Because of my own experiences and how I interpreted some of the events after my father's death. It was like, this makes sense to me. I mean, this makes more sense to me than the standard model that I was being taught of, you know, heaven, hell, purgatory. We're already in purgatory. We're being reborn until we get it right and then we move on,

What I realized there at Notre Dame was that, A, there is profound wisdom in the Catholic Church from which I can always learn and on which I can always draw. And B, that there are also very big fences and walls and, limitations if I were to continue to inhabit that as my tradition, that I would always be bumping up against. I have a friend who was a theologian at Notre Dame. And when we were talking about this and he said, so basically after studying in our theology program, you left the church and became Hindu. And I said, I never really thought of it that way, but yeah. And he said, oh, my gosh and put his hand on his forehead like, you know, what have we done? But, it was because I had the opportunity to speak with and take classes with these wonderful people, these great intellectuals, that I got to really understand that even though in my own mind I could harmonize Catholicism with Hinduism and with other religions, that wasn't going to work for me if I wanted to function as a theologian and a thinker in the church. I think if I was just going to be sort of like a regular Catholic, I might have reconciled it all in my mind and just kept on going to Mass and being Catholic. But I wanted to teach, and I wanted to write and teach about these things.

And I knew that if I followed that path, I'd be one of these people getting in trouble with the Vatican. I preferred the idea of being in a community that would be supportive of what I was doing, which is what I feel in the Vedanta tradition, that what I am saying and understanding and experiencing is very much in sync with that tradition. And so I'm very comfortable in it. And for me now, like going back to your earlier question about, you know, I'm a white person in a tradition that's mostly people of South Asian origin, Indian origin. The intellectual and spiritual affinity far outweighs any, you know, like skin color and culture and that sort of thing.

Jeffery D. Long / Elizabethtown, PA