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I’m delighted for this opportunity to speak via video to the Spiritual Directors International, and especially delighted to be on the program even this way with my good friends Krista Tippett, and Karen Ehrlichman, and Valerie Brown. Also delighted to have a chance to say a little bit about my relation to Thomas Merton, my relation to Spiritual Direction, and the journey that’s brought me to the place where I have this chance to speak with all of you. I was raised in the mainline Protestant tradition, specifically in the Methodist Church. I studied religion in college. I went to Union Theological Seminary in New York for a year, and did a PhD at Berkeley in the Sociology of Religion. The only reason I'm rehearsing that academic background, I'm actually a recovering sociologist, so none of that counts anymore, is to say that despite all of those stops in the religious world that I made early in my journey, I learned nothing along that way about the mystical contemplative stream that I later learned runs through all the great religions of the world. Nothing at all. Looking back, it's kind of astonishing to me that that was the case. 1