Julian of Norwich, the celebrated 14th century mystic, theologian and saint is the center of my spiritual and theological life. Julian's Revelations of Divine Love record her experience of a God of unconditional love and maternal compassion, a God of unlimited goodness who cares for us, as Julian says, 'at the lowest level of our need.' Although I have loved other mystics and theologians, particularly St. John of the Cross, and the lesser-known Bl. John Ruusbroec, Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love is my spiritual home. My life-long journey with her has been an education into the mystery of divine love — how God invites, challenges, and heals.
I first learned about Julian as a young monastic in The Order of Julian of Norwich, an order of monks and nuns leading a contemplative life in the Episcopal Church. For the first 20 years of my adult life, I journeyed into Julian’s Revelations in the context of a rigorous and encouraging monastic life in which I had the freedom to explore the whole of the western spiritual tradition with forays into other traditions as well. I gained a lot then, and still do, from my explorations in Buddhism. This monastic journey was an incredible blessing of my life: the combination of manual work, spiritual and theological study, and community life, all aimed at growing in humility and a capacity for love has shaped me forever. What made Julian an amazing companion for my monastic journey was her witness to her experience of a God, and her descriptions of the process by which she came to terms with just how unconditionally God loves us. I was ordained to the priesthood in the monastery in 1997.
When I left the Order at 40 years old, after a prolonged and extremely difficult discernment, I pursued a qualification in therapeutic counseling, my intention being to take my contemplative charism and my belief in God’s love into the secular context of a counseling room, to offer a witness to that love, not by talking about it, but by embodying a glimmer of it for others. My hope was that this itself would be therapeutic. I studied in the person-centered tradition in Norwich, England, under Brian Thorne, who himself had studied directly with Carl Rogers, the great humanist counsellor who created the ‘person-centered’ approach to therapy.
Soon after I left the monastery and embarked on this training in counseling, I realized that a long friendship I had had with a brilliant academic and contemplative soul could perhaps blossom into something more. After a short courtship Jane I were married. She was a professor at Cambridge, UK, while I studied counseling in Norwich, and we enjoyed the immense richness of living in a medieval city, with the Julian of Norwich Shrine, where Julian had actually lived 600 years ago, just a mile down King Street! The Cathedral was a block from where we lived, and a pub thought to have been in business since the 13th century was just down the road. While in England we had two children, Corinne and Sebastian. I worked as a counsellor in Norwich, and also at the Julian Center, next to the Shrine, and at the parish church of St. Peter Mancroft, in central Norwich.
In 2015 we moved back to the United States, to Chapel Hill, where Jane took up a post in the Economics Department at The University of North Carolina, and I took care of the children while finishing a book on Julian.
From May 2016 I relished the gift of being able to minister with the people of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Raleigh as an associate rector with special responsibility for adult spiritual formation, overseeing our outreach and young adult ministry. This was an amazing exploration and experience of ministry in an Episcopalian parish, learning the ropes of parish life, but bringing my life-long concern with growing in God’s love to a parish community.
In 2019 I accepted a call to become the rector of an amazing parish, St. Matthew’s in Hillsborough NC. God led me to this place, and what a joy it has been to explore a new for my family in Hillsborough and a new ministry in this joyous, big-hearted, dynamic place.
What lies ahead? I dream of founding a center for spiritual direction and small group facilitation training. I dream of a school for excellence in preaching in North Carolina.
