On July 7, 1973, I arrived in Kathmandu, a young Jesuit beginning “regency,” that active period that falls between philosophy studies and the theology studies that lead to ordination.
That July day I embarked on what is now a fifty-year course in learning from South Asia’s Hindu traditions. I was busy teaching high school classes at St. Xavier’s School most of my time in the Valley. During academic terms I did not have much chance to explore even the Valley itself. When I did have time, I loved walking and cycling around the city, visiting old temples in Kathmandu and Patan, the great and famed Pasupati temple by the river where the dead were cremated, and the great Buddhist stupas in Bodhnath and Swayambhunath.
I remember most vividly visiting the temple of the goddess Durga (Kali) known as Dakshin Kali, just south of the Kathmandu Valley. I first went there on a chilly Tuesday morning, when animal sacrifices were being performed: an old, dark temple, the small crowd of devotees, the animals being led to slaughter, the blood on the sanctuary tiles. How strangely different and attractive I found Dakshin Kali! It was, far more than St. Xavier’s, the “other” I implicitly wanted to find in Nepal. Although theologically I could not explain or defend a deep intuitive openness to a Goddess who expected animal sacrifices, on another level I could not deny a sense of connection and harmony. I had connected for the first time with Hindu religious culture. I found the experience riveting and, in an odd way, in harmony with the rich piety and ritualism of my own Catholic faith growing up: sense experiences and images, sounds and acts, all resonated deeply, even though in theory I disapproved of killing animals.
A few times, less often than I would have liked, I was able to travel further outside the Valley, visiting pristine but very poor villages in the hills. I greatly enjoyed and have always been grateful for a month — October 1974 – which I spent walking in the hills with Fr. Cap Miller, his companion and student when he was gathering information for his doctoral dissertation at Oxford. We met faith healers, who would go into trances to speak to the demons plaguing people who were ill, and find the cause and the remedy for their illness. We had tea with a sadhu high up in the hills, about 12,000 feet. By chance we visited a small village at festival time, where we saw blood rituals at a goddess temple.
Slowly but surely, I was stepping into the deep waters of a new place, new culture, new religions, my senses bombarded with new and lovely sensations, new forms of worship attracting me and resonating with my New York Catholicism. My mind was alive with new questions and new possibilities that it would take years to digest.
I also began to read. One evening in September, 1973, I was sitting at the front desk of a classroom of some thirty boys, and to pass the time had before me a book I had selected at haste from the Jesuit library shelf; it was Gitanjali (Garland of Songs), just a little book of 103 poems by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a Bengali Hindu writer, written and rewritten in a time of loss, as he lamented the death of his wife, daughter and son. It was the book, published in 1912 in the West, that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Tagore, the first non-Westerner to win any Nobel Prize.
I remember that night in study hall, reading the opening verses with some astonishment, recognition, a sense of connection:
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill. (1)
Over the years, Gitanjali actually became a way of introducing myself. Any number of times, and even just two months ago when I was asked to offer the blessing at an interfaith banquet, I read, pray aloud this song:
Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.
I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forget that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar.
When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of many. (63)
And so it was that I was in love with these poems, and found in them a validation of my trip around the world, from New York to Kathmandu. Bonding with Tagore, as it were, convinced me that I had not come East in vain. In those two years in Kathmandu, I would gradually discover many other bonds to connect me to the students I taught, the culture of the Valley, and to Hinduism. I would, later on, read much Hindu literature in Sanskrit and Tamil, finding nourishment, provocation, and solace in them. Yet it was in reading Gitanjali, beginning that night in September 1973, that contact was made: my theoretical sense of the East, my plan to learn from Hinduism, had suddenly come alive, in the kindred spirit of Tagore, singer of songs.
St. Xavier’s in 1970s Nepal provided a perfect setting for the juxtaposition between my traditional Catholic upbringing and an ancient Hindu and Buddhist culture, with no theoretical frame in which to smooth over or distance the rawness of the encounter of several religions, two (or more) cultures, I was not, after all, in search of the meaning of life, I was not interested in becoming a Hindu or Buddhist. I wanted wholeheartedly to be a Jesuit priest. But I wanted, needed, to do this in my own way, and my two years in Nepal made this need all the more acute. I wanted to be a Jesuit deeply changed by Hindu learning. In a way, my life since 1975 has been simply a matter keeping up with what I learned and saw in Kathmandu, and the great opening that occurred in my hitherto provincial Catholic view of things. It all began, 50 years ago this week.
