Video: Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story

On October 1, 2024, HDS hosted a celebration of "Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story," the new memoir from HDS Professor Francis X. Clooney, S.J. Joining Prof. Clooney on a panel of respondents were: Rajeev Persaud, MTS ’24, Andrea Bischoff, MTS ’24, and Jonathan Makransky, multireligious ministry initiatives coordinator at HDS. The event was introduced by Kerry Maloney, Chaplain and Director of Religious and Spiritual Life.

Sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain and Religious and Spiritual Life and by the Office of Ministry Studies.

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story. October 1, 2024. 

KERRY MALONEY: Well, good evening, everybody, and thank you for joining us tonight for this celebration of Professor Frank Clooney's new memoir. Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story. What a great title? It came out in June of this year after much anticipation from T&T Clark Bloomsbury, and we are just delighted to be able to have this event tonight in its honor and in Frank's honor. 

My name is Kerry Maloney. I serve as the school's Chaplain and Director of Religious and Spiritual Life. My office is sponsoring tonight's gathering with the kind co-sponsorship of the Office of Ministry Studies. My office's mission is to stand publicly at the busy, very busy, beautiful intersection of the intellectual and spiritual life of this institution and the people who comprise it. 

Frank's life, as elegantly summarized in this memoir, clearly exemplifies the ultimate indivisibility of those aspects of life as intimated by the book's exquisitely evocative title. I think this is the best memoir title I've ever seen. Now, you'd think that you could purchase at an event like this, the book under discussion, but you would be wrong. And the reason is the publisher didn't send the books on time. 

However, fear not. Fear not. If you wish to have your very own copy of this, you can buy it at the highly, deeply discounted price from the publisher directly, from Bloomsbury. And we have the QR code right on this page to do that, so I'm going to send a few of these through the-- alas, unlike Senator Warnock, who was able to sign his memoir for us last Friday, Frank will not be able to sign your digital copies of your books, which have not yet arrived to you. 

So I've had the privilege and joy of calling Frank a close, personal friend for 40 years now, which I know you're shocked because we're both 25. How is that possible? Like me, most of you are probably more than passingly familiar with his extraordinary life and work, which is what drew you here tonight. But permit me, if you will, just a few moments to distill some of the major accomplishments of his decades long, illustrious career. 

I will mercifully abbreviate his CV for you, or we would be here till tomorrow morning, but let me give you some of the highlights. Frank joined the Harvard Divinity School faculty in 2005. He's the Parkman Professor of Divinity and the Professor of comparative theology here. 

After earning his doctorate in South Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1984, he taught for 21 years at Boston College across the river there, before coming to Harvard. From 2010 to 2017, he served as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions across the street, as well as serving in his professorship roles. Frank's primary areas of indological scholarship and our theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. 

He is also a leading figure globally in the developing field of comparative theology, a discipline he helped to found, which is distinguished by attentiveness to the dynamics of theological learning, deepened through the study of traditions other than one's own. He's also written extensively on the Jesuit missionary tradition, particularly in India, on the early Jesuit pan-Asian discourse on reincarnation and on the dynamics of dialogue and inter-religious learning in the contemporary world. 

In addition to the memoir we're celebrating tonight, Frank is the author of numerous articles and books, impressive not only for their wide ranging content, but also for their sheer number. He's one of the most prolific scholars in his field. And to save time, I won't share that extensive list of titles with you, but I encourage you to check them out online if you have several hours to spare and you're looking to procrastinate on an assignment, or something. They're most impressive. 

In July 2010, Frank was elected a fellow of the British Academy and has served as a professorial research associate at the Australian Catholic University. His most recent honorary doctorates-- not a recent, there are several. Most of us can claim the same, I'm sure. Include one awarded by the University of Scranton in September of 2023 and one awarded by Le Moyne College just this past May. 

During 2022, 2023, he also served ably and vigorously as the President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Now, not incidentally, Frank is, as you know also a Roman Catholic priest and has been a member of the Society of Jesus for the past 56 years. That's some loyalty. 

Let me simply say that if you want a front row seat on Frank's estimable life and career, this memoir provides just that. In it, we are witness to his lifelong devotion to careful study deep reading, and to constant honest prayer to an utterly humane life that is no surprise shaped utterly by the humanities. 

In what could be the bumper sticker for this memoir, Frank declares in multiple ways in its pages, when in doubt, read deeply, slowly, and teach accordingly. His life stands as a shining testament to the transformational power of a life devoted to those practices. 

Now, we're joined tonight by three recent alumni of the Divinity School who, following Frank's remarks, will themselves offer brief comments on his memoir. Andrea Bischoff, is a 2024 graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where she earned the Master of Theological Studies. She's currently a master's student at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, and she serves as the Managing Editor of the Journal of Hindu, Christian studies. Welcome home, Andrea. 

Jonathan Makransky, received the Master of Theological Studies in Buddhist studies from HDS in 2019, and he's worked in university spiritual life and ministry settings since then focusing on inter-religious initiatives. He's currently the multi-religious ministry initiatives coordinator in the Office of Ministry Studies here at HDS. Jonathan is a lifelong Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and has practiced leadership and youth mentorship experience in that tradition. Thank you for coming tonight, Jonathan. 

And winning the prize for coming the greatest distance is our beloved Rajeev Prasad, who is a Hindu poet from Toronto originally who like Andrea, graduated this past May from HDS with the MTSS. He is currently the Hindu chaplain at Emory University in Atlanta and continues to serve as local West Indian community as a priest. Rajeev says that he has been the beneficiary of Professor Clooney's scholarship, both as his student and as a spiritual seeker, and credits Professor Clooney for much of his own spiritual progress. Well, don't we all Rajeev? Yeah. 

Following Jonathan, Rajeev and Andrea's comments, Frank may wish to engage them, offer some rebuttals and some fights with what they say, and otherwise have a conversation, and then we'll have an opportunity to have conversation with them all. So we'll conclude at 6:30. And of course, we understand that some of you do need to leave a little early. Friends, enough for me. I give you the man himself, Professor Francis Clooney. Thanks Francis. 

[APPLAUSE] 

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you, Kerry. I thought I'd pass around a copy of the book. For anyone who hasn't seen it, it'll make you irresistibly desire to have your own copy. So I'll just-- you can just pass it if you've seen it. So I would like to begin by my profound thanks to Kerry, who have known as she admitted for a very long time, more than 40 years when we first met at Boston College generations ago. 

I'm also grateful to the OMS, the Ministry office, to Laura, and Monica, and Jonathan, who's up here, and Teddy Hickman Maynard for co-sponsoring this event. So it's really nice to have ministry so involved because that's really so important for what I see myself is about. And I will be profusely thanking after I've heard what they say. My three respondents for being here today and coming across the river from BC and all the way up from Atlanta, so thank you for being here, all three of you. 

