 For penance, he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation.This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which would inform Kerouac's work.Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for "The Paris Review", of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York.