years at a secular university (Harvard), how to preach from the sacred texts of my faith tradition, while learning to teach and lecture passionately on what Hindu wisdom has taught me over a lifetime.
I recently published a memoir in which I’ve tried to spell out the story of my life of thinking, learning, praying, balanced between traditions: Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Catholic: A Love Story. Now that the book is out, I think that perhaps the subtitle is the key to a life of religious learning: the love story, the story of what keeps us alive and open, humble enough to be touched by things old and new. Life is a matter of loving the true and the holy, loving to see God nearby and far away, loving when young and middle-aged and with the wiser and deeper passions of old age.
This love is alive across all borders. People in every religious and spiritual tradition are daily experiencing growth shifts and changes in their religious learning within their home community and across religious borders. They continue to learn because they continue to be alive spiritually. As people of faith — because we are people of faith — we are never simply unchanging messengers of timeless truths but frail vessels who learn and share the living truth as we see it when young and renew it when old, loving the spiritual gifts we have received and loving to the sharing of them.
Francis X. Clooney SJ
Harvard University
His memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Catholic: A Love Story, was published by T&T Clark/Bloomsbury in 2024.