So I thought what I would try to do is keep my time short, maybe 20 minutes or so. That always means 30 minutes, I guess, by the time you finish talking. But to talk about how the book came to be, and why I wrote it, and then just some ideas of some key elements in it, and then our discussants will bring out more. So in some ways it's a COVID book. 

I had the ideas for the book beforehand, I think over the past few years, thinking about getting to that point in life, when to not so much wrap things up, but consolidate things and take a long view backwards about why things have come out the way they have, for which I'm often most grateful. But nonetheless, COVID, I think we all had a time to reflect, slow down, think about where things are going, and to look back. And so it was partly that, but partly because it's that time of life. 

So as the book, the mystery is gone in the first page it tells you when I was born. So I'm 74. At that time in life begin to think about where things are coming from, what you've done, what's left before you. As Kerry said, I'm a Jesuit Catholic priest. I've been a Jesuit for 56 years and a priest for 46 years, so that's adding up as well. 

I'm in my 41 year of teaching at the university level, 21 at BC, and now my 20 year at Harvard. So when you begin to see these things kind of pile up and say, now, there is so much that has happened along the way, how to think about what it all means and where it's all coming from. And part of it was also not wanting to spend the rest of my life repeating myself. 

But you reach a certain point in life, and you know what you can do well. And you can find a publisher for it, and you can just do that again, and again, and again. So it's a recapitulate where I've been, what has mattered over the years, and then say, is there something left to say? Is there something new that I can say particularly that appeals to younger people, that has kind of a purchase in today's world rather than writing the same things over and over again. 

As I often tell people, it's not in the book, the old joke about the two professors walking across campus and one of them says, I published a new book, and the other one says, what are you calling it this time? 

[LAUGHTER] 

That syndrome of falling into repetition. But also, again, with younger people in particular, but really for all of us, what is it that I've left behind? What is it that I can talk about? And I think part of the writing of the book, as you might imagine, in such a project, I'm sure many of you have undertaken such reflection, and sometimes writing over the years is you start sifting through your life back as long as you can remember, and you think about where you came from, what has happened along the way, and how you ended up where you are. 

And I think for me, it's amazing looking back that there were so many kind of crossroads in my life. I don't have a very dramatic life. I mean, there's nothing in there that would make headlines, but rather small points along the way where I had a choice and where things went the right way and other people had a choice about what I would do, and then have made it go in a certain way. 

So, for instance, growing up in New York City, going to a Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, taught by the Jesuits. Deciding when I was 17 that it was really being called to be a Jesuit and to enter the Society of Jesus. I could have made other choices. The society could have said, no thanks. Stick it out there in the world. We don't need you. 

But I did make a choice when I really didn't know what I was doing at age 17, I think I'll enter the seminary and to see what that goes. On the path of being a fairly traditional Jesuit, I learned a lot of Latin and Greek in high school. I was a double major of philosophy and classics in college. And then in 1971, got the bright idea. I want to do my teaching experience that we do before theology. I want to do that outside the United States. 

And it was really unprecedented. There was nothing really in my life that would have justified that feeling. I think I was destined to spend my life in Manhattan teaching at Regis High School, Xavier High School, Canisius in Buffalo, Saint Peter's in Jersey City, whatever. But I was inspired by a lecture I heard at Le Moyne college about being as imaginative, having a heart as large as the world. 

And so I started looking around and thinking maybe I could do my teaching experience somewhere else. And I'm from New York. And so the New York Jesuits had connections in the Philippines, the Caroline Islands in the Pacific, Puerto Rico, Nigeria. I wrote some letters back and forth, which were very slow moving 50 plus years ago to a Jesuit father Halligan in Ecuador, who worked with the street kids. And he was urging me to come down and work with him. 

But somehow, in the midst of all that, those would have been such different turns in my life, I found that suddenly India was rising on the horizon. Without any real reason, because I had not-- unlike many in the '60s, I wasn't really into yoga. I wasn't into meditation. I took the train up the East side of Manhattan every day, never got off and went over and met Swami Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON, the Hare Krishnas. I could have done that many people of my age then. 

I was sort of on the straight as a straight person, straight path, seeing where things go. And suddenly I wanted to do this. And I told myself that the reasons were, which I think were fairly minimal, I know Sanskrit. I'm sorry, I know Latin, and Greek, and Sanskrit is of the same family. So that would be convenient to expand my linguistic time or my spread. 

And also I admire greatly Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi, so I want to go and work with the poor. I want to be in India. And that seemed to be double reason, which again, it could have been otherwise. And the Jesuit superior in New York, who had to give me permission to do this, to go to India, could have said, no. We need a Latin teacher in Buffalo, so that's what you're going to do instead, and that would have been that. 

But it opened up, and the door opened, and this was possible, and I was able to do this. I couldn't go to India, in fact, because of visa issues in 1972, '73. Indira Gandhi was not so favorable toward missionaries and Americans. And so I ended up going to Kathmandu and spent two years teaching in a high school in Kathmandu where all the boys were Hindu and Buddhist, and not knowing very much about Hinduism and Buddhism at all. 

I was there in the school, 22 years old when I got there, suddenly teaching teenagers and realizing that suddenly this was an entirely different religious context than I had grown up in, and so many things followed from there that we can talk about later. But what if I had not taken that path? Where would I have ended up? Or again, I was ordained a priest. I came back after two years in Kathmandu, did my theology here in Cambridge at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, which used to be right across the Cambridge common on Brattle Street with the Episcopal Divinity School. 

When I was ordained, the provincial superior said, you should go to Germany and study theology, which was a kind of a compliment. You're a smart young Jesuit. That's what smart young Jesuits do. They go to Germany and study theology, and then come back and teach in the seminary. And again, timidly raised my hand and said, well, actually, I'd like to do a degree in Indian Studies. Because being a classicist, a lover of languages, I felt if I didn't study the languages more deeply, I really would always be kind of an amateur at learning from the East. 

And he could have said no. Well, that's ridiculous. You can't do that. But he said, sure, go ahead, see what happens. And so I ended up going to the University of Chicago. The South Asia department. Learned Sanskrit. Tamil was my second language there. And if I had stayed here at Harvard, which was a possibility, I wouldn't have done the Tamil, and that would have meant a difference in my life as well. 

But these things began to unfold. You come to crossroads and this happens. This happens, this takes this turn, that turn. The reason I went to Chicago instead of staying here is there was one professor there I really wanted to work with. And I thought he was-- he's 15 years younger than Daniel Ingalls, the great sanskritist here, Hans van Buitenen. 

