Francis X. Clooney, S.J. in his office, 2024. Photo by Marisol Andrade Muñoz.

Therefore, whatever one does—and certainly through study and teaching—it is simpler than you think because God is not far away. I understand why people use the metaphors about searching for God and going looking for God, but for me, it seems you don’t really have to search for the one who’s already there with you. Looking in my own tradition and then crossing over to Hindu traditions, that insight has remained. Hindus knew this, Christian mystics knew this.

Bulletin: You write, “My goal . . . in this book is to provide exercises, work to be done by readers themselves, inquiring into the deep currents of their own lives. This is, I suppose, very Jesuit: all of life as a series of intellectual-spiritual exercises.” This isn’t how people often think of memoirs, so can you share what propelled you to write in this genre?

Clooney: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the book called The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, but it’s a little book of instructions. It’s not a beautifully written, mystical treatise, it’s not like reading Dionysus or John of the Cross, it’s very mundane and even pedestrian. It’s like a cookbook—do this, do that, and see what happens. But just as with a cookbook, if you follow the instructions and do it right, you could end up with a wonderful meal. That seems to be the point.

So why did I write this book at all? I turned 70 in August 2020, right in the heavy period of COVID, and I started thinking, what can I do to recapitulate my life? Why did I write what I did for so many years? What was it all about, and what message do I have to share? I read some interesting autobiographies, and I thought putting together a narrative in this way would allow me to tell the story of how I came to be what I am. Have you ever read Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness?

Bulletin: I have, it’s such a classic among spiritual autobiographies.

Clooney: It is, and Dorothy Day talks at the beginning about going to confession. She says it’s harder than you think to be honest with yourself. When Robert Coles later asked her why she wrote the book, she said that she hoped that telling her story could help readers to know their stories better. I’ve had a fairly placid life, but the idea of confession, telling it like it is—this is sacramental in a certain way. Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and others set a high standard—if you tell your story in a certain way, it will be valuable to other people too. It’s not about, “here are my achievements in life,” it’s about sharing yourself with others, especially younger people, so they can learn their experience from your experience. The students I have in class now—especially undergrads and new MTS students—are 50 years younger than me. What I prefer to do as a professor is to inspire their confidence to say what they think, and our conversation can go from there.

Bulletin: We tend to assume that academics privilege words over everything else, so I was struck that, for you, prayer is an act mostly done in silence, it’s “the face to face, simple encounter with God.”

Clooney: When you need to talk about things that are not present, it makes sense to use the words of the Bible, or the Psalms, to reach the one who’s somewhere else, the distant God. But it seemed to me that when you’re close up, you don’t really need this. Vision or simple presence becomes more important and the talking seems less relevant. I’m a Catholic priest, so I celebrate Mass in the parish. One of the things that does not please me about our services is that typically we talk too much. There’s not all that much silence.

In the second chapter of my book, about when I became a Jesuit, I talk about the indications in the Spiritual Exercises where Ignatius seems to take into account the possibility of a prayer of presence. When you start your prayer, realize you’re in the presence of God and God is watching you. When you find something in your prayer that spiritually satisfies you, don’t rush on to something else. It seemed to me that opens the way to a simpler version of prayer with much more simple silence. They say that when Ignatius said Mass alone, he would sometimes take two or three hours. I think this was because he would stop and pause.

I admire great preachers who have an enormous effect on people, but I’m not one of them. For me, that’s not the point of preaching, it’s rather that the sermon should clear the space so you can have an encounter, you can do it yourself.

Bulletin: It’s clear that in both your teaching and your preaching, you opt for a text-focused approach in which you serve more as a gentle guide than a didactic instructor. Your aim is to “keep open the pathway to transformation, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.” How did you arrive at this approach?

Clooney: Of course, these are different contexts. You shouldn’t be preaching in the classroom and you’re not giving a class in church. But still, in both places I think the value of reading and study are highly underestimated. Sometimes I find my students can underplay the importance of reading. Why get caught up in books when you should be having an experience or when you should do something? But really taking the time to read something, and then read it over again, is extremely powerful.

If you come to my parish, you will find that I’m always telling people at the end of Mass to “go home and reread the readings for today.” Just this past Saturday, I reminded everyone that in August we were going through chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. I said it would be good to open your Bible, or download it, and read it every day or every week. What I’m trying to show is that the snippet that’s given each week is meant to show you something about how to find God yourself.

John, one of my favorite evangelists, says in chapters 20-21, “I could fill all the books in the world, but what I’ve given you, I’ve given so that you may find life.” He’s writing, they say, a generation or two after Jesus’s death, so he’s writing for an audience that never met Jesus and probably never met the original apostles. He’s therefore saying that you need the word in order to share the experience when the eyewitnesses are gone.

Nepal, 1973.

I hit it off well with the boys I was teaching, and they taught me too. In an odd but true sense, it was during this time I truly embarked on a religious life, open, free, in the hands of God. Leaving behind Catholic New York and American Catholicism gave me a certain freedom to think differently. Some young people in those days would become a Hindu or a Buddhist. I didn’t do that. I remained a Catholic, but I ended up knowing and seeing far more than I ever had, and living among people of other faiths changed me. In small ways I explored the local religious culture. I marked Hindu and Buddhist festivals. I walked and cycled around the city, visiting Hindu temples and Buddhist stupas. I became a vegetarian during this time.

The boys I taught influenced me, as well, pushing me in new ways. In the book I describe a brief struggle at the school over whether a picture of Sarasvati, the Hindu Goddess of learning, could be posted in every classroom next to the crucifix. I sided with the boys in this, but I failed to make the case. I didn’t think the rector—a very good man—gave an adequate reason for refusing. The older Jesuits showed love and care for their students, but they were thinking the endpoint of their teaching had to be Christ. I was saying that the end point was Christ, but a Christ who did not object to being contemplated next to the goddess of wisdom.

Bulletin: As you write: “I still wanted to be a Jesuit priest. But I wanted, needed, to do this in my own way. . . . I wanted to be a Jesuit deeply changed by Hindu learning.”

Clooney: When I came back, I studied theology at Weston School of Theology as a final step toward my ordination in 1978. But after that, instead of doing a PhD in theology in Germany like my superiors wanted me to do, I persuaded them to let me do a PhD in South Asian Studies at Chicago, not in the divinity school there, because I didn’t want a religious studies frame. I wanted to study the languages and the cultures and think from there.

Going to Kathmandu at an impressionable age gave me a kind of freedom; going to Chicago for that PhD program also freed me up. And then when I was a Fulbright Scholar in Madras as a grad student, I left home yet again. To be a Jesuit deeply changed by Hindu learning: I think what I meant to say is that to be a Jesuit in the late twentieth and now early twenty-first century, you have to be free enough to do something different, always letting go and moving on. As Jesus said: leave everything, and come, follow me. Letting go eventually led to my decision to accept a chair at Harvard—in a total surprise, since after 21 years at Boston College, I never imagined leaving there.

To do all of these things, I had to get permission from superiors, because I wanted to stay in the order. They could have told me no at any of those three pivotal points in my life—going to Nepal in 1973, going to the University of Chicago in 1979, coming to Harvard in 2005—but they said yes, go ahead and do it, see what happens. If it’s clear that you’re willing to be obedient and you will do what your superiors say, in a sense that gives them the freedom to tell you to go ahead and do what you want. That’s our Jesuit logic, at least.

Bulletin: You describe that time while you were studying theology at Weston as the hardest period in your 55 years of being a Jesuit. How did it shape you as a thinker and a teacher?

Clooney: The difficulty was partly the cultural readjustment. The Jesuits in Kathmandu lived a relatively simple life which would have been considered rather austere by American standards. I came back to Cambridge where there was a seemingly endless budget for food and cars everywhere, and too little mindfulness of how the rest of the world lives. I’d become a vegetarian but now the expectation was that every meal had to have piles of meat. As I say in the book, I wanted to talk about the gifts and insights from Hinduism I’d gleaned, but no one seemed interested. As I saw things then, Weston School of Theology felt like a place where everyone already had the answers, and I found that intellectually soft and annoying. I didn’t feel like I fit.

But even now, that difficult first year in the MDiv helps me to understand that students in their 20s are often in a vulnerable time in their lives. And I want to be sure they can be free in my courses to think for themselves, to speak up, react and act. Again and again I say to my students, “Your life experience couldn’t possibly be the same as mine, even if you identify as a Christian or a Catholic. So you need to teach me where you are and how that affects your reading of the texts.” I give them the freedom to surprise me and to go off in different directions. Part of the price then is to let them think things I never would, or to interpret the readings in ways I would never do.

Bulletin: I was struck that you said you’ve made your courses even more “pointed” post-COVID because it’s “become more urgent to seek out what is serious, urgent, lasting.”

Clooney: During COVID everything was disrupted on a grand scale. Our classes had to meet on Zoom and everyone knew someone who was really sick or who died. We didn’t even know when it was going to end. I found myself asking, “What kind of knowledge is going to count now? How can I use my knowledge in new ways?” So I focused more on courses asking the big questions. I literally put question marks on the end of the course titles. I’m teaching a course this fall, “Who needs God?” with a question mark. It starts with 21st century American life, Pew surveys and all that, with the decline of belief in God and decline even in understanding what “God” means. Then we look back into classical and modern traditions of Hindus and Christians, and explore why people have needed God in the past, wondering if traditional wisdom can help us now. If the point of the course was that everybody needs God, period and not question mark, that would be false advertising. I have always been frustrated by easy or set answers myself. A real question has an uncertainty to it. We really don’t know the answer in advance. If we do, then we should be asking some other, real question instead.

Another course which I just taught last spring is, “Can we still read religious classics?” With all the legitimate concerns about race and gender, colonialism, imperialism, exclusions, elitism, the dominance of the written over the oral, and so on, is it possible to take the classics seriously given they were written mostly by men of privilege in other times and places? Is it still worth it to read classical literature? I put together a course built around one of St. Augustine’s catechetical texts, a catechetical text by the Hindu theologian Shankara, and a famous text by Confucius. None of the three is white, but they are elite male leaders and teachers. Dare we still find value in their texts today? Or is it time to forget the past and move on?

Bulletin: Can you talk about your first formal experiences learning in a Hindu tradition, especially during your Fulbright year in Madras studying Mimamsa, the respected Indian system of learning? You call this your “second intellectual formation.”

Clooney: The Roman Catholic scholastic framework is quite powerful. If you follow Thomas Aquinas you can explain anything, whether or not you really understand what you are talking about. But I was looking for an intellectual discourse that couldn’t be consumed and digested in a Catholic framework. I found it in Mimamsa, Hindu ritual and legal reasoning.

The Mimamsa Sutras of Jaimini is the founding text of the tradition, over 2000 years old. It’s a vast compendium of over 2,700 short verses on 900 cases that for one reason or another raised doubts and required investigation. Since the Veda was assumed to be perfect and clear, the assumption was that all problems could be resolved by those who can read carefully. Mimamsa is an incredibly detailed ritual law system of interpretation, no one actually lives by it as a spirituality. One of my teachers in grad school told me that the saying in India was that if you study Mimamsa too much, it dries out your heart. I didn’t even set out to study Mimamsa, I sort of backed into it because Sankara and Ramanuja, the Vedanta theologians I was beginning to read, presumed knowledge of Mimamsa interpretive principles. You need to think ritually, if you are to think in a liberative fashion.

But what struck me is that this was a way of thinking about how sacred texts work. Hindus believe that the Veda, the original sacred text, had no author. It is an eternal text, and the secret to the meaning of everything lies in Sanskrit grammar, in sentences and paragraphs that always have practical implications. If you understand all the arcane details, one by one, the manifest meaning of the sacred text, and then of the Veda, becomes clear. The world in a book: Jewish scholars have told me that they’re interested in Mimamsa because it seems rabbinic in a way.

With Swamis Sarangpur, 2017.

How do you take multiple traditions seriously without betraying both of them by going to a meta-level of some higher truth? Because you’re in it, you’re not above it, you don’t have a God’s-eye view, a perspective by which you understand all at once. There’s A and B, but you’re in A, you travel to B, and then you travel back. What else are you supposed to do except attempt to make sense, in a way to translate? “Translation” is a metaphor for life itself, but right now I’ve been working on actually translating medieval Tamil poetry. For this, you have to be utterly immersed in what you are reading in the original. You have to get inside the world, and the language, and the music, make it work, surely imperfectly, but in ways that speak to new listeners in new places.

Bulletin: This conversation can’t end without talking about poetry. You describe immersing yourself in it under the tutelage of teachers in India as an experience of “getting caught up” that allowed you to deepen your own spiritual commitments.

Clooney: I find that poetry can be a best teacher for the theologian. Over the past year-plus I got into reading T. S. Eliot’s poetry, and this summer I read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of him. All through his life Eliot wondered, “What’s the point of doing all this?” Every five years or so, he’d think, “I’m losing it, I have no more creativity.” Yet right then, The Waste Land comes out, and years later, The Four Quartets. And suddenly, it seems, Eliot’s won a Nobel Prize, yet he kept saying to himself, “This is foolishness, there isn’t any point to it.” Comparative theology is more like poetry than it is like the scientific study of religion or the history of religions as academic disciplines. It is on the edge between disciplines, engaged in many, owned by none. I think there has to be room for poetry and for humanistic comparative learning in a university, even if the payoff isn’t immediately quantifiable.

I consider it by grace as well as chance that when I was rushing to an evening study hall in Kathmandu, I grabbed off the library shelf a book I had never heard of before, Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore. This little book of 103 poems by a Bengali Hindu poet—rendered in English by himself—spoke to me immediately. Even now when I go back to it, it still speaks to me. It was the first time I was able to bond with a South Asian text in that way. I had dutifully read the Bhagavad Gita when I was at Fordham and admired it, but with Tagore’s verses, the door was open to a kind of crossing over. I needed no introduction or footnotes to read it, it made sense to me and it showed me that it was possible to learn again and again in worlds I did not know.

A prayer later in the collection has had lifelong meaning for me, because it shows what I believe: that an openness to God is an openness to everything and everyone around us. It describes the grace and gift of friendship that has been given to me over and over again in my life.

I would go on later, in grad school and beyond, to read the poetry of Nammalvar, the great ninth-century Tamil poet, and for a year to study Vaisnava Tamil poetry with traditional teachers. You find the poet in his words, and in his words I found more of my life. About a decade ago I wrote His Hiding Place Is Darkness: Toward a Hindu-Christian Theopoetics of Divine Absence. It was simply a matter of reading Nammalvar’s songs of love lost and found along with the biblical Song of Songs, and both poetries as read over centuries by masters of medieval commentary.

I’m currently working on a new translation project, of 600 verses of poetry by the first five alvar poets who flourished from the seventh to ninth centuries in South India. As I say in the book, “my life in writing really does tell the story of my soul,” and like Nammalvar, I hope my writings point up the beauty of the quest for a life of unconditional surrender to God.

Bulletin: I had to laugh at this line: “I am not being wholly ironic in saying that Harvard is, from a Jesuit viewpoint, a mission field, one of those great civilizations we have stumbled upon in our five centuries of existence.”

Clooney: There are things in the book meant to either make people laugh or to provoke them. That line does both, perhaps. I would not have lasted very long here were my aim to convince others to become Catholic! But from a certain Catholic perspective, Harvard is a mission field, a fascinating land not encompassed by or explained by what Catholics have to say about life and its meaning. There are values in my Catholic tradition and Jesuit tradition, both older than Harvard, that we could do more with here. So, accepting a chair at HDS in 2005 thrust me right into the middle of it all.