I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. My father taught plumbing and my mother was a housewife. My brother, Jim, was born when I was seven and together we grew up in the warm embrace of a large extended Irish-Catholic family. I attended a Catholic school and as an altar boy spent time around the priests and nuns. It was therefore quite natural for me to leave home when I was thirteen to enter a prep seminary in a Chicago suburb. I became a Servite, a religious order founded in late medieval Italy. We weren't exactly monks, because we prepared for an active life of teaching and ministry, but we were monks in that we meditated, chanted Divine Office, and lived the vow of poverty — we had everything in common.
In the seminary, I discovered I had some musical talent and a passion to compose. At nineteen, I took the Queen Mary to Ireland where I studied philosophy for two years. I returned to the Chicago area and spent a year focused on my musical studies. It was the days of the Viet Nam war, the Second Vatican Council, and flower children. I felt deep changes taking place inside me, and shortly before I was to be ordained a priest, I left the order.
I tried to become a musician, but my interests in religion and philosophy got in the way. Eventually I got a Master's degree in theology from the University of Windsor in Canada. Then I went to Syracuse University for a Ph.D. in religion. There, blending religion, psychology, and the arts, I received exactly the education I needed. I taught psychology for a year at Glassboro State College and then took a position in the religion department of Southern Methodist University.
I've always been a maverick teacher and I couldn't force myself to write in proper academic style, and so after seven years, I was denied tenure. By then, people were asking me to be their psychotherapist -- I had done some training at Syracuse -- and I carried on a private practice from 1976 to 1992. In Dallas, I became involved with The Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, which offered me a kind of post-graduate experience of teaching and study. James Hillman, Patricia Berry, Robert Sardello, Gail Thomas, Ivan Illich, and Rafael Lopez-Pedraza regularly spoke and taught there. I gave seminars on archetypal psychology and mythology.
In 1985, I left Texas and tried to find work in New England. Doors closed everywhere, and so I continued in private practice. I taught part-time at Lesley College in Cambridge, and I became an itinerant teacher in many small New England towns. In 1992, Care of the Soul was published and I was able to support a family and live the life of an independent writer. I loved writing, and in the next decade, I published many more books, tapes, CDs, and videos. In the academic year of 2000-01, our family lived in Ireland, where my wife, Joan Hanley, did some remarkable projects in the form of public art, and I did some background investigations for a book which is yet to be written on Irish spirituality.
I have a daughter, Siobhan, fourteen years old, who has musical talent and a fiery personality. Abraham, seventeen, is a talented artist, very adaptable and calm. The children have been in a Waldorf school all these years and grew up in the countryside of New Hampshire.