And when I got there, I didn't meet him. He was not available this quarter, and then his funeral is next week. And had he died a few months earlier, I probably would have stayed at Harvard and never learned Tamil, just the Sanskrit. So these little miracles along the way, that changed me. And then getting a job at BC. 

And then one day in 2004, in the spring, Bill Graham calls me, then Dean at Harvard Divinity School and says, basically, would you like to come and join the faculty at Harvard? We have an open position, the position that John Carman had had for many years, and are you interested? You'd have to come over and give an interview and meet the committee and so on. But think about it. 

And it was quite amazing because I never would have thought of applying for a job here. But nonetheless, that opportunity opened. And so 21 years at BCE, now 20 years here. And the reason I mention all those examples is that these, again, as I said, kind of crossroads. You're in the middle of your life. One thing happens, and another thing happens, and you look back and say, see what it has all been. 

And I think for me, it's a tone in the book. I try to communicate in the book that it's really kind of a sense of gratuitous opportunity. In Catholic tradition, we'd say divine providence. God working in strange ways, and small ways, unexpected ways this happens, that happens, that happens. This works well. That goes well. All of these things were quite remarkable. 

And looking back and I could give 100 more examples of people who were good to me, people who helped me to do what I wanted to do, and finding my way through the life that I've been living all these years. Another tone in the book is sort of regret things that didn't happen along the way. So it still didn't get that Nobel Peace Prize. I don't know when I'm going to get it. I keep waiting by the phone every winter. Are they going to call? But they never call or the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. I still didn't get that either, so I don't know when these things are going to happen. 

But even being a Jesuit, I mean, so we have vows of poverty, chastity, obedience. So we don't marry, we don't have children, we don't have grandchildren. What would my life have been like if it was like my sisters and married and had family? How would my life have worked out? I'll never know. Certain things didn't happen because of happy choices that I made, but nonetheless, things were undone. 

Being aware at my age. I think as we get older, we're aware of all the things we don't know and the things we don't understand. And all those books on my shelves, those big Sanskrit tomes, and Tamil tomes, and so on that I could spend another lifetime or two working on. And I realized I'm not going to get to it. I'm not going to do that project. I'm not going to do that project. 

Smart students come along and they know things I didn't even know that I didn't know. Smart undergraduates become graduate students here, and they things that I don't know. And at a certain point in life realize you're beginning to run out, but that your knowledge is limited no matter how much you know. And I think that's a good thing. You expect that when you're young, but even when you're old, I think it's good to admit. 

Watching younger people take my place and younger people, even in faculty meetings and talking about things that I never really thought about in the way they think about. And that's exciting. It's both the torch has been passed. New generations do new things. But realizing there are conversations I can't really be part of because things have moved on over the years. 

Also, in an odd way, I think I've noticed one of the things it's a theme in the book, the price of being an intellectual is that you end up on the one side being if it goes well. And some people have a lot of trouble along the way for reasons not of their own fault, but you end up with a fairly comfortable, secure life. So what's more secure than being a Harvard tenured professor or a tenured professor anywhere? You become secure. You live in nice places like Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everything goes along fine. 

And the instinct I had when I was young, I want to go to India because I want to work. I want to do what Mother Teresa did with the people on the streets, or I want to be like Mahatma Gandhi, never happened. And making choices along the way. Like when I was in Madras as a grad student doing my dissertation. You could spend this money buying books that you can use over the next 40 or 50 years, or you can give it to poor people who are hungry. 

And I tried to do both, but you never do both enough, and ended up helping some people but not other people, and having a pile of books, and you make a choice about where you are. I did work in the home for the dying, in Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying in Kolkata for a few days. 

I was in Kolkata in December of '73, and spent a few days working at the Home for the Dying. And it was mopping floors and cutting up vegetables because the sisters looked at me and said, well, this guy, he'll be a danger to the sick, not a help to them. So they just said, you mop the floor, you cut up the carrots, and put them in the soup, and then just stand back. 

But Mother Teresa came in on the other side of the room with some, I think, benefactors, possibly American benefactors. And there I am, mopping the floor. And she's over there. I'm thinking, this is my chance to meet Mother Teresa so that in October of 2024, I can tell people I met Mother Teresa. And then I realized, what would I say to Mother Teresa? Great job you're doing. Keep up the good work. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Thank you so much. No. And I didn't cross the room and meet her. And I didn't become a Gandhi. And I even in Kathmandu or in Madras, riding my bicycle around the City of Madras, but going through very poor areas sometimes and getting to know people in some of the poor areas, but never really plopping down and work with them. 

As a priest. I've worked a number of times on and off in prisons, prison ministry, but never became a prison chaplain, even though that's one of the most wonderful things, but it's sort of an instinct I've had from very early on. In the book, I talk in an early chapter about when I was in high school, possibly a freshman, maybe a sophomore writing the Subway, the number four IRT train down to South Station to get the ferry boat back to Staten Island, where I live with my family. 

There was a girl on the other side of the car crying uncontrollably. And she was a little bit older than me. I was probably 14 or 15 and she was probably 16 or 17, but she was so unhappy. And so caught up in some misery and weeping. And I was 14, what was I going to do? I didn't do anything.

But somehow it was an instinct in me. If I was a different person, I would have gone over, and sat with her, and asked her, could I help you? Is this something I can do for you? And I didn't. And I didn't 1,000 times in my life help the person in need, or the homeless person in Harvard yard square and so on that. And you realize that this adds up the things you don't do, and you realize you reach a certain age when you've made choices that work out nicely, but there's a whole world that you're not really part of. 

And I mentioned there that I've thought of that girl for the last 60 years, and kept her in my mind, maybe in my prayer. But it's also a sense of regret for things I didn't do. One of my heroes, and I was really surprised at this in writing the book, turned out to be Bertrand Russell. 

I was reading people's autobiographies. Different people who wrote about themselves, ranging from Dorothy Day, let's say, the long loneliness to Gandhi's experiments with truth, to Bertrand Russell, and he wrote several volumes, partly because he needed the money, so he expanded it into several volumes. 

But he talks very candidly in the preface to his autobiography. There are three things that have driven my life. One is a desire to know. And as he's a brilliant mathematician, logician, and writes these incredible volumes. So the desire to know. The desire for love, and always kind of looking for love in his life, in different relationships and so on, wanting to love, to be in love. 

And the third was I have been haunted my whole life by the cries of the poor. And I think he in his later life became like an activist against nuclear weapons and so on. But there was something that resonated with me. If the great Bertrand Russell, who was such a brilliant thinker, and had so many intense relationships was haunted by the poor. Well, that's somehow resonated with me, the things you don't do in your life, and so I try to talk about that. 

