The conversion of Roy Schoeman: Jewish atheist to Catholic
Roy Schoeman was an atheist, the son of Holocaust survivors, who had a miraculous conversion at the age of 30 while teaching at Harvard Business School. This is my translation of the story he posts on his Salvation is from the Jews website:
My parents were observant Jews in Europe who fled to the US to escape the Holocaust. I was raised as a "conservative" Jew, and was quite pious by nature and very enthusiastic in the religious instruction I received and the religious activities in which I participated. I attended the Jewish evening school religious education program at my synagogue ("Hebrew School") throughout high school. I was very close to my rabbi and to several of the seminarians who were my professors at the Hebrew School. As if it were providential, the rabbi of my hometown was Arthur Hertzberg. One of the most prominent rabbis in the USA, he was president of the American Jewish Congress, an adviser to several presidents, and wrote a number of best-selling books on Judaism and Jewish history.My favorite Hebrew School professor, with whom he was particularly close, also became a rabbi prominent figure who later headed the largest Jewish rabbinical seminary in the US.
Growing up, I was unusually devout and passionate about God and Judaism, even though the conservative, suburban context I was in didn't really support a life of piety, faith, and prayer. In my senior year of high school I knew a very charismatic mystic Hasidic rabbi (Shlomo Carlebach) who used to tour the country giving "concerts," which were really prayer meetings over which he would preside, playing guitar and singing Hasidic worship songs, mixed with religious stories and teachings. He had a large following among Jewish hippies and college students. I began to follow him and spent the following summer traveling in his entourage. I wanted to live my life for God and with God, and while in Israel I considered abandoning my plans to go to MIT and stay in Israel, studying in one of the Jerusalem yeshivas (which are schools where young people spend their time in prayer and religious study, the closest thing Judaism has to religious life). I was disappointed by a certain sterility and coldness that I saw in them, and that they did not reflect a true intimacy with God.
So I returned to the USA and entered MIT. I felt very lost, because anything that did not have God at its center seemed to have no meaning or meaning, but there was nothing I could “do” that did have God at its center. . The former Hebrew school teacher with whom he was close had also moved to Boston, where he started a sort of anti-cultural, hippie-oriented Jewish commune/seminary. During my first few weeks at MIT I considered dropping out, but he advised me to stay, and I did, spending most of my free time at his commune/seminary.
Although I tried to maintain my religious orientation, there was a fatal flaw in it that soon drove me away. He did not understand the relationship between religion and morality, in particular sexual morality. So soon my religiosity got mixed up with the drug and “free love” culture that was rampant, and soon degenerated into the immoral and vague hippie “spirituality” of the time. My thirst for God was satisfied, for a long time, with the false consolations and illusory spirituality of that environment.
For the next fifteen years, I lived my life in tremendous internal tension. I had a longing for transcendent meaning, and a refusal to give up that longing for more than a brief period, but I had no knowledge of what that longing was really for, and thus no idea of the direction in which it should go. Since the life of a conventional engineer in the USA has no "meaning", I moved to Denmark, because I felt, in the deep relationship that the Danes have with life and family, a greater spiritual meaning, but once there that It wasn't my real life, so I went back in. For a few years after my return, while working as a programmer, I lived for mountaineering, with the thrill and sense of danger and achievement it produced providing an anesthetic for my thirst for meaning. In 1978 I was going back to Harvard Business School for an MBA, but the fleeting feelings of success it produced didn't quell my desperation for real meaning, for long. , it only produced a momentary illusion of purpose that soon disappeared, leaving me with the desperate feeling that there must be something more.That's why I never settled down in a cart, or got married.
I did extraordinarily well at Harvard Business School, earning the most awards available in my class, and graduating among the few with "High Distinction." Shortly after graduation, I was invited to join the faculty, and I did. , teaching the course on marketing in the MBA program But even the success of being a Harvard Business School professor, and a very popular one, at 30 years of age, did not diminish my sense of meaninglessness. teaching and the students, but I didn't find much interest in the subject itself. After teaching at Harvard, they offered to support me (very generously) while I completed a Ph. my lack of genuine interest caught up with me and I went back to consulting.
It was around this time that I got involved with my last "false consolation", my last false direction to give meaning to my life. As a child, I had been a keen skier, but I gave it up after leaving for college. strength, supporting myself with consulting while I spent most of each winter skiing in the Alps. I improved a lot, and my peers in the Alps were all professional skiers, circuit skiers, Olympic hopefuls, etc. For a few years, I lived to ski, finding enough comfort in the physical thrill, the speed, the aesthetics, the sense of accomplishment, the camaraderie, to temper the thirst for meaning in my life.
