By: Jay Sorgi
There are many ways to enter the Catholic faith, many avenues to His kingdom.
Soham More, a CEO of a Bay Area health care small business, has used a road to Emmaus that is much-less traveled than the norm to reach his journey to Jesus and full entry into the Catholic Church.
“Everybody is different. The way I was wired, the way God created me, it seems like the intellectual side attracts me first, where if I understand something, it allows me to go deeper and deeper,” said More, who is entering the Catholic Church at Easter at St. John the Baptist Parish in El Cerrito.
“Especially if it’s something that I don’t fully understand yet, I just get that natural curiosity to go deeper.
He said his journey, which began in a culturally Hindu family, accelerated while attending college at the University of California at San Diego.
“I was very into spiritual literature,” he said. “I remember distinctly in college being very interested in learning more about … the concepts that we talk about every week at Mass and we talk about while going through the [Order of Christian Initiation of Adults] OCIA program.”
Six years of post-college journeying happened as he rose to a top leadership role in his business, but times of suffering also helped him see that temporal things don’t bring joy, but spiritual awareness does.
“No matter how successful you are, how many material objects you have or don’t have, there’ll come a point where you realize that true happiness does not reside in anything earthly and worldly. And then it begins the quest for figuring out where that true happiness is residing,” More said.
“There were a few years where the company was struggling. On top of that, I had a lot of personal life issues, whether it’s family members that were sick or family members who lost jobs, and wondering how we were going to support the family. Suffering is what really started the foray into, or is what really exacerbated the foray into, spirituality. Through that suffering, I was able to find peace through grace, through the Lord.”
More’s OCIA journey has taken him two years to complete, as he saw his 2024-25 journey as a year of deeper, intellectual exploration of truths in how God impacts us all every moment.
“Even from a very basic perspective, we don’t control who we’re born to. We don’t control where we’re born, and we don’t control that early foundational element of our lives. Even as you go deeper than that into your day-to-day issues, there’s so many things that have been set in place,” he said.
“It feels like sometimes you’re a leaf in the wind and the direction of the wind is completely outside of your control, but you just keep floating along, and that’s been the real growth I’ve experienced through OCIA. It’s seeing how much God is involved in our lives that most people don’t have a day-to-day understanding of.”
As More further discovered, it was one thing to know these truths about God’s presence, but it’s a whole other level when those truths reach the heart.
“I get that all of that has been constructed by God, but it’s experiencing that with your heart,” he said.
“I think that’s where OCIA has made the biggest difference for me, where that repeated interaction, those weekly meetings and the constant learning has really helped transform it from an intellectual understanding to something you feel.”
More said that much of that learning has stemmed from his exploration of the Bible and how its lessons deeply resonate today in the modern world.
“A\ll of it comes around the same idea that what we are experiencing has been experienced for generations. Modernity has changed the way we experience that, but the core of what we experience is still there. The core of suffering, the core of anxiety, the core of ego is all still there,” he said.
“Having those discussions weekly with my mentor and godfather Thomas Fleming, along with our OCIA class, and just hearing other people’s experiences and how they reflect on the Scripture and how they take it personally in their lives, I think that truly has opened up the door for me.
More is walking through that door this year, becoming fully entered into the Catholic Church this Easter,
“This is one of the few organized religions that not only teach you about spirituality, but there’s a level of devotion and formality inscribed, whether it’s daily, weekly Sunday Mass, whether it’s the yearly Lent season and fasting,” he said. “I really appreciate the level of detail and formality and helping us strategically as servants of God to reach that final point.”
That point in the Holy Saturday Easter Vigil Mass becomes a meeting with the Body and Blood of Jesus, a moment of the kind of awe and reverence he might not have understood before, but one that will transform his life.
“A state of devotion,” he said.
“I’m not here to get anything in return. I’m just here to feel the love of being around (Him). Hopefully that love allows me to express that in the rest of my life.”