What it came down to in the long run-- I'm almost done because I want to leave plenty of time for our discussions. When I look back at my life, I realize what I call in the book a double formation, and that in some sense the issue for me personally and intellectually is that for most of my life I've been doing two things at once. So the Jesuit track, again, growing up in an Irish Catholic family in New York, going to grammar school, the nuns taught me through all the eight grades of grammar school, a Jesuit high school with 20 Jesuits on the staff in those days. Very Catholic. 

And then a few years later, 1978, being ordained a Catholic priest. This training and what we call formation. The whole person is trained. You're in a tradition. You're immersed in it. You're part of it. You pray in it. You think in it. Eventually, you serve in it. You do ministry, maybe you preach, and so on like that. All of that kind of intense, and that's sort of enough for one lifetime. 

But then I realized that that raised for me the standard that if I was going to learn from Hinduism or Buddhism starting in Kathmandu in '73, that you have to have a deep formation also, that it would be highly unsatisfying, I thought, to have a deep place in my own tradition of intelligence, practice, understanding, commitment, community, friendships, and so on. 

And then the other just pick up a book and you read it about them. Or you go to a temple like a tourist and you look at it, nice architecture, and then you do some dating of the monuments and so on, and then you walk away. Your historian about the other that wouldn't do. And that if I was claiming to cross the religious boundary and learn, I had to have a second formation, which was by no means complete because I'm not a Hindu, I'm a Catholic. 

But growing up Catholic, and then after 1973, the past 50 plus years now, trying to always have a sort of a deep empathy, a deep understanding of the things I read, all of these things coming together and trying to understand, to imagine in a Hindu universe in a certain way, to think in a Hindu universe, to have some of the instincts in terms of imagery, feelings, other possibilities, sort of in a Hindu way. 

Knowing that it is limited, and it's not really going to work, but that sort of began to define me as a person sort of on the border between two worlds. As the title ambiguously puts it, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar, so all that going on. Trying to balance it became a major theme. 

And I think for technically, I wouldn't spend much on this, comparative theology, which is my major field. I didn't develop as a contribution to the study of religion. I didn't think of it as a subdivision of comparative religion. I didn't do it because I had studied with some of the great religion scholars, and you can do comparative work in this way. 

When I came to Harvard, very much the presence of Wilfred Cantwell Smith was still so prominent. I didn't do it for those reasons. I did it because in myself there was this sense of two things going on at once that were deep, and powerful, and Holy, and that's what I wanted to keep alive. And not sacrifice one for the other. To not be a convert. Not to become a Hindu, but not also to insulate myself and keep it out there so it doesn't actually touch me, but rather to be on the balance. 

And as I point out in the book, I have a whole chapter on this, teaching, and preaching, and praying. And I try to raise the necessary questions at the beginning. I don't think teaching and preaching are the same thing. I try not to preach in the classroom. I try not to teach from the pulpit, giving a lecture or something like that. 

But there are ways in which for me both, and this is influenced both by Catholic tradition and also Hindu traditions, that when you speak, you're drawing people into some holistic experience. You're pulling them into a reality that we read about. And that I'm aware of this in the classroom, in my courses this year, and last year, and the last 40 years that the things we read in class could make a difference for people. 

It's none of my business to push that. But if you read a sacred text, if you read a philosophical text, if you read a devotional text, these things should change you. And to try to show in the classroom that what we study and what we think really make a difference in who we are as persons. And so to make that happen again and again. 

And in the pulpit, not again, giving lectures with footnotes, never writing-- I've never only maybe twice in my life I've written down a homily. I just get up and think. I mean, I've thought about it for a long time when I preach, but it's sort of it just comes out. And the point, I think, is to open people's minds and get them to think about these incredibly familiar Sunday readings in a different way, saying, what could this mean for my life? 

And so in a certain sense, teaching opens the mind, opens the heart. Preaching opens the mind, opens the heart. And I say at the end of that chapter, praying too. So it'd be nice if I could say, well, when I pray, I'm just 100% Catholic and that's it, period. 

But I think, deliberately in terms of how I pray and how I think about my prayer and what images make their way into my prayer, there's always that kind of aura of Asia, of India, of Hinduism, and that that's good. The idea of purify your prayer, get rid of all the idols and the false gods, that doesn't work, but rather to be there learning inter religiously, even in the most intimate moments of the spiritual life. 

So the book is all about these things. And we can talk about this more as we go on. But I end by saying, the subtitle, A Love Story. So Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story. In some ways what I wanted to evoke there and I talked about this several times in the book. 

That it's some sense it's a grace that I didn't deserve. But I'm grateful I've had to continue all these years to love what I do, and to have this kind of powerful engagement in what I do, making sense for me, giving me life, loving being in the classroom, loving preaching in the parish, loving writing the next article, loving correcting the proofs, loving all this stuff that somehow there's an intensity of love. 

And again, I didn't marry. I don't have children, I don't have grandchildren. But somehow in the work, this kind of an overflowing compassion and love that has held it all together. And that's what the book is about in short. But thank you for listening. Now we'll get some really interesting responses from the younger generation. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE] 

JONATHAN MAKRANSKY: OK. Thanks so much, Father Clooney. That was an amazing talk to start us out. So I have the task of starting out the respondents here. I had a funny exchange with a colleague of mine on the way over here, and I told him, I was on my way to try to speak intelligently about Frank Clooney's memoir. And he said to me, well, the good news is that all intelligence is relative when it comes to Frank, which I agree. So that took some of the pressure off of trying to live up to such an amazing memoir. 

I'll also start out just by saying that I've had the privilege of knowing Father Clooney for most of my life so far. I think we first met when I was three or four years old because my dad was colleagues with him at Boston College in the Theology Department. 

So my mom actually recently unearthed a picture of the two of us sitting on our back deck when I was about five, and I think you were attempting to teach me chess in the picture. And I'm not sure how it went, but I'll have to ask her about that. Yeah. Well, we'll have a rematch at some point. But in short, I feel like I've been learning from Frank, from Father Clooney for most of my life, so it was a real privilege to be asked to speak on this panel. 

And so much resonated with me in the course of my reading of this book, so I definitely recommend that everyone picks up several copies to give out to your family and friends. There was so much wisdom to share in every chapter. And across multiple thematic lines, so it was actually quite difficult for me to just choose one or two to focus on, but attempt I did. 

So I would say, right off the bat, I was particularly struck in this writing by your own sense of deep grounding in your own spirituality. Of course, as a Jesuit priest, one assumes you have some sort of deep grounding in your sense of Catholic spirituality. But I was also struck by how that deep grounding seemed to free you to blossom and open yourself very explicitly to other traditions, including the Hindu tradition, of course, down the line, and how this deep grounding from your years as a teenager even has allowed you to build really deep relationships with people, and with texts, and traditions from all sorts of backgrounds. 

