“A Chicken Enchilada Changed My Life”
It was, of course, what happened while I was eating the enchilada. On September 27, 1995 I was having lunch with my friend, Fr. Pete Turner, listening to him talk about a retreat he had recently attended. Over lunch, Pete described how retreat participants had experienced the daily pattern of a Benedictine monastery, and discussed ways of applying Benedictine spirituality to one's workaday life. As an outpatient Christian Therapist for Thomas Memorial Hospital, I recognized that the Rule of St. Benedict, originally written to guide the communal life of monastics, could be become the basis for a collaborative treatment program housed in a local church. The core values of Stability, Obedience, and Ongoing Conversion which undergird the Rule would create an ideal atmosphere for personal growth and healing.

Fr. Pete put me in touch with David Green, the rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Charleston, and together we developed the Eighth Day Life Center, an intense program of counseling and spiritual direction based on the Rule of Benedict. Over the next two years we led some seventy-five souls through an eight-day course of prayer and emotional healing. It was an experience that profoundly transformed my own spiritual life and ministry.

Growing up in the Methodist church nothing could have been farther off my radar screen than Benedictine monks. Like many teens of the 1970’s I rejected the church in favor of other avenues such as Yoga, meditation and drug use. Looking back now, I can see that there was an interest in contemplative spirituality, but that I wasn’t aware of any Christian expression of it at the time. So I spent my teen years searching, and finally through the influence of my wife and a philosophy course, had a dramatic Christian conversion at age 20. Completing my undergraduate psychology degree at Marshall in 1979, I went on to study counseling and theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, graduating with an MA in Counseling Psychology in 1985.

My professional career has taken me into many different types of treatment settings, including private practice, working with Cancer patients, inpatient psychiatric units, and for the last 14 years, outpatient Christian counseling. My family has also been very tolerant as I have searched through various Christian streams: Evangelical, Charismatic and Liturgical. The continuing thread has always been the quest for healing of head and heart.

In 2001, friends from Eighth Day introduced me to the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, an Anglican “Convergence” group blending together the Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Catholic traditions, challenging me to consider pursuing ordination as a priest. (The enchilada was leading very far afield indeed!) Through listening carefully, I “discerned the call” and was ordained to the priesthood in 2002. One further step led me back into the Benedictine sphere, but now with a new twist.

Fr. Mark Camp, a newly ordained member of our denomination, introduced me to a religious order called the Company of Jesus. All the members were “Third Order” types, living in the world and practicing their spirituality in the midst of their daily lives. Mark had become a Franciscan, but the Company of Jesus also had a Benedictine chapter. This appealed to me very much, and after another discernment process, I made my own profession as a Benedictine in July of 2002. Last year, I was elected Abbot of the Company of Jesus.

As Abbot, my job is to help new aspirants discern their calling to our Order, oversee the work of our Vocation Directors, and lead formation retreats. My email comes from all over the world, and I am constantly amazed and humbled to see how so many diverse kinds of people desire to commit themselves to a deeper level of Christian discipleship. I continue my work as a counselor and I believe my Benedictine walk has helped me to better understand my client’s spiritual development, and to enable them to relate their spirituality to the resolution of emotional and interpersonal problems.

The journey has been incredible, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of it, but I warn you:
Be careful of enchiladas;you never know where they will take you! I close with the collect of an abbot found in the Alternative Service Book of the Anglican Communion:

“Almighty God, by whose grace St. Benedict, kindled with the fire of your love, became a burning and a shining light in the church: inflame us with the same spirit of discipline and love, that we may walk before you as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen.