I was captivated by the eyes of this young girl who was up very early, helping set up shop at an outdoor market.

Buddhist prayer flags flutter from a satellite dish on a rooftop. Down the street, a distant figure bends in prayer, chanting a morning offering. A Hindu maid carries burning incense, allowing its fragrance to permeate the lobby of a hotel. These were just some of the sights and sounds and smells that I met with while stopping for a cup of coffee in Kathmandu, Nepal, on a recent photo journey there.

These dancers were participants in a talent show at a school in Kathmandu.

I was half a world away from my home in Kentucky. Christianity seemed to be a figment of my imagination. The familiar shape of churches was replaced by Hindu and Buddhist temples. Sacred cows wandered the streets. Small shrines and statues of deities adorned street corners and houses and businesses. Religion is not a fraction of the Nepalese week; it permeates the culture. The importance of faith in this culture is reflected in the Nepalese greeting, namaste, literally, "I salute the god in you."

The two boys were at a Hindu site where goats were brought to be killed in a ritually proper way (note horns above the column) and then taken home to be cooked.

When Nepalese call their country a "yam between two boulders," they are referring to its situation right between India and China. Suffocating in the shadows of these giants, Nepal opened its borders to the outside world in the early 1950s. The first Jesuits to Nepal, invited by the king to educate but not proselytize, founded St. Xavier School in Kathmandu and plunged into a culture radically different from their own. My trip brought me in contact with four of the Jesuits who work in the country.

This young boy was a participant in a talent show at a school in Kathmandu.

"Inculturation is part of life for me," says Fr. Bill Robbins, SJ, a Canadian who came in 1977 to teach. "Here the society is Hindu. I'm not sure how much I mix with that, though I certainly accept it. I enjoy my faith and enjoy what I like of the religions and practices around me. I've learned not to measure people by creeds and talk but by action. The compassion in people is a strong lesson for me."

He dedicates the majority of his time to working at the Freedom Center, a drug rehab facility founded by Fr. Tom Gafney, SJ, murdered in 1997, reputedly by drug dealers. Robbins remembers that after the initial shock of hearing of the murder, his next response was why bother? "And that feeling is hard to get rid of. But you don't face injustice by running, so we're still here!"

	[Left] Fr. Cap Miller, a U.S. Jesuit who teaches at St. Xavier School in Kathmandu, chats with a Xavier student taking a break from a cricket match held at the school on a holiday. Fr. Miller is wearing a topi, the traditional Nepalese hat.
	[Right] It is common in Kathmandu to see Hindu holy men posing outside a temple and accepting a few rupees from those who take pictures.

Frs. John Locke, Cap Miller, and Charles Law are Jesuits who journeyed to Nepal from the United States back in 1958 to begin careers as educators, teaching and administering at the Jesuit schools and college in the country. Having lived and worked for most of their lives in Nepal, having earned degrees from the country's Tribhuvan University, having become citizens more than twenty years ago, they are immersed in the culture.

This woman waits for her serving of dahl bhat, a traditional dish of rice and lentils, at a home for the elderly run by Mother Theresa's Sisters of Charity. Her glum expression was not typical of the home's other residents, who seemed pretty happy.

"The heart of inculturation is learning the language," says Locke. "A lot of external things you can do like eating the food or wearing local dress is superficial." Locke thinks that as you learn the language you learn the way people face life, their world view, how they handle problems, what their values and thought processes are. Learning the language makes you not only adjust to but also sometimes adopt aspects of the culture.

Recognized internationally for his scholarly work on Buddhism, Locke admits his own faith has been profoundly affected by this Eastern way of thought: "After all, whenever I find goodness, peace, harmony, and virtue, I recognize it as the fruit of the Spirit, whom I experience as the Spirit of Christ. Because one religion is true doesn't mean the others are false," Locke continues. "We are dealing with the infinite. We have grasped some aspects, and others have grasped different aspects. What comes from all of this is a broadening of horizons and tolerance."

This Buddhist monk was recovering from a rough journey over the Himalayas; he had fled Tibet the week before because of religious persecution.

Portraits of the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, and Christ adorn the St. Xavier School office of scientist and Jesuit Fr. Cap Miller, with whom I also had the chance to talk. He is attracted by Buddhist meditation and reads daily excerpts from Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu holy book. His own book, Faith Healers in the Himalaya, is an anthropological study of shamanism in Nepal.

Lastly I visited with Fr. Charles Law, SJ, who wears a topi, the traditional Nepali hat, along with his Roman collar. Fr. Law showed me some books he wrote for high school students on the problems of prostitution, child labor, discrimination, and drug addiction. Another major concern of his are the woman of Nepal, about 80 percent of them illiterate, and the children, of whom 50 percent are malnourished.

I followed this woman with a child on her back on a trek up literally hundreds of stairs to a Buddhist temple on top of a hill. The sunlight filtering through prayer flags and early-morning fog and the music and chanting of temple monks combined in a surreal way.	Cows, considered sacred in this society, have the right of way. This one wanders a market, looking for cast-offs, including radish greens and vegetables, from the previous day's market.

The tika, the splash of color high on the forehead of this woman, is a Hindu mark of spirituality.

These Jesuits live in a complex land of extremes, from the awe-inspiring heights of Mt. Everest to its poverty-stricken lowlands. Dedicated to the Ignatian philosophy of men and women for others, they work in the trenches of the Third World.

Back home in Kentucky, I found my spirituality grounded in the weather-worn hills of the Licking River Valley. Soothed by the traditions of my farming heritage, I harvested hay with my daughters and tried to tell them of things that I learned in Nepal. Spinning yarns of my adventure I wove threads of Nepali culture into the fabric of our life with relative ease: I loosely compared our Ash Wednesday smudge on the brow to the tika with which a Hindu holy man anointed my forehead. The tika is a dot of red and yellow paste, the red wishing good fortune to the bearer and the yellow honoring one's ancestors.

My daughters urged me to stack the bales of hay in the loft into a camp that they christened Fort Kathmandu. Below, in the stable, they cheered as they blessed each of our horses with a lipstick tika.

Xavier University photographer Gregory Rust journeyed to Nepal and captured stunning images of a very spiritual culture.