So I won't give too many spoilers to encourage you to read the book. But Father Clooney had a very deep encounter with God as a teenager that he describes in great detail in the book. And it seems like in some sense you describe all of your scholarship and your work over the years as stemming from and relating back to that experience. 

And you quoted Thomas Kuhn, I believe, in the book in talking about how in scientific revolutions there's often little bits of incremental change that happen along the way. But ultimately a real shift in perspective comes back to one moment or one pivotal axial point and how you relate to that in your own spiritual and scholarly life. 

And I really resonated with that on a personal level as well. So as Kerry mentioned in that very generous introduction, I grew up actually in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, born and raised, and knew that I wanted to explore that here at Divinity School at some point in the course of graduate study. And really found myself relating everything back to a couple of experiences that I had in retreat over the years around meditative practice and spiritual awakening. 

And to see how you were able to ground such serious and deep scholarship in that moment really served as inspiration for me and sort of caused me to reflect on my own graduate career and now my work here in a new light, so I really appreciated that aspect of the book. 

And I also really appreciated how that colored your initial formation as a Jesuit as well, and really radical ways that I was not necessarily expecting on the first read. But you talked-- you were mentioning your initial tour in Kathmandu when you were teaching at Saint Xavier School there during your teaching period, before your theological formation. 

And in the book, you talk about how you repurposed the Jesuit fathers receiving room for guests there as a puja room for the Hindu and Buddhist students. And you also backed the students up when they wanted to put a portrait of Sarasvati on the wall next to the crucifix that was in every room. 

And I just found myself really struck by that, that I don't think many Jesuit priests of the time would have that approach to education and just that sort of radical openness and empowerment in relationship with the spiritual other even at that early stage in your career was really striking to me. 

And I think I was also struck by the trajectory of that over the course of your life, such that you, as you were just describing actually in your talk here, you speak about how your deep openness arising out of your own spiritual grounding allows you to incorporate elements of various Hindu prayers into your own personal prayer life. 

And you cite specifically the srivaishnava Divya mantra in relation to the cry of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke, where your prayer then becomes approach for refuge, the feet of Narayana with Sri obeisance to Narayana with Sri. Father into your hands. I commend my spirit. And that was just really striking to me. And I think from my own experience in your class as well, I think that really colors the way you approach your relationships with students and your scholarship. 

I actually, in preparing for this response, pulled a move that you make frequently in the course of this memoir. And I went back into the depths of Canvas from several years ago, and I looked at a final paper that I submitted for the year class that I was in Krishna and Christ to look at the comments that you put on the paper, which I got an A on, I will say. Not that matters really. 

But I was struck in that paper at the impact that seeing a model of a teacher with that approach had on me as a budding, young pseudo scholar of religion, I guess, and the way that would inform my work now here back at HDS and my own personal sort of framework on spiritual practice and religious scholarship. Where I not being a member of either tradition under examination in the class Hinduism or Christianity, actually ended up looking at a number of the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, and the writings of various Christian mystical thinkers, Teresa of Avila, people like that, and relating it in my own subtle way to Vajrayana Buddhist modes of pure perception and devotion, and how that relates to transforming ignorance, and desire, and hatred, and aversion into holy manifestations of the divine. 

And I don't think you actually knew that's what I was doing at the time in the course of the paper, because I only explicitly talked about the Christian and Hindu sources. But it really was me working out in real time. A lot of what you explicitly spell out in this paper and the way you do your work, so it was really-- 

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Can you go back in and change the grade now? 

JONATHAN MAKRANSKY: Absolutely. Yeah, I'll send it to you. And so I think, yeah, it was just really striking to me on a number of levels. I think just to sum it up so we can move on to other respondents here. I think the concluding quote of the book, which I'll read out here, really summed it up for me in terms of how your own deep spiritual grounding allowed you to open up to others, both personally and in scholarship, in your sense of calling in what you're doing. 

And you write, without love I would not have even believed it worthwhile to write this book. Showing you my life and work is just one simple thing. I could not have given it all to you without fear of exposure or worry that I've said too much or too little. Had I not been loved first. God looking at me before I ever looked at God, none of any of this would have taken place. And I think that really summed it up for me over the course of the book, so thank you so much for your work and mentorship. 

[APPLAUSE] 

RAJEEV PERSAUD: Yeah. Hi, everybody. Hi, everybody. 

AUDIENCE: Hi. 

RAJEEV PERSAUD: I'm super grateful to be here and that I was invited by Professor Clooney to participate in this event. Back when I in my first year, the running joke among my friend group was that Clooney was my grandpa, but my Catholic grandpa to the Hindu priest on campus, which I probably never told you. But I happily played into the idea because he was so instrumental in my experience here. 

Yeah, the beard is, the resemblance is uncanny. And the book, it-- I mean, it's a really cool book, and it's also really leisurely reading it's enjoyable. But what is so special about it for me is it makes clear what made learning from Professor Clooney so valuable, and what made it so special, and what the guiding force that animated that learning was that you don't really ever think about. 

You take X amount of classes with him, but-- and there's always something. There's a thread that connects all of it. And especially I looked at my papers too, that when I was like preparing for this, and there's a thread that ties all of it together. And this allows you to see-- the book, allows you to see what that guiding light is, that force is, that animates whatever my experience was in that class. 

And so when I think about the book, the three of us met a little bit online to just think about what would we talk about? So we weren't stepping on each other's toes, and all three of us had three very different things to take away from the book. You know the story with the elephant, and the blind men, and they're touching like the ear and they go, it's a fan. And then the tail is like something, that's the three of us were. And Clooney's book was the big elephant. 

And I think about my experience and we talked about in the next generation. So I'm exactly 50 years younger than Professor Clooney, so I have-- but it's still so salient to the 24 year old's experience. Coming to div school, I think there are three camps that people are in when they come in to generalize. And I think one of them is those who are steeped so strongly and firmly in a tradition, and are coming to learn. Those who have no tradition and are coming to learn whatever they're interested in, and those who are kind of wrestling with the tradition they've come from but feel maybe estranged from. 

And over the course of the two or three years that people are here, I think those lines really blur. And I think that for me, I'm coming from the first camp, which is very steeped in tradition, very ultra Hindu coming into div school. 

And your fear, and I think Professor Clooney mentions it in a quote somewhere here that I was anxious that my experience not be taught and taught out of existence. And that's the fear when you're a religious person. You come to study religion like academically is that less my belief be sanitized and just made very dull by the academic kind of analysis of whatever you believe and it takes the magic out of whatever you believe. And when you're Hindu there's a lot of magic, so that that's the fear that you have. 

