by Bobby Jindal
Catholic CitizensBobby Jindal, formerly a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is the Governor of the State of Louisiana.Mystical, meaningful sevens throng the Bible, from the seven days of Creation through the seven fat years and seven lean years foretold by Daniel to the seven angels of the Resurrection and Judgment. In Catholicism, seven is the number of sacraments, of cardinal virtues, of gifts of the Holy Spirit, and of deadly sins. In traditional catechetics, seven is the age of reason, the beginning of the capacity for knowledge; in folk wisdom, seven is the pivotal anniversary in marriage, the passing of the first hurdle toward mature intimacy. For me now it is seven years since I was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic. So I celebrate my seventh birthday in the Faith, my seventh spiritual anniversary, by reflecting gratefully on how it all came about.
My parents, who came from India, imparted to me a nominal Hinduism backed by a solid belief in God and His desire for man to engage in regular prayer, but I did not make progress toward a systematic religious faith until the awkward years of junior high school. In between gossiping about girls and complaining about algebra, my best friend Kent and I argued about the meaning of life. Kent's born-again Protestant view of the world contrasted with my worldly view of religion. His view of a world motivated by love and self-sacrifice was certainly more hopeful, though to me less relevant, than my own notion of selfish actors attempting to satisfy their own desires and showing little concern for others. Kent gave me few convincing answers, but he did raise questions that were to lead me to some very surprising places. He planted the seeds.
I was challenged more by the novelty of Kent's approach than by its substance, and I spent some effort trying to learn more about how my Hindu faith responded to his questions. It took my grandfather's death, at the end of my sophomore year of high school, to concentrate my efforts. Pitaji was my idol, a successful banker who had it all, and I almost could not believe that his wealth could not save him from his mortality. Kent's questions took on more than academic importance as I pondered, for the first time, the afterlife. My grandfather was, by all accounts, a good man, but I had no assurance that he, or I, deserved entrance into heaven, if such a place existed; not even my hero's life accomplishments seemed an adequate offering. I imagined Pitaji bargaining with God, trying to offer a part of his fortune for eternal life.
What began as a search partly motivated by fear of judgment and selfish desire for assurance soon led me to appreciate at least some part of Kent's worldview. I made the startling discovery that love, not money, makes the world go round. I finally began to understand that my grandfather meant so much to me because of his love and generosity, not the expensive gifts that he used to express those feelings, and that these same traits were his life's true accomplishments. I discovered this capacity for self-sacrifice, other-consciousness, and love at exactly the right time, for Kathy, the most wonderful girl in high school, was about to notice me.
Kent had introduced doubts and insecurities into my once orderly inner world. I pushed my parents to buy a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and began to search for answers, but was unprepared for Kent's Christmas gift, a paperback Bible with my name on the cover in gold lettering. It was to sit on my bookshelf, appreciated but unread. While Kent had brought me much of the distance toward meeting God, it was Kathy who brought me the rest of the way. My first date with her was a dance, but we ended up on the top floor of the hotel discussing what it means to love God and our fellow man. In between throwing quarters into the fountain 22 floors below, while I wished alternately for a relationship with God and a relationship with Kathy, we shared life stories. I learned that she wanted to be a lawyer so she could serve on the Supreme Court and stop the country from killing babies. Though she answered few of my standard objections to her decidedly Catholic and pro-life views, my reasoning was no match for her sincere faith. While she could not answer my questions about why God had revealed himself only to Christians, while neglecting over half of the world, or how a Catholic society could deal with issues such as overpopulation, Kathy's sense of peace and charity troubled me even more than Kent's sharp questions.
I was finally moved to open the Bible out of a mixture of curiosity and hostility; the latter was due to my irritation with the hypocrisy of certain Christian acquaintances and to a natural bias in favor of my own religion. While I wanted so much to find the peace which Kathy derived from Scripture, at the same time I was driven to find some profound inconsistency in the Bible.
I was amazingly ignorant of any context for what I was reading, and had even thought Christians worshiped fish (in the same way that many Westerners think Hindus worship cows). I found little inspiring or relevant in the Old Testament, but I committed myself to read the Bible from cover to cover.
Curiosity, not any spiritual calling, motivated me to attend a Sunday service with Kent. I was disappointed by a mildly interesting sermon delivered by a part-time preacher who reminded me of, and may have been, a used-car salesman; the cheap theatrics failed to entertain, much less inspire, me.
Then I went to my first Catholic Mass with Kathy. I was probably the first teenager who ever told his parents he was going to a party so that he could sneak off to church. Kathy abandoned me to go sing with the choir, and so I suffered through a confusing ceremony guided by a missalette which made little sense. The entire ritual was a blur of sitting, standing, and kneeling at random times, interspersed with apparently discontinuous readings and much mumbling.
Though Christian practice was less than appealing, Christian belief was getting the better of me. Whereas the Old Testament seemed to my ignorant eye nothing more than genealogies and occasionally interesting history, the New Testament spoke more directly to my soul and experience. Parables warning against the evils of enslaving oneself to material goods were poignant, and the idea of an omniscient God who could forgive my sins through His infinite sacrifice was appealing, if not credible. Hinduism's offer of nirvana as a reward for sanctification was comforting, but the Gospel's more severe notions of universal moral corruption and the possibility of eternal damnation were more consistent with my awareness of both my failings and the importance of my particularity.