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Of course, God was using everything in my life to draw me to Him, and it would soon bear fruit. It was when I was in the spectacular natural beauty of the Alps that I became aware of the existence of God for the first time since university. I remember the scene – I was up on the mountain, still well above the tree line, shortly after sunset, with the sky glowing a soft red and the snow and granite glowing blue in the twilight. My heart opened with gratitude, and I knew that such beauty had been created by God. It's worth noting that the area of Austria I was in was still deeply and devoutly Catholic, with beautiful crucifixes everywhere, both inside houses, hotels and restaurants, and along paths and pathways. Even in the ski town, the church was packed for Sunday mass. (In fact, in the hostel where I stayed, a wooden crucifix hung above my bed. Every afternoon when I returned to the room I would take it down and put it in a drawer. I didn't want to sleep under a cross! and the next day I found that it had been hung again over the bed, by the devout old woman in whose house I was staying.
After a few years of living for skiing, that too began to bore me, and I grew more and more despondent. The only solace he could find was spending time alone in nature. trying to recapture the comfort he had felt in the Alps. During the spring of 1987 I took a few days off and went to Cape Cod to spend time in nature. I was walking early in the morning in the woods just back from the beach when God dramatically and clearly intervened in my life to get me back on the right track. As I walked, lost in thought, I found myself in the immediate presence of God. It was like "falling into Heaven". Everything changed from one moment to another, but in a smooth and subtle way so that I was not aware of any discontinuity. I felt in the immediate presence of God. I was aware of his infinite exaltation, and of His infinite and personal love for me. I saw my life as if I were looking at it after death, in His presence, and I could see everything I would be happy with and everything I wish I had done differently. I saw that every action I I had ever done mattered, for better or worse, I saw that everything that had happened in my life had been perfectly designed for my own good, by the infinitely wise and loving hand of God, not only including but especially those things that in At the time I had thought they were the greatest catastrophes, I saw that my two greatest regrets in dying would be every moment I had wasted doing nothing of value in God's eyes, and all the time and energy I had wasted worrying about myself. e not being loved when every moment of my existence was submerged in an infinite sea of love, even though I didn't know it. I saw that the meaning and purpose of my life was to worship and love my Lord and Master, in whose presence I was. I wanted to know His name, so that I could properly worship Him, so that I could follow "His religion". I remember silently praying "Tell me your name. I don't care if you are Apollo, and I have to become a pagan Roman. I don't care if you are Krishna, and I have to become a Hindu. I don't care if you are Buddha, and I have to be a Buddhist. As long as you are not Christ and I have to become a Christian!" (Jewish readers can identify with this deep-seated aversion to Christianity, based on the mistaken belief that it is the enemy behind two thousand years of persecution of the Jews.)
He didn't tell me his name. Obviously, I wasn't ready to listen to him, my resistance at that time was still too great. But I knew, from that moment on, the meaning, purpose and goal of my life; and that feeling has not dimmed or diminished, although the immediate state of awareness has passed.
When I returned home, everything was different. I remember calling my mom and saying “Mom, I have great news! Everything is true! You never die…” only to find a lapidary silence. It never occurred to me that she didn't believe me, after all I knew from direct experience! Although I went back to my consulting room, everything was different now, and I started a direct search to find my Lord and Master and God whom I had met on the beach that day.
Because I interpreted the experience as "mystical," I initially looked into mysticism, which led me to many dead ends. Prior to my experience, I had had no interest in mysticism or any of the New Age religions or meditation practices. or occultism, and those were the first ones I ran into. I spent a few months going through this direction, essentially Hinduism in disguise.
But every night before going to sleep, I would say a short prayer to know the name of my Lord and Master and God whom I had met on the Beach. A year to the day of the initial experience, I went to sleep after saying that prayer, and felt as if I was awakened by a gentle hand on my shoulder, and escorted to a room where I was left alone with the most beautiful young woman I could imagine. I knew without anyone telling me that she was the Blessed Virgin Mary. I felt completely awake (and my memory is as if I had been awake), even though I was dreaming. I remember that my first reaction, being there impressed by her presence and her grandeur, was at least I knew the Ave Maria so I could honor her! She offered to answer any questions she had. I remember thinking what to ask, asking the questions, and her answers. After talking to me a little more, the hearing ended. When I woke up the next morning, I was madly in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and I knew that the God I had met on the beach was Christ, and that all I wanted was to be as Christian and as good a Christian as possible. I still didn't know anything about Christianity, nor the difference between the Catholic Church and any of the hundreds of Protestant denominations. It took me another two years to find my way to the Catholic Church, guided by my love and reverence for the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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