And so Professor Clooney talks about in the book, I had to also open intellectual space for myself. Like any new faculty member, I had to explain myself where I belonged was not entirely clear. And I think that spoke to me that. When you come to div school, you're not sure-- it's not really clear what are you doing here? 

You're not an MA student, so you're not so decidedly PhD track. But then most people here are not really ministerial students either. So really what this is a springboard for so many things. And Professor Clooney talks about at length in the book about carving that space, where your convictions aren't sanitized, and where they don't take a backseat to the learning, but where they rather complement the learning or a part of the learning. 

And part of that, I think, has to do with calling that Professor Clooney talks about in the book. And John talked about the experience, that formative experience that Professor Clooney had at 15 with God. But that leads to another question, which he gets into, which is happiness compared with being interesting. 

And the stereotype, I mean, I think I'm privy to other people's perspective of the div school. People, those who are in other schools, because I have a lot of friends in the college, and they-- I mean the stereotype about is we're all very tortured. We don't really-- we're not having the greatest time in our spiritual life. 

But then this spoke to that, happiness compared with being interesting and not being interesting, like superficially, but being a thinker, it's very-- had I not troubled the waters and come to this school, I'd be very happy with what I believe. Which I don't know if I am anymore. But I do know that I think deeply about what I believe, and that is a space that I think Professor Clooney has uniquely carved out here in the form of the study of theology that is a little bit different from the study of religion because it allows you to really get into what do I believe? 

And reflecting on the papers, I realized that each of those papers, and maybe you notice this, but they were all an exercise in theology for me. I came out-- every single paper I wrote for Professor Clooney was like, helped me know, I believe this or I don't believe this. 

And I've come to him, I've more than a number of times with grievances, and I've cried in his office, and gone through the whole works. And he was my ad hoc chaplain when I was here. And I realized that the real work, the chaplaincy, the pastoral care I got from him came in the form of the scholarship, in the form of the schoolwork, and that was really, really important. 

And I think about the two years that I spent here. And I think it's so well summarized in this short little quote here from the book. And this speaks to me not so much as two years of having been a div school student, but two years of having been a Clooney student. And this is what he says. He goes, we need not decide things too firmly as if faith needs an end to questing because it cannot suffer poetry and the drama of uncertain love. 

Better we say more only when we have more to say. In the meantime, remaining on edge, holding our breath as we stop our words, love extended beyond its capacity for confident words. Loving God is always a risk. And I think that is such a summary of what I've experienced, where it's been so humbling in my experience as a spiritual person that I think more before I speak, and I question more before I stake a conviction on something. 

And so I'm very grateful for the book, but even infinitely more grateful for having been your student. So thank you very much. 

[APPLAUSE] 

ANDREA BISCHOFF: I first met Frank at a 2017 Hindu Catholic dialogue with the US conference for Catholic bishops in DC. I don't know if you remember that, Frank. I had just arrived, actually from my stay with the Trappists in Virginia. A very long, quiet stay in the mountains, and Frank was upstage as one of the panelists. And I remember that everybody afterwards was telling me how a big deal he was. How much of a big deal he was. He was the real thing if you wanted to study Hindu Catholic dialogue. 

Everyone said he was a rock star and he obviously didn't look it. And for those that know him, he doesn't look it now and he probably never does. He's incredibly unassuming. But still, at that point, I wasn't bold enough to approach him. I was very, very shy. 

Years later, Frank, I can say that I have successfully approached you, and even more so I have had the honor and privilege to study deeply with and from you. Frank, you were the reason why I applied to Harvard Divinity two years ago. I knew that you were a Catholic priest engaged in Hinduism, and this reflected my own background in Catholic religious life, but also practicing Hinduism since I was 12 or 13 at the same time. 

I thought that if anybody could understand the tension I was facing being a devout Catholic, but also deeply immersed in the study and practice of Hinduism. If anybody could teach me how to engage my Catholic faith and Hinduism in a scholarly way from a place of deep personal love and commitment. If anybody could help further what I believed was a personal calling from my God to further open up the space between these two very different religions, I knew it would be you. 

When Frank asked me to speak today, he gave me a very specific task, to relate what younger generations like me can learn from your memoir of both your work and your life, for they're actually inextricably intertwined in the book. What is Frank's legacy? How will his work and his life live on for those of us who do comparative theology today and in the future? 

Well, Frank, of this, I can speak nearly forever, but I'll save you the time. Fortunately for everybody here, I narrowed down these things to three different themes in the book. Three themes of your memoir that inspire my scholarship, my potential contribution to the Catholic Church, my life. And I think it is safe to say the work and lives of many people who didn't have the opportunity to speak here because let's be honest, you know too many people. 

The first theme that I have is courage. And there are so many examples of this in your life and in a text, such as your courage to follow your passion for Hindu tradition, not knowing at the age of 17, 18 where it would lead you. The courage to immerse yourself in another very different tradition. When the Catholic Church was just beginning to officially open up its doors to dialogue with and recognize the holiness of other religions in Nostra Aetate and Vatican too. 

Your courage to continually stay in the tension when you encountered seemingly unreconcilable differences in the texts you study. And for those of us who have also felt that the nearness to God lies also in traditions outside our own, who have likewise felt the call to promote greater openness, respect, and empathy in our world, which is desperately in need of that. Your courage inspires us, particularly me, to believe that my work can and will make an impact. 

The second theme is humility. I think it takes a lot of humility not to immediately resort to judgment or resolution when discovering something in a religion or in a person that doesn't fit into our own particular worldview. 

And throughout your memoir, you consistently remind us that if we wish to truly engage with, learn from, and respect another religion, we have to recognize and suspend our own biases and let go of clinging to our own limited definition of truth. I truly believe that in your memoir touched upon that. 

We are not and we never will be the masters of the texts or the traditions we study, whether we're students or professors here. We will never know everything, and that's kind part of the excitement. But it takes a lot of humility to keep us learning, to allow us to genuinely connect to and relate to the religious other, to break down the walls of fear, prejudice, and misunderstanding in our world. 

Our ability to be vulnerable, to be human, allows our work to have an impact beyond ourselves. And I do believe that your work has that impact. Lastly, and most importantly for me, your commitment to Christ resonated throughout this text. In your book, Christ is in the background as that still, small voice that guides your life, and your work, and everything you do. 

It was out of Christ's ever flowing love for you, that you became a priest in the first place. And it's your continual faith and trust in Him, that you could be only for Him, that has allowed your scholarship to impact the hearts and minds of your students and your peers here. Your faith in Christ gives me the faith. Sorry, getting emotional, that when I dive deep into Hindu texts and practice, that my Christ will always be there waiting for me when I return. 

