This is the sixth part of the story of my conversion to Catholic Christianity together with my wife Judith and our three sons.
One day after I had been in seminary two years, the professor of Old Testament, who was from Australia, gripped my arm above the elbow quite tightly as I climbed the steps into the classroom building. He said, "The faculty think you should be ordained." He meant they thought I should become a priest in the Episcopal Church. I was glad that my teachers respected and liked me, and I liked the idea of becoming a priest. I thought I could belong more closely to Jesus and do some work for him.
Of course my position was very difficult. I was a very good student, and when I graduated in 1972, the faculty gave me the top preaching prize. My classmates resented my teachers liking me, and with all the novelties at the seminary, a Buddhist winning a preaching prize was too much for the poor alumni.[1] The alumni association of the seminary had a short meeting at the graduation banquet, during dessert, to increase the amount of money in their preaching prize, and made it bigger than mine. I think I symbolized all the new things they did not like at the seminary, but it was only the beginning. The year after I graduated, one third of the entering class were women.
Because my application was late, I was ordained two years after my classmates. I became a deacon in 1974, and a priest on May 18, 1975, the Day of Pentecost.[2] In 1974 there was no work for me in any of the churches of the diocese, and the bishop in San Francisco sent me for career counseling to find some other way to earn a living. I took graduate classes at San Francisco State University, and learned computer programming for the first time. I liked it very much.
In September of 1974, just after I had started classes, I had a very disturbing dream that troubled me for many days afterward. Great clouds came down in big spirals from the sky. The experience was terrifying. I thought they were atom bombs, although that is not the right shape. Later I learned that the great German artist of the fifteenth century, Albrecht Duerer, had a similar dream and painted a watercolor picture of it. It disturbed him for many days, but he thought the great spirals were a great flood. Deeply troubled, I planned to move my family away from San Francisco, something I never considered before.[3]
Judith was not from San Francisco. She grew up in the Philippines, and wanted to go back. Her father and mother were born in the American community in Manila, and married there in 1937. Judith had a Chinese nurse when she was little called Ah-mei, who stayed behind when Judith's family moved to California in 1951. From Ah-mei, and from the culture of the Philippines, Judith had a strong sense of the reality of the spiritual realm, in which good and evil spirits were active and needed to be taken seriously. For this reason, when I finally dared to ask Judith if she wanted to be baptized, to my surprise she said yes.
I asked her in a letter while we were staying with her sister, who needed help with housework and meal preparation, because her doctor told her to keep lying down until her baby was born.[4] We learned to write short letters to each other, and talk about them, at a Marriage Encounter weekend, intended to help husbands and wives understand each other. Friends of Judith's sister brought her Christian books to read while she lay on her bed, and Judith found them interesting. Judith thought baptism would be of practical help in the spiritual world, and she wanted all the help she could get. And she wanted to continue to be a Buddhist, because it helped her too.
Judith's father knew about Christianity, but was afraid he could not live up to its demands. When he was twelve he heard the story in the Gospel, in which Jesus told a rich young man to sell everything he had, give the money to the poor, and follow him. Judith's father took the story seriously. He believed he could not be a Christian unless he were poor. Instead he studied law and became a lawyer. Everyone knew he was honest. He tried a new philosophy every year, and used to talk about his philosophy when the family gathered in the living room before dinner. After I met Judith, I participated in some of those discussions. Because her father was a lawyer, it was very difficult to argue with him.
Judith's mother was not religious, although her grandmother took her secretly to a Catholic priest in Manila to be baptized, when she was a baby, since her mother had become a follower of Christian Science.[5] That was Judith's grandmother, who with her grandfather had suffered as prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines during the war. Judith loved her grandmother, and remembers her room as simple and filled with light. She had a little statue of the Chinese goddess of mercy, Kwan Yin, and read Mary Baker Eddy's book.
In 1975 I baptized Judith and our five-year-old son Aryae at the dining room table of Fred and Mary Harris, who at that time were in their seventies. Mary had been my voice teacher in seminary -- she taught us to pay attention to what we were reading -- and she was one of the few Episcopalians Judith liked. Whenever we were near San Francisco, Judith visited Mary and talked about the struggle to fulfill one's assignment in life. Judith was baptized on the condition that she could still be a Buddhist.[6] Then we moved away. We had been to a monastery of Cistercian sisters in southern Humboldt County, who were doing their contemplative prayer on meditation cushions, and we found a place near them.
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A Prayer for Emergencies
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Dwite
1. The alumni were clergy. I do not really know what exactly offended them, because no one ever told me. They may have been annoyed that the school awarded me two degrees for the same course work, on the theory that one was academic and the other religious. The school did this for others beside me, until later they stopped the practice.
2. May 18, 2000, the Jubilee of Priests in the Catholic Church, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of my ordination in the Episcopal Church.
3. The images in the dream are not Christian symbols, but I have always understood the terror of the dream as intended by God, to prod me to take the big step of moving away from the place I had always lived.
4. The baby grew up to be a young man about 1.9 meters tall.
5. Christian Science comes from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy in Boston in the nineteenth century, and teaches healing through prayer.
6. Our parish priest was troubled by Judith's Buddhism, but permitted me to baptize her. Of course her commitment to Christianity in 1975 was half-hearted. In baptism, one is supposed to die to one's old life, and be born again in a new life. However most Christian converts in the modern world bring some attitudes and ideas from the past with them. Judith was unusual because she said what she would keep.