Marcel Bertels, at the Third Kopan Meditation Course, December, 1972. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.
“As a child, I had an enormous attraction to and curiosity about Christianity,” shares long-time student Marcel Bertels, “but as there was nothing and no one to nurture this curiosity, even in the Roman Catholic system of which I was part, it was gone by the time I was eight or nine years old. After that, I basically had no more space for anything to do with religion.”
However, Marcel later did find space for Buddhism.
“Lama Zopa Rinpoche was a huge shock to my system. I had never seen or met anyone who was so far beyond a normal human being. Rinpoche’s demeanor was always very stern and serious in those days, completely single-minded, like there was simply no time to joke, quite different from how we experience Rinpoche now…”
From Mandala January-March 2013