Perhaps more than anything else, my life is and has been characterized by a strong spiritual and religious life. Since I was very young, I was deeply spiritual and that has manifested in a long and meandering path. I began with evangelical Christianity that I embraced in my youth. In my twenties, I resolved to study Catholic Christianity from its own voice and ended up joining the Catholic Church in 2007. I stayed there for about 12 years and I dug deeply into it during that time. I studied the philosophy, theology, history, apologetics, practice, culture, and community of this new path fully. There came a point where it began to fall apart though. I went through a very difficult deconstruction of my belief system and wrote about that in the book, "Way of Fear, Way of Love." This book details the process of finding that the story didn't hold up and the scrutiny that I had to go through to see it freshly. I was deeply immersed in Evangelical and Catholic apologetics so this story is about facing those arguments and seeing what still seemed to work and what fell apart. This book would be most interesting to Christians who have focused on apologetics and who are starting to see the cracks in the story.

 

It seems that whenever I go through these major spiritual changes in my life, I end up doing some kind of work of art or writing about it. My college graduate artwork reflects my thinking at the time which was deeply connected to my evangelical faith. When I was Catholic, I created a book that I wrote and illustrated. This book is called A Small and Shallow Place. It is a simple poem that spans the story of the Bible and that has accompanying illustrations. I still see this book as meaningful. I see it as a reflection of the core of Christianity that came from a Catholic lens. There is still a beauty of this core idea that I hold to though I have moved to a different path.

 

After my deconstruction, I decided on a new path that I call the Enlightenment Tourist. I took it on as a goal to learn as many religions as possible in the time I have in this world. My path is not simply to study though. It is to embody and live the life of a different spiritual community. I have set on the path to convert, as truly as possible to as many religious paths as possible. I hope to connect with new people, to see how they think and understand spiritual paths. I hope to remove my judgments and misconceptions. I hope to show others who find themselves in no-man's land that there are other paths that are psychologically healthy. I see this process as a lot like learning a new language. It can be fun for a while but it is also daunting. So much early on feels so foreign and different and it is tempting to return to the comfort of what we knew. It takes work and time to learn to think in a new way. It's very much like learning to think in a new language. But once you do, you find that we are mostly talking about the same thing.

 

As I have set purposefully on this path, the first stop I chose on this spiritual Tour de Monde became druidry. There are many reasons that this path opened up and there is a lot to say about that as I continue to write these stories. But for now, the work that has come from this is called Raven in the Glade. This is a book that I did that culminated my studies through art, poetry, and reflections. It is also a story about a land that I love that I call the Glade. It is a space near me that has been profoundly healing. My story of healing and growth is inextricably tied to this land. The art in this reflects my love for this space. The work presented here is the first part of this body of work that I have set forth on.​