I attended Kent's Protestant church for a second time, to see him perform in a religious musical. I expected to be entertained, but was on guard against any overt spirituality that might be hidden in the light musical fare. During intermission, the youth pastor showed a crude black-and-white film depicting the Crucifixion. Suddenly, God was tangible, in a manner clearer to me than any preacher or even Scripture itself had made Him. Seeing Christ's sacrifice convicted me of my sinfulness and my need for a savior. All at once my objections seemed petty and ungrateful as I asked seriously who was I that my Lord should suffer for my sake. I understood for the first time what I had read about and heard of. Todd, the youth pastor, then preached a sermon that crisply outlined how simple it was to submit oneself to Christ and removed any lingering doubts about what would need to be done.
It took a month of daily discussions with a very patient Todd and hours of prayerful Bible study, but I gradually prepared myself to make the big commitment. The Bible no longer consisted of mere stories, but of personal letters from God to me. The Bible's specific lists of sins documented my shortcomings; Christ's uplifting words of love and hope were the best medicine for my spiritual wounds, which were finally being exposed to the light of honest self-examination. Whereas years of pretending my sins away had only compounded their deadly effects and my own sense of guilt, hours of fervent prayer put me on the path to spiritual recovery. The actual moment of submission was anticlimactic as I knelt in prayer with Todd and asked for the Lord's dominion over my entire life and pledged my best efforts in return.
My initial euphoria lasted an entire year as I postponed the inevitable confrontation with my very unsympathetic Hindu parents. I justified my silence, with much help from my new spiritual mentors, by comparing my situation to that of the earliest Christians hiding from government persecution. As they took to caves and secret signs, so I found refuge in my closet, where I studied the Bible by flashlight. Todd, Kent, and many others were overjoyed at the outcome of my spiritual searching, and I needed little prompting from them to turn away from Kathy's Roman rituals in favor of the simplicity of fundamentalist Christianity. I had found God through Todd's straightforward preaching, not in a rosary or a confessional booth. Yet I was not ready for baptism or communion in a church that invested neither of those with deep meaning. I would wait to commit to the one, true church, just as I had committed to the one, true God. Which church had the right interpretation of Scripture?
I did not realize at the time that my search for scriptural cogency would eventually lead me to Catholicism. I approached Kathy with my questions, both out of a desire to share my newfound faith, and also to get her to explain her steadfast faith in her ridiculous religious system. Eventually I faced her mom, a convert, when Kathy ran out of answers and patience.
Kathy's mom spent a lot of time responding to me on controversies ranging from contraception to authority, and dispelling any silly notions I had concerning confessional scams, the rules of succession should the Pope slip into a coma, and similar nonsense. She made sense out of the oddest Catholic practices, and provided numerous references. Most importantly, she was a living example of a pious and informed Catholic. I devoured every theological source she lent me, reading entry by entry Catholic dictionaries and various catechisms. Yet my stubbornness and lack of visible progress would have tried the patience of a saint, and, indeed, I provided ample opportunities for sanctification for my Catholic tutor.
I found many Catholic practices offensive to my understanding of the unadulterated Word of God, but this was often because I did not understand the underlying beliefs. One belief that was both clear and confounding to me was the Church's unique claim to interpret Scripture with authority. Whereas I had eagerly sought discipleship from Todd, and thus accepted his guidance, I was not as ready to constrain myself according to the dictates of Rome. I was bound, as a Protestant, only nominally by the teachings of my pastor, and could easily demonstrate my opposition by finding a more suitable spiritual home through the Yellow Pages. Despite the best efforts of certain liberal Catholics to convince me otherwise, I sensed that Catholicism requires some form of submission. Though one could protest almost any doctrine and remain Protestant - for even the oddest belief has a home in some denomination or can serve as the core belief of a new one - I felt that it made little sense to be a Catholic without truly believing a basic set of doctrines obvious to even the casual observer.
I spent much time learning particular Catholic teachings from both Scripture and history, and eventually I distilled the wide array of issues down to the one central teaching on Church authority. I discovered that the Catholic Church has thoughtful and scriptural justifications for each of her beliefs, which are at least defensible if not always overwhelmingly convincing. The Church's teachings, considered one at a time, appeared to me to be credible but not especially inspiring, but, when considered together, quite substantial. So the most decisive and efficient way to discern whether Rome was an incredible fraud or Christ's Church was to examine the foundational principle upon which her other teachings depend. For if the Church is right in claiming a divine mandate to interpret Scripture and to articulate infallible doctrines, then even the most outrageous assertion becomes binding.
I surprised many of my Catholic friends with the weight and gravity I accorded to their Church's teachings, but, despite my suspicions, I respected the institution enough to take it seriously. I was not tempted by the expedient path of ignoring difficult teachings, and there was no reason to swallow Rome's demanding morality if her authority were less than divinely inspired. After all, if I wanted the aesthetics without the inconvenient morality I could become Episcopalian. I fully expected that my vigorous examination of the pivotal issue of authority would find Rome wanting.
Months of studying history, theology, and (surprisingly) Scripture led me to one simple and inescapable conclusion. The papacy was right, and I was wrong. The same submission to authority commanded by Christ and then Peter and Paul was, unbeknownst to me and many other American Christians, also accepted and continued by the earliest Christians and their successors, who now constitute the dreaded Catholic Church. Despite my best efforts, I could find no justification in the Bible or the early Church for any individual to establish his own church apart from the one established by Christ. A Protestant might find it ironic that I was driven to Rome by my love for Scripture and my desire to learn how Christ and His Church intended for me to understand Scripture.
Seven years of prayer and searching since my first conversion that day in Kent's youth service led me to Catholic baptism and confirmation. Now there have been seven years of Catholic faith and practice - a wonderful childhood of faith, an ever-deepening "romance of orthodoxy."
My Confirmation sponsor, a cradle Catholic, jokingly asks if my second conversion, to Catholicism, is to be my last. I assure him that there is no sign of a seven-year itch.
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