My Journey
Where My Story Began.
I'm a husband, father, grandfather, trail runner, and consumer attorney. I grew up in a conservative Catholic family, attended CCD, and attended Mass every Sunday. My wife and I raised our 3 children in the Catholic Church. They attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college. My wife was a teacher at our
parish Catholic school. We were fully involved in our Catholic parish on every level.
In 2013 I became an ordained Catholic deacon. I served as the deacon at our parish, prepared families for baptism, preached homilies at Sunday Mass, presided at baptisms, funerals and weddings, and devoted myself fully to a tradition I thought had all the answers and held all the truth.
But something shifted.
Questions on the trail.
The more I learned about the Church and the doctrine, the less it made sense.
During the many years of training and education in my diaconate formation, I’d spend my mornings running on the beautiful Temescal and Westridge trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, listening to great teachers like Richard Rohr, Brother Wayne Teasdale, Rob Bell, and Paul F. Knitter to name a few. On those beautiful morning runs, as my feet hit the earth and my breath found a quiet rhythm, many questions began to surface - questions that Catholic dogma couldn’t answer.
For example, I wondered why the Catholic Church taught me that I was born a sinner and the only way to change that was by doing what they told me to do. That made no sense.
The more I learned, the more questions I had about Catholic Church doctrine and the Catholic institution. I wondered why the institution took the beautiful message of Jesus - and made itself into one of the wealthiest and most controlling forces on the planet. With each mile I ran, the more I realized that much of what I had been told by the Catholic Church just didn’t add up.
Beyond One Tradition
During my time of transition I had the great fortune to join and later to become the president of the Interreligious Council of Southern California. For the first time in my life I was exposed to many beautiful people from so many different religious traditions which opened both my heart and my mind. I also studied Native and Indigenous Spirituality which gave me a whole new perspective on spirituality.
Things in my religious and spiritual life were shifting and the dogma of the Catholic Church no longer made sense.
In 2025 I began spiritual direction training at the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality (CNRS). The center offers a beautiful way to relate to the idea of a “God” without requiring belief, disbelief, or certainty. Instead of treating “God” as a boundary line that divides people into camps - theists, atheists, and agnostics - it treats “God” as just one possible symbol for the mystery; depth, and interconnectedness of existence. The CNRS is not anti-religion; it is a space for exploring spirituality beyond the frameworks, doctrines, and authority structures of traditional religion. I completed their training and am now a CNRS certified non-religious spiritual director.
My spiritual journey continues to this day. Every day I find my spiritual home in nature, on the trails, with my family, and especially in the faces of my five grandchildren. They are the future, and I hope to help each of them in their individual spiritual journeys, whatever that might look like.
