In a recent discussion about books with a friar, I was surprised to receive a recommendation of a book of poetry by a Hindu Bengali poet. Why would a Catholic friar be recommending a book by a Hindu author? But I know and trust this friar, so I got the book and began reading to see what it was all about.

What I experienced when I began to read was truly surprising. The first of the prose poems stunned me. The language and the metaphors flowed smoothly along the page and created images and impressions that entranced me. For example: “Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.”

Despite having been written by a Hindu poet, it sounded very monotheistic, extremely reverent, and expressed a deep understanding of God’s mysterious power and love in the world and the soul. That same kind of experience continued as I read the rest of the book. The name of the author is Rabindranath Tagore, and the title of the book is Gitanjali. This book won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

Why should I have been so surprised to find such deep and beautiful poetry from a Hindu? It is the same kind of surprise that I experience when I come across some deep philosophical or theological insight from someone who is not a Catholic or even a Christian. The questions that I am tempted to think are, “How could they get that right? How did they know that? They are not Catholic. How can they have ended up in the right room when they don’t have the full map of the mansion?”

But the fact is that even the mice can find the kitchen. If God is the creator of all things, if he has stamped his image on the human person and all beings derive their existence from his single act of existence, then of course, we should expect to find rays of his truth and goodness and beauty shining even in remote locations. When dinner is being prepared, the aroma spreads through the whole house, and those with properly tuned senses become expectant that their hunger will soon be satisfied.

The Church has always taught that “outside the Church there is no salvation” (CCC 846). When I was a Protestant, I was aware of this teaching and thought it conceited. But during the process of my conversion, as I was being attracted to the Catholic Church, I read the Catechism’s explanation of the meaning of that phrase. I understood more clearly what it meant that the light of the fullness of truth is located within the Church, but that light is not prevented from falling well beyond the boundaries of the Church.

Even though the sun is located at the center of the solar system, we who are 90 million miles away still benefit from its energy and light. Even though God has opened the spring of salvation at the center of the Church, floods, rivers, cataracts, brooks, streams and rivulets will find their way as far as the borderlands and into the sea, carrying with them the refreshment of their Source. Dispersed and thin as the far reaches may be, they are still the cause of all life in those regions because their headwaters are eternal life itself.

God has bound salvation to the Church, but God himself is not bound by the Church. The father of a family makes sure that his wife and children live under his protection and provision and want for nothing, but that does not prevent the father from showing or even showering his charity to those who are not his children.

C.S. Lewis pointed out that whatever was true in the monotheistic creed of the Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten, came to him in the same way that all truth comes to man: from God. Even the old myths contain glimpses of celestial strength and beauty, though they be falling on jungles of filth and imbecility, a point made, again, by Lewis.

And if all of the art in the world, whatever the culture, place or time, can be so intoxicating, how much more so will be the highest concentration? When I encounter truth, goodness and beauty somewhere outside of the Church, instead of being tempted to jealousy, I should rejoice at the prodigality of God who sends his rain and causes his sun to shine on the just and the unjust, and I should be moved to appreciate even more what I have found in the Church.