
This guy has a pretty fascinating life story. Excerpts below, but worth hitting the link for the whole article.
Mr. Habib, 38, interrupts what had been a rapid political assent, from his election as a state representative in 2012, an election to state senator in 2014 and finally to lieutenant governor in 2016. Born to Iranian immigrants in Maryland, he is the first and only Iranian-American to hold statewide elected office. Mr. Habib is also a three-time cancer survivor and has been blind since the age of 8.
Mr. Habib is stepping away from his political life to join the Catholic Church’s largest religious order. Founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1540, today the Jesuits total about 16,000 members, though, like most religious orders in the church, the society’s numbers have been declining both in North America and around the world in recent decades.
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“For the last few years, I’ve come to know Cyrus Habib and have witnessed his deep desire to know Christ and to serve him as a Jesuit priest,” Christopher Nguyen, S.J., vocations director for the Jesuits West province, said in a statement to America. “Cyrus has gone through many challenges in his life, which have brought him closer to Christ. I know he will use his blindness and battles with cancer as a means to minister to others who suffer in the world.”
Raised by what he calls “generically—but seriously—monotheistic” parents, Mr. Habib converted to Catholicism at the age of 25 while studying at the University of Oxford, after meeting Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., and the other Dominicans at Blackfriars Hall. (His mother, Susan Amini, who is a product of Catholic education in Tehran and is now a King County Superior Court Judge, would later also convert to Catholicism.)
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Frustrated by his prayer life in the face of personal crisis, he went to his spiritual mentor, the longtime pastor of Seattle’s St. James Cathedral, the Rev. Michael G. Ryan, who handed him James Martin, S.J.’s The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, which introduced Mr. Habib to the Jesuit charism in a deeper way.
Mr. Habib did not seriously consider a vocation, however, until his father passed away in 2016, just a few weeks before he was elected lieutenant governor.
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...Mr. Habib has decided to abandon further political accomplishment in exchange for vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “I have done the work of discerning that [the political life is] not the path to happiness for me…. I could become [U.S.] secretary of state and there would still be this thing in me that I would try to fill with accolades and titles and media,” Mr. Habib said. “There would be this hunger, this thirst, this thing that would be unquenched.”
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