A True Seeker: Henry’s Journey to the Catholic Church through Atheism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism

The now-OCIA director in Boulder reflects on his journey to abundant life in the Catholic Church.

Seeking something bigger than himself, Henry Schliff tried it all when it comes to religion. Now at home in the Catholic Church, he seeks to help others find their way home, too. (Photo provided)

From Buddhism to Catholicism 

Henry Schliff traversed the globe and almost every major world religion, searching for God.

He spent twenty years searching for the Truth in Buddhism.

He searched for God in Hinduism; he searched in Islam and Judaism.

He even searched for God within what he calls the “Marxian academic practice of collegiate comparative religion courses."

But none of it satisfied, he said. That is, until he met Jesus Christ.

Now having found God — and the peace only Christ can bring — in the Catholic Church, he is a Secular Franciscan and Director of Religious Education for Sacred Heart Parish in Boulder.

“I strongly believe that whether it was his will or his allowance, it's not accidental that my path led me through all these different things,” Henry told me. “I see tremendous good in having experienced them. And I also see where he was planting the seeds along the way.”

Born in the Bible Belt 

Henry grew up in rural North Carolina. His father was a lapsed Catholic, and his mother was, as he described, “very much a seeker throughout her life.” She pursued many Eastern philosophies and ideas, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism. She had been baptized Methodist but was no longer interested in Christianity, though she remained a very spiritual person throughout her life. Henry says his household was “not religious in any sense but had the underpinnings of spirituality.”

At 18, Henry spent a summer intensive at a Buddhist monastery, after which he practiced Buddhism for twenty years. He was especially attracted to Zen, though he dabbled in other forms of Buddhism. Around this time, he also explored Hinduism, studied the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, and practiced Yoga religiously.

“My whole approach to spirituality was always somewhat intellectual, but mostly immersive. I would study by practicing,” he said.

“I had a longing for God in my heart,” he told me. “I couldn’t articulate it, except that I kept looking for him. Buddhism didn’t really satisfy that. I was looking, I’d say now, for a relationship, although at the time I didn’t have any of that language.”

His search for God led him to practice Islam for about a year with a group of Sufi Muslims, though he never made the Proclamation of Faith. He was still vacillating between “the search for God and Buddhism.”

After several years, he attended Naropa University, a Buddhist school in Boulder, where he was formally introduced to Judaism and studied Biblical and Israeli Hebrew.

His religious pursuits included a bit of everything except Christianity — something that now seems almost comical to Henry.

“I did everything I possibly could to avoid Jesus,” he said.

Avoiding Jesus

Growing up in the Bible Belt, Henry was predominantly exposed to Southern Baptists and Pentecostal Christians.

“Not bad people at all,” he said, but in his young mind, he saw in these forms of Christianity, “a decent amount of hypocrisy. It seemed that way to me, not really understanding, not having the maturity and perspective to see that they were actually just acknowledging that they’re sinners, but they were trying.”

Henry went on numerous mission trips with the Assembly of God Pentecostal Church to Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Honduras.

Though he loved the work, he struggled with what he saw as severe close-mindedness among many of the Christians.

“At that time in my life when I was very much seeking, that really turned me off,” he said, describing encounters with many Christians who were entirely averse to ecumenism and displayed no real interest in understanding other religions.

There were Christians who had a more ecumenical outlook, Henry recalls. He remembers being on mission to Honduras and digging holes for fence posts with a Pentecostal pastor. At one point, the pastor looked up at him and said, “In a lot of respects, we’re all talking about the same thing — the Love of God. You have a different language for it, but we’re all going the same direction.”

“I had kind of put him in a box, like he was this Bible thumping, fire and brimstone preacher,” Henry said. But this preacher’s ability to appreciate what was true in other traditions really surprised Henry. This same preacher would later marry Henry and his wife.

Religious Studies 

Henry began attending Naropa University in Boulder as a Religious Studies major.

“I didn’t realize how much graduate school would beat any sense of faith, religiosity or spirituality out of me. It’s not hyperbole when people like Bishop Barron talk about the kind of co-opting of the humanities under the umbrella of postmodernism and particularly Marxist post-modernism,” Henry reflected.

On the very first day of the semester, in his Academic Study of Religion class, the professor told the students that in order to analyze religious systems, they would have to understand that all theorists of religion trace their roots back to Nietzsche, Freud and — especially — Marx.

Looking back, Henry reflected on how the program’s strong, underlying ideology was that religions are simply ways to control people, and therefore need to be analyzed, dissected and deconstructed to understand how they function.

“It’s not overtly stated, but the end goal is to ‘bring the light of enlightenment’ into it so that you can annihilate it,” Henry said. “I’d say it’s the closest I ever came to becoming an atheist because they do their job well. It’s really hard to study under that particular lens and not become incredibly cynical.”

Eventually, he came to see that this excessively skeptical approach fell apart when he began to apply the same skeptical lens to the program itself.

“Eventually, I was able to step back and critique what I was immersed in, but for a while there, I was hanging onto this Buddhist thread, but it was pretty tenuous. I had a lot of doubt,” he shared.

