Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician, once observed that “there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man that cannot be filled by any created thing but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
Pascal would have loved meeting Hui Lui.
Hui Lui (pronounced Hoy Lee-oo), a young man born in a country where the free exercise of any religion is (and has been for years) proscribed, found himself in possession of that very same divinely shaped vacuum in his own heart and was driven to fill it, taking a route that could have been mapped out only by a power greater than anyone could contradict.
From the Clutches of Communism
Hui was born in the Chinese megalopolis of Shanghai, the only child (due to China’s one-child policy) of loving parents, who worked in the city as laborers. With all of the rapprochement that has taken place between the United States and China over the past several decades, it is sometimes forgotten in the West that China remains a totalitarian regime that micromanages every aspect of its peoples’ lives.
For Hui, what he was supposed to do and what he was supposed to believe were constantly made clear to him. There was no benign view of religion or religious practice in the childhood he experienced in China but only an abject assault on the very concept of religion. “We were taught from an early age that all religions were just the result of superstitions and were not worthy of respect.” Hui knew nothing other than the godless, materialist worldview that was promulgated by the Communist rulers of China.
From his youth, Hui received such a steady diet of this ideology that by the time he was a young adult he thought he knew what really mattered. For Hui, faithful member of the Chinese state and card-carrying agnostic, what mattered was acquiring the education necessary to become a man of business and stoke the furnace of the Chinese economic colossus. He was well on his way down that road, having completed a second year of economics studies at the prestigious University of Shanghai, when he began to feel a pull to the West.
To prosper in the global economy meant understanding the West, and the best way to do that, thought Hui, was to get a Western-style education. But America was full of colleges and universities, all promising to deliver the mandatory bona fides to prospective captains of industry, so he refined his search by surfing the web. From his laptop computer in Shanghai, he found a small, Catholic college in Santa Paula, California.
Campus Communist
Thomas Aquinas College was unlike any other school Hui had researched. It was small—fewer than 400 students. It offered only one degree: a bachelor of arts in liberal arts. It did not employ textbooks but instead relied on the primary sources and writings of such Western luminaries as Aristotle, Virgil, and the college’s patron, St. Thomas Aquinas. What particularly intrigued Hui was the conviction the college held that the truth could be known—a quality that set it apart from so many of the other Western schools Hui had been investigating.
The challenge of jumping head first into the deep end of the Western civilization pool was too compelling for Hui to resist. A few months after his initial electronic contact, Hui—Chinese agnostic, servant of the state, native of a city of close to twenty million people—enrolled at a tiny college dedicated to the thought of the Angelic Doctor of the Catholic Church in a town of around 30,000 people.
Naturally, since classes at this Catholic college were conducted in English, one would expect that Hui would need to brush up on the English he had learned as a student in Shanghai. But at TAC, the need was even more urgent. Here, professors were not going to lecture from a podium as they had in Shanghai. Instead, Hui and his classmates would be responsible for working together to lay out the arguments and conclusions of the great authors they were studying and then go on, in true dialogue fashion, to discuss those positions and determine whether they are true.
Clearly, the location, mode, and subject matter of Hui’s college experience stood in marked contrast to all he had known in Shanghai. But beyond even these differences was this: In addition to studying the writings of such Western notables as Euclid, Herodotus, Virgil and Aristotle, he was given a Bible for the first time in his life. As a freshman, he read it from cover to cover, and while he read the Word of God and studied some of its most eloquent defenders, such as St. Augustine and St. Pius X, the God-sized hole in Hui’s heart began to fill up. There was no bolt of lightning—yet—but Hui was now most definitely on a new road.
Hui immersed himself in the rigorous classes in mathematics, science, logic, and grammar that he found at TAC. At the same time, he deferred thoughts about God, which nevertheless kept creeping into his mind and heart. The bigger, harder questions about God and his personal role in the lives of men could wait for later—or so Hui thought.
Everything for a Purpose
Besides being the only agnostic communist on the Catholic college’s campus, Hui had another claim to fame, or infamy. His driving skills were less than stellar, and he was involved in a number of vehicular mishaps. But other than the dents to both Hui’s car and his ego, no one was the worse for the wear. The most notorious incident involved Hui’s attempt to navigate his way back to the campus after a day of selling knives door to door. His defective sense of direction and questionable driving skills conspired against him once again and caused him to veer off the road, break through a fence, and come to rest at the bottom of a backyard swimming pool. One can only imagine the looks on the homeowners’ faces as they watched a late-model economy car do a belly flop into their pool and then see a Chinese communist emerge holding a knife in his hand. Eventually, the car was raised, the pool owners were assured that the incident was not part of a greater communist plot, and Hui’s exploits were entered into legend at TAC.
He would have more close calls. After one particularly harrowing experience, he narrowly avoided getting hit by a tractor trailer rig only to be emotionally hit head on. Upon returning to school, he was told the devastating news. “I came back to school and heard that Dan Fleury died. A truck had hit him.” Fleury was a classmate and close friend of Hui who had converted to the Catholic faith in his junior year, and Hui had attended the Easter Vigil Mass at which Fleury was baptized into the Church. “Dan’s death was a strike to my heart.” he recalls. “It shouldn’t have taken me so long to realize that everything has a purpose, even Dan’s death. In our freshman year we all read, even in science, that everything is made for a purpose; even the physicist says that the reason this or that organism does what it does is because it’s designed for some purpose.”
The unexpected death of his friend caused Hui to halt, pause, and make several detours on his own road to Damascus. He began investigating other religions, looking for the answer to why he—the horrible driver with all the funny stories of near disasters—was alive, but his friend, Dan Fleury, was taken in the blink of an eye. “I call this period of my life the dark night of the soul.” Hui explains. The death of his friend made him dig deep, trying to retrieve some kind of meaning from the suffering he felt.
He was stuck on suffering, not able to process the hows and whys of his friend’s untimely death. One day, while still in the depths of his dark night, he attended Mass at the urging of some of his TAC classmates. “It was then and there that I realized that one thing is for sure: You can always count on some kind of suffering or confusion or pain waiting for you down the road. Then I saw the crucifix behind the altar. I felt goose bumps—or something—all up and down my body. We all read in the Bible that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and he knew what he was going to do. He knew that his life was going to be about suffering, confusion, rejection, and pain. I understood then that we all participate in Christ’s suffering. I could feel the light of Jesus throughout my body. It was a physical as well as a spiritual sensation.”
Hui went to the chaplains at TAC and told them of his experience at the Mass. He wanted to be baptized right away, but upon the counsel of the chaplains, he waited, if impatiently, as he was further catechized. He was at last baptized and received into the Catholic Church during his junior year at TAC. After graduation, Hui became the director of religious education at a large parish in northern California.
Not a bad destination for someone who originally started out on the road to serve a godless mega-state. But it turns out that this was not Hui’s final destination. In 2004, he began testing a vocation to the priesthood as a seminarian at the St. Isaac Jogues Novitiate House at the Institute of the Incarnate Word in Cheverly, Maryland. In October 2005, he made his first profession in the priestly Order of the Incarnate Word.
The Christian name Hui has taken? What else? Paul.