From Buddha to Christ
by Al Sandner
MOSAIC, Winter 2010

  
The story of Fr. Hoang Lam reads like the script for a post-Vietnam War movie. He was a Buddhist, a veteran of the Communist North Vietnamese army, who flees Saigon (as he still calls it) with sixteen members of his extended family and makes a new life in Metro Detroit. However, there were major script revisions.

A quick airplane flight to Detroit replaced a perilous flight in a rickety boat on the pirate-infested South China Sea. The family (three Christians and fourteen followers of the Buddha) was welcomed by Fr. Vincent Nguyen and the faith community of Guardian Angels Parish in Clawson. The escape, it turned out, was narrower than they realized. Soon after their arrival in the U.S., the Vietnamese government outlawed such family departures. God's protecting hand? The young Buddhist thought so. Fr. Hoang Lam still does.

Hoang's oldest sister, Thoa-who helped rear him as a "second mother"-had been stricken with pneumonia as a young girl. She was treated by a French doctor, Dr. Longet, and Thoa became the doctor's spiritual protégé. She was baptized before Hoang's birth and told him about her faith as he grew up.

Although Hoang's parents were prayerful Buddhists ("I could hear my father praying in his room every night, and could smell the incense."), Thoa's gentle ministrations led Hoang to see the hand of God in many of the things happening in his life-particularly in the harsh, unforgiving regimen of a Vietnamese soldier/laborer.

With the sponsorship of an older brother who fled to the United States at the fall of Saigon in 1975, the family (including spouses, nieces and nephews and twenty-six-year old Hoang) arrived at Guardian Angels Parish in 1990. Three years later, Hoang and his mother, Hat Diep, were baptized. Other family members, including in-laws, were gradually drawn into the faith, but the father . . . well, Hoang continued to hear the prayers and smell the incense."

As he contemplated God's blessings, Hoang began to ask Father Nguyen about what he might do in gratitude. Father told him to pray and to proceed with his life, education and career path. Hoang received his degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and started a career with a large auto supply firm..

Then he surprised Father Nguyen by declaring-much sooner than the priest had expected-"I want to go to the seminary." He entered Sacred Heart in 1999.

Now came the hard part. From Buddha to Plato to Socrates to Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas was a logical and interesting progression. The peace-seeking meditation of the Buddhists was an enlightening contrast to the joyful Christ centered meditation he learned at Sacred Heart. But through it all, he struggled with the obstacle of language.

"I prayed for seven years for my studies," he recalls. Prayer and hard work brought Hoang to ordination in 2006, when he was sent right back to Guardian Angels-but not to minister to the Vietnamese. Father Nguyen and the Vietnamese community had moved, meanwhile, and established Our Lady of Grace Vietnamese Parish in Eastpointe. Guardian Angels remembered the young priest, welcomed him back and accepted him into the community.

But one major family issue remained. His father, Duong Lam, could be heard praying to Our Lady for his Christian family and to Buddha for the others. Finally, Hoang relates, during a serious illness, "My father said to me, 'Baptize me.'" Duong Lam was baptized, took the name Joseph and received all the sacraments on what was to have been his deathbed. Joseph Duong Lam rallied for several months and, after years of kindly rejections, asked his daughter, "Tell me about Jesus."

Six out of ten siblings are now Catholic. Four of Father Hoang's brothers remain Buddhist-but some of their children have been baptized.