Tibet to Jerusalem

After Henry finished his degree, he became a stay-at-home dad for his son, at which point he also began a more serious Buddhist practice. He began studying Buddhist texts and their underpinning philosophies more in-depth. At the same time, in Denver, he began practicing Buddhism under a Rinpoche — a “spiritual guru within the Tibetan tradition,” Henry explained.

At this point, Henry also became increasingly interested in a school of thought within Tibetan Buddhism which wasn’t totally atheistic but had, as he put it, “a strong theological component,” though they probably wouldn’t use that term.

He recalled, for instance, a time when the Rinpoche was talking about the Buddha nature “which underlies all things,” which he said “is infinite, is a consciousness which knows and creates and brings all things into being, which is outside of time and space.”

As the Rinpoche spoke, Henry said “alarm bells” were ringing in his head: “Like, I had read a little bit of Catholic philosophy, and this sounds a lot like the way they describe God the Father.”

At the same time that Henry was more seriously pursuing Buddhism again, he was also reading small portions of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and John of the Cross, which led him to wonder after “the mystical and logical threads within Catholicism.”

How did these three saints enter his life? Many years earlier, a Southern Baptist preacher gave him his books by John of the Cross.

“He told me that he could see I was a spiritual seeker, and he was like, ‘You need to read this guy. Just add it to your collection.’ And it was John of the Cross,” Henry remembered of the books that he would hold onto for years.

Around this same time, Henry was becoming increasingly angry with the state of American politics.

“A huge amount of anger just welled up. Anger, resentment, all kinds of stuff. And I had this revelation that I was a very angry Buddhist, which is a total oxymoron … I just thought that was completely contradictory, almost untenable,” he shared.

Henry, who had spent decades studying, meditating and cultivating a Buddhist practice, now realized his Buddhism had not actually given him lasting peace.

“This word just came into my heart, and it was very compelling and forceful: I wondered, ‘Why are you so angry?’” he recalled.

Another question quickly followed: “Why does Jesus disturb you?”

Within twenty-four hours, Henry found one of his many Bibles (he had been a Religious Studies major, after all). Not sure where to begin, he turned to the Psalms and began reading and praying with them.

“That same kind of voice in my heart came back, and it said, ‘What do you really know about me?’ And I was looking at my Bible and had to answer, ‘I don’t know,’” he shared.

But he felt a compulsion, and he flipped ahead to Matthew.

“I started reading, and it just pulled the rug out from under me. I realized, ‘I don’t know you at all. I have all these preconceptions about who you are,’” he remembered praying.

Henry had read the Gospels before, but “had so many blinders up” that he “just couldn’t see” what was really there. In that moment, though, “Christ lifted all of those, and I read it for the first time. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I had no clue. This is not the person I thought was there at all.’ And the more I read, this conviction took hold. I realized, ‘This is it. You are it. There’s not another.’ It was so striking. All my life, I had been vacillating all over the place. For twenty-five years…I was seeking and bouncing around, but suddenly I realized, this is it.”

Shortly after that, while in a state of prayer and meditation, Henry experienced Christ calling him to discipleship.

“He just kind of walked up, and he said, ‘You need to follow me,’” Henry recalled.

Jerusalem to Rome 

For Henry, the conviction of Christ was immediately conviction in Catholicism.

“There was this utter conviction that the only way [to follow Christ] was through the Catholic Church. It never even crossed my mind that there was any other way,” he said, attributing the movement to grace.

Henry sat down with his non-religious wife to tell her, “I have to follow Christ, and I have to do it through the Catholic Church.” Sagely, she replied, “Well, there’s a Catholic Church right down the street, so you should probably go to Mass.”

And so he did, and he has been going for the last eight years.

“I think I could count on one hand the number of Masses I’ve missed,” he said.

Director of Religious Education

Now Henry works for the Church to help form adult faith formation and to accompany those entering the Church through the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA).

Reminiscing on his first encounters with Christian preachers and how turned off he was by much of what they said, Henry remarked, “It’s funny because now this is what I profess: Christ is Lord, he’s King, and he’s the One True Revelation of God.”

Now that Henry ministers to many people coming out of Buddhism, New Age and other traditions, he is able to speak with nuance in a way he would have benefited from when he was young. These seekers frequently ask, like he did, how all the beauty and truth they see in their old traditions could be entirely vacuous or wrong.

“What I tend to tell people is that God speaks to all people throughout all times, and to the extent that the revelation aligns with what Christ has given us, then it’s true,” he explained.

The Second Vatican Council put it this way, “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men" (Nostra Aetate, §2).

Henry’s goal when he meets those who are seeking, especially those who come from Buddhism, New Age or other traditions, is to find common ground and build bridges, and from that common ground, to show them how everything true in these other traditions is a reflection of the fullness of Truth, Jesus Christ.

Now, Henry’s continual desire is to bring people into communion with Jesus Christ in the Church that he founded, because, as he put it, “Catholicism is the faith of Christ.”