Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream by Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra Page A

predatory priests, thankfully, though the practice of caning, which the missionaries brought with them from Ireland, has become rightfully disgraced.
    We did have some intensely devout classmates, called the seminarians. They began studying for the priesthood at age twelve and lived at the seminary while attending school with the rest of us. A number were Christian from birth, since they came from Goa and had Portuguese surnames like Da Silva and Da Souza. I was puzzled by such devotion and asked one boy why he wanted to become a priest. His eyes widened.
    “They fly you to Rome, and then the Pope makes you a priest. The Pope himself!”
    So it was the travel? My dream was to fly to London and see the house on Baker Street where Sherlock Holmes lived. The seminarians were dreaming bigger—I was impressed.
    Sprinkled into our school were also some Catholic converts; they came from poor families and attended on scholarship. Every day, the Catholic boys went to catechism class. The rest of us, the motley pagans, were given the choice to go along to catechism or to attend a class called Moral Science.
    “Moral science” seems like a peculiar concept to me now. It was actually more like moral logic. The lessons were aimed at systematically proving why Christian morality was correct. If we understoodlogic, we’d know that the teachings of Jesus were universal and irrefutable. I was already mesmerized by the story of the Passion in the New Testament, which couldn’t be improved upon for blood and poetry. Primarily I loved Jesus as an action adventure hero. What could be more adventurous than fighting for God against the devil until your ruthless enemies nail you to a cross?
    Moral science drove home the iniquity of masturbation and homosexuality, both approached in a gingerly sidelong fashion. You left class certain that something was awful but not knowing exactly what it was. Those lessons had only a temporary effect. What stuck for life? An abiding trust that love is the basis of true morality. (I once read an apt definition of the law as a set of rules set up after love is gone.) Someone from a family that wasn’t as loving as ours would have had a harder time absorbing this teaching. I recall a debate on the existence of God that I attended years later. On one side was a scientific atheist, who hammered away at God for an hour with a barrage of rational argument. He sat down to scattered applause, and his opponent, a comfortably stout, smiling Catholic priest, took the lectern.
    “Why do I believe that God is real?” he asked. “Because my mother told me so, and I believed her.” He sat down to thunderous applause.
    St. Columba’s adjoined a girls’ school, the Convent of Jesus and Mary. Like ours, it was a day school, founded in 1919 by an order of French nuns. The two grounds were separated by a wall, and my friends and I would sometimes cross over. Girls attracted us, but Moral Science had let us down badly in the girl department. It hardly seems credible that adolescent males could quiver at the thought of holding hands with a girl for ten minutes under the gaze of a suspicious chaperone. Girls were a faraway dream to me and my friends. In all honesty, we crossed the wall just as much to see the grotto filled with flowers that had statues of the Virgin Mary for the devout to pray to.
    We were very good boys, which needs no special pleading. We didn’t reek of incense. Piety comes naturally to a certain side of an adolescent, filled with sentimental dreams and naïve idealism. Thoseare society’s labels, not mine. What makes idealism naïve isn’t that you grow out of it but that no one teaches you how to hang on to it.
    The silent devotion of the Mary grotto at the convent felt beautiful to me. One day, looking on while people came and went to kneel in prayer, I had the overwhelming sensation of a divine presence. The statue of Mary was sending it to me without my praying for it, or even wishing. This was the