Your heartfelt commitment to God reminds me to keep him at the forefront of all that I do. He guides everything I do. Your continual ability to see Him in all things and every person is so beautiful and it encourages me to never stop discerning where Christ's love and compassion is in all of my work. 

Frank, you have really shown me that as a passionate Catholic, engaged in this really hard work of dialogue, that a deep love of Christ is not to be set aside. Christ is in it. Christ is the ground. He's the center. He's the heart that enables us to fearlessly go out into our divided broken world and work for peace. 

So at the end of his memoir, Frank writes, and this really stuck with me. I keep finding that my Christian faith remains the single deep and sufficient foundation for me. I am not thinking of that faith as a set of doctrine, or even as the church, or society of Jesus, but as a single, deep and enduring relationship to Jesus Christ, who called me to follow Him a long, long time ago. And I can only hope, Frank, that I and many others here can follow you. 

[APPLAUSE] 

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Yes, I think I will be extremely brief because I'd love to hear others speak. But first of all, a profound sense of gratitude to the three of you for such beautiful reflections. So if there's ever another edition of the book, I'd love to include your responses in the book. 

Because part of the point of the whole thing was not that my life's story is paradigmatic for other people, but that it might in some way spark, show a possibility, and that people will look at themselves and say, yes, I can do that, or I do. I'm already doing that. It's already part of my life. And I think in three different ways, you've said that to us today, which I think is quite wonderful. 

And hopefully too, what all three of you who are-- one thing you have in common, you're young, and you have so much ahead of you. And those of us who are older, how do we keep the faith, keep the love, keep the joy over such a long time? That I think what partly what you're saying testifies to me that you have it in you. 

I mean you already have the depth, be it in a Buddhist tradition, a Hindu tradition, a Catholic tradition, that the sparks are there, the energy is there, the vision is there. And that hopefully, you will-- as I find myself blessed 10, 20, 30 years from now down the road, somehow saying I can always go back to that starting point. In the beginning, this was my story. In the beginning, this happened, and this is what keeps me going when I'm 50, 60, 70, or whatever. 

I think I could say much more, but I think it is true that I thought of other people I could have invited, and many students over many years, colleagues from the faculty I could have invited in. But I think I chose the three of you because I thought you would have your own personal stories to tell, and your own personal way of looking at the book, and I think you've done that brilliantly for us today. 

I think if people ever watch the video, they'll skip over my part and go right to your part and say, there's a wonderful that these three young people could speak so eloquently of their own selves and of the book. So I'll stop with that. Just thanking you, and I think you're now an inspiration for those who come after you. And that's the whole point. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE] 

KERRY MALONEY: Well, heartily agreed, Frank. Thank you all for such heartfelt and thoughtful responses to this heartfelt and thoughtful memoir. Frank, thank you again for producing it. Amazing. Amazing and producing the life that you have. We have a few minutes now for questions or comments from the audience. And I'm going to come around. Can you hand me that microphone, Frank. I'm going to come around with a microphone if you just wait until I reach you, and that way we'll pick you up on the video. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Professor Clooney, and for everyone for sharing your words. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your memoir. And one thing that stands out is the notion of a reciprocal legitimation, where that which you are honoring as what your influences were with Shakespeare, and Aquinas, and Rabindranath, Tagore with Gitanjali, and Dostoevsky, and the poetry of the Alvars. 

That as one's reading it see the roots of what's inspired you going deep like the roots of a tree. And it's also growing upward to see your own words similarly reflected as poetry in its own right to see where those roots came from. 

And one quote from page 100 stood out the most for me that you write, I find in the Alvars poetry a mirror from my own experience of God in 1966, such as had permeated every moment since then. My writing certainly has not come forth all at once. And yet it is in its own way, a lifelong unfolding of a single, original intimation of God in my life. 1,000 ways of saying just one thing and asking the reader to see it. 

And with that, I'm wondering if you could speak on the influence of reading poetry for you and how that's influencing the future projects you're working on with the sacred works of Tamil that you're doing. 

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Craig. That was wonderful. We'll include you in the book, too, in the next version. One of the things I learned along the way was that where does the inspiration-- I mean, what keeps me going sort of on an everyday level? And I realize looking back to my high school days and college days, it wasn't really the philosophy we studied or the theology we studied. It was the literature. 

And so when I talk about my own experiences back in high school when I was 15, I make a big point that I was reading Dostoevsky at that point, The Brothers Karamazov, and that somehow the experience of Alyosha, his mystical moment, somehow gave me words for mine, and that was so important. 

And that I studied a lot of philosophy. We had 10 courses in philosophy in college at Fordham, the Jesuit training. But the course that really helped me most was the year long course in Shakespeare. In one semester, we read the comedies, in one semester, we read the tragedies. 

And the Professor, Clare Hahn, who was a longtime and beloved professor there, she just opened it up for us. And I think she did. What I always wanted to do is bring it to life, not even the performance. The performances were important, but in the classroom, bring it to life and say, this is what matters. This changes things. Don't you see how these characters come alive on the stage. 

And then when I finished that year long course, six weeks later, I was in Kathmandu. And six weeks later, I was in Kathmandu and the first book that really touched me was Rabindranath Tagore's poetry. And so I realized that the poetry makes so much difference and the imagination that comes with it. 

The philosophy is important, the theology is important, scholasticism is important. But the poetry matters so much up to, as you say, when I stumbled into Tamil because at Chicago I had to learn a second language, and my incredibly grateful for this sense of the poetry of South India, meaning something to me. How that came about and energizes me in the project I'm working on now and so on. 

And so that too is something to think about, what do we read? What is it? The poetry, the novels, the drama, art, music that keeps us going over the years may not be the thing we are studying, but it may be the thing that keeps us alive. 

I just add as a footnote. Recently, Pope Francis, this summer, talking to the seminarians in Rome, he says scolded them and said, you should all be reading more novels because your imaginations are impoverished. And you should start reading, and understanding, and imagining a greater world by reading fiction. And he begged them sort of to do that, and I think that's totally true. But thank you. 

AUDIENCE: Frank, thanks so much for writing this wonderful memoir. Thanks for being such a great colleague over many years here in Venice. We arrived almost the same time. You're a little earlier. The question I have as I read your memoir is that there seemed to be some, I don't know how to describe them properly, but kind of first order and second order experiences and guidance in your life. 

The second order has to do with important people who open doors for you, and got you to Kathmandu, or Madras, or University of Chicago, or BC, or Harvard, or whatever. But beyond all of that, there are these first order experiences of special connection with the divine. As a 15-year-old boy in your bedroom with this deep spiritual experience or standing in the retreat house up in Gloucester and having had a pretty bad year at Western, I think it was. 

And there's others as well, I think, of entering some temples in Kathmandu for the first time. And it strikes me that some of these experiences, given that you're a person of wide reading and so on, but these were either alone or had a deeper impact on your life ultimately than anything that you read. And not minimizing the things that you read, but I'm just wondering how you think about those looking back. 

I find it really courageous that you wrote about them in powerful ways, but I'm kind of eager to hear you reflect on that aspect of your life, that there are these deep experiences of spiritual connection, which were the ultimate shapers of your life more than the signposts to various institutions and places. 

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Yes. Thank you for picking up that. That's very wonderful way of putting it because certainly, I can be incredibly grateful. As I was writing it, I kept mentioning names of people that I wanted to remember, and I could have added another 100 names, but the indexer was getting annoyed. You can't just keep adding names so that they can appear in the index. 

But people mattering so much, and friends, colleagues who have helped in so many ways along the way. I'm an introvert. I don't mind going in my office, in my room and closing the door, and hiding under the bed or something like that. Just to be alone is so important and on my own best conversation partner. In some ways I talk to myself, but the friendships matter. 

And then I think in some ways, I'm saying, as I think our panelists have said, there's kind of an underlying core experience, that kind of subterranean flow that I first felt very strongly in 1966. But I think was there already, just that there was no-- I was too young, maybe, it just hadn't opened up. And then with surface, like you meant that retreat at Gloucester with or things were kind of falling apart after my first year in theology and suddenly it was like the sun was shining and then the ocean was there, and everything came back. 

But what was important was that along the way, there were these people I met, and there were often some were friends, but some were superior Jesuit superiors, some people in positions of authority deans at Harvard Divinity School who enabled the next step and said, yes, can do that. Yes, that's possible. 

So like that retreat at Gloucester, when I was trying to explain to the director that all the problems I brought into retreat, OK, they're gone now, so we don't have to talk about them anymore because I was out by the rocks this morning and suddenly it's all clear. And he could have said, no, no, no, no, you can't escape from that. So quickly. You have to do this. You have to do that. You have to do clinical pastoral education. You have to get your act together. You should see a psychiatrist, whatever. 

But he said, OK, that happened, and the door is open. Or meeting a Jesuit in South India, or meeting a Hindu friend in South India who say go this way, this has happened to you, this makes things possible. I mentioned that when at the conference at Le moyne, when I was in college, the Jesuits just happened to give very famous Jesuit, Horacio de Costa from the Philippines. 

And he gives this talk and he says, your hearts as large as the world. And he didn't give me a new idea or something, but suddenly he said, you have permission to imagine as widely as possible. So I think maybe it may be influenced by my understanding of Hindu teachers, Hindu gurus, and acharyas. Is that it's not so much instructing you and you should take a lot of notes, but that the teacher is the one who enables you to open up potential that's already in you, and shows you a way to advance. 

And that I think this is a Christian theme as well as Hindu. When you need a teacher, the teacher will appear. And sometimes you can be yearning for a teacher and you can go to famous teachers or gurus, and it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and then suddenly, almost accidentally, there's somebody there to say go this way go that way, it's OK what you're doing. 

So I think it's that kind of back and forth across levels. But the experience, I think, Jesuit enough stubborn enough that a lot of it. I know that already. You don't have to tell me that. It's all inside me. But I've always needed over the years people to say, don't you see you're free? You can do this. Let go. Run with it. And there's a number of superiors said to me, see what happens. See what happens, and then you see what happens. And I'm grateful that it's worked out. Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: I'm wondering if Thomas Merton was an influence on you as a Catholic in going to another religion? And I'm also I was thinking about Clifford Geertz bracketing or epoché. When you were experiencing the Hindu, did you-- were you conscious of bracketing your Catholicism, your faith, to the otherness of the other? 

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Yeah, so on the ladder, I don't know When I first read Clifford Garrett's probably not then, not in high school, not in college. But the sense of being able-- if you're at the borderline between traditions or you think you're at the borderline, all kinds of irresolvable complications can arise and you can end up-- I'm sorry. 

KERRY MALONEY: That wasn't picking you up. 

FRANCIS CLOONEY: All right. All kinds of complications can arise. And you can say, well, I better stop and resolve these first before going on. But no, the ability to suspend the desire for consistency or harmony of positions and say, there is my tradition, there is my faith, that's not changing. Now let me leap across the boundary and go there. 

And that somehow this seemed to work. Because again, I think my comparative theology is not so much systematic or theoretical, but you do this, you do that, and then you read it, write about it, and then it's done. These things just happen, and you happen to put them together, and they work out in the long run. 

In terms of influences. I think oddly, Thomas Merton, I think, I've grown always to appreciate more and more over the years reading all his works on Hinduism for an essay I wrote, and so on that. Visiting Gethsemane a number of times, his Asian journal about his trip that ended in Bangkok when he sadly died so young. But it was his autobiography, seven story mountain, that really caught my attention. 

Long before I thought of writing my own memoir, it was a sense of, here I am. I was born at a certain day and my mother was this, my father was that. And I ended up doing this, and it was stupid, and I made that mistake and that mistake. Then I ended up in New York, and then this teacher changed my life. And that teacher opened my mind. 

And then suddenly a little Hindu monk appears at the door Brahmachari. And I ask him, now's the chance to learn the wisdom of the East. And he says, actually, what Brahmachari told me was, you haven't read Teresa of Avila, you haven't read Dionysus, haven't read John of the Cross. Go and read them. And he says that somehow that Acharya, who went on to have a very active life back in Bengal, he really was-- God sent him all the way from India to New York to tell me to discover my own tradition, and I love that about him. 

Raimundo Panikkar was another figure. I'm not-- in some ways I'm not like him, in other ways, I am like him as this kind of borderline person. He influenced me a lot, and other figures I could name. But I think looking for models who are people who kept at it their whole life and kept learning, and crossing over, and realizing there's always more, there's this-- it's overflowing. And both Merton and Panikkar, I think both did that, and other people too, including people in this room. But that sense of figures who tell their stories in a way that tells me it's possible to me to live my story. Thank you. 

KERRY MALONEY: Well, Frank, thank you very much. And thank you to your students, your disciples, for joining us tonight and sharing their wisdom. And thanks to all of you for coming tonight to celebrate this book. I know that you want to go out, and scan that QR code, and purchase that book because the Jesuits need the money, and you can get it a heavily discounted price. 

So we're really grateful that you were here to celebrate not just this book, but this great teacher, this great human being in our midst. We are so grateful for you, and your decades of scholarship, and wisdom, and leadership, and love, and love. Truly a love story. Thank you, Frank. Thank you all. 

[APPLAUSE] 

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors, Office of the Chaplain, Religious and Spiritual Life, Office of Ministry Studies. 

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, The president and Fellows of Harvard College.