Start Here: My Story

How is not our part

“There are no accidents in salvation. Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship.” ACIM - M-1.6-7

Born in 1960, I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in rural Pennsylvania surrounded by a very large extended family of people who rarely moved away from that area. I went to a Catholic school from grades 1 through 6 and was madly in love with Jesus. Mass had gone from Latin to English and it was the age of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. Seven days a week I was an altar boy, then a lector (which meant that I read the gospel during Mass), and I played guitar for “folk Mass.” I was “all in” when it came to Jesus, and my bedroom was full of statues and altars and crucifixes. But only about 8 of us in our huge family were Catholic or even particularly religious or spiritual except for Sunday mornings. The little town where I grew up had a bar and a church on every corner.

As a “sissy” gay, neurodivergent kid who loved reading, I was quite weird and a target for bullying. My parents were older – my mother already had grown children. In fact, my nephew and I graduated from high school together. My mother suffered from depression and could get violent, and my father suffered from alcoholism which caused many financial problems as he had trouble keeping a job. I remember our furniture being repossessed and having to change our phone number to hide from creditors. This and so many other factors had me living in extreme anxiety most of the time after an episode of breaking out in hives from head-to-toe, my doctor told my parents that this was “all in his head” – meaning anxiety, though no one really used that term at the time. After that, my mother gave me a book called “the Hypnosis Handbook” so that I could learn to go into trance and calm myself. I realize now that it was a book full of what we now call affirmations. I couldn’t know it at the time but in retrospect everything was continually coming together in a wild orchestration to prepare me for all the people and things to come.

Like many people of my generation, I was raised by TV and I so wanted to be like those TV families living in sunny California – the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family and so many more. And by the time I was turning 23 and had had a small “nervous breakdown” at home, I was desperate to get out of Pennsylvania. Just in the nick of time, a girl I had worked at a department store with invited me to be her roommate in San Diego where she had moved the previous year! And though I had no money and no car, off I went, praising Jesus and shaking in my shoes every step of the way.

The first 3 months in San Diego were exciting but because I had no car it was very difficult getting around and this also made it hard to get a job. I sank into a pretty major depression, and my old friend anxiety was living with me 24/7. Then, one Sunday morning as I was channel-surfing TV ministries, I “stumbled” on Rev. Terry Cole-Whitakker’s TV ministry. And though I thought she was a “slick saleswoman and a false prophet leading people to hell,” I watched her show every week and found myself resonating with her teachings more and more – something in me was starting to shift.

Her actual ministry was right there in San Diego. One day while sitting at the pool in our complex, as I was reading “Out On a Limb” by Shirley Maclaine, another resident (a gay guy) started chatting me up about the book which he had also read. We talked about the spiritual topics in the book and it turned out that he had been to Terry’s church and he invited me to go with him the next Sunday! I had been too anxious and afraid to go on my own, so this was yet another answer to prayer.

“The simplest level of teaching appears to be quite superficial. It consists of what seem to be very casual encounters; a “chance” meeting of two apparent strangers in an elevator, a child who is not looking where he is going running into an adult “by chance,” two students “happening” to walk home together. These are not chance encounters. Each of them has the potential for becoming a teaching-learning situation. Perhaps the seeming strangers in the elevator will smile to one another; perhaps the adult will not scold the child for bumping into him; perhaps the students will become friends. Even at the level of the most casual encounter, it is possible for two people to lose sight of separate interests, if only for a moment. That moment will be enough. Salvation has come.”
ACIM - M-3.2:1-8

From the moment I walked into Terry’s church that first Sunday morning there was no turning back. It rang every bell in me, and I threw myself into it all with wild abandon. I was going to Sunday and Wednesday services, volunteering on the prayer lines on Monday nights, buying the tapes and books, and in January of 1984 I started taking a 10-week live class with Terry on Saturday mornings. There were 800 people in that class every week and one couple flew in from Alaska ever week to attend!

FYI Note: I came out as gay in 1983 to my family and everyone. My ENTIRE career since then has been as an “out” gay man. I talked about it in lectures, classes, books, on my public access show - everywhere. It’s never been hidden or a secret from day one.

At that time, Terry was teaching from the Course quite a bit and part of our homework for those 10 week was to do a Course workbook lesson every day. I immediately loved the Course, and it only continued my love affair with Jesus, only now without all the guilt and shame. The Course was changing my relationship with Jesus and with myself and the world. I didn’t yet know that I had signed-up for an accelerated graduate-level degree in SURRENDERING because just a year later I found myself moving to West Hollywood to follow my “dream” of becoming an actor. I landed here just as the first huge wave of AIDS hit and nobody was prepared for the level of disaster that was about to rain down on us all.

My first month here I met a well-known makeup artist and photographer who took me on a date to see a woman named Marianne Williamson who lectured on the Course and was having a special event at a theater in Beverly Hills. Oh my, she talked SO FAST I could hardly keep up with what she was saying, but it all came like some divine download and I was fascinated. At the time I was taking classes at a local Church of Religious Science and was attending a Friday night Course in Miracles study group as well. Soon I would be attending Marianne’s Saturday morning and Tuesday night lectures on the Course as well as her small Sunday afternoon prayer group and I would see her for counseling from time to time. On some Wednesdays I would go to Louise Hay’s “Hay Ride.”

“First, they must go through what might be called “a period of undoing.” This need not be painful, but it usually is so experienced. It seems as if things are being taken away, and it is rarely understood initially that their lack of value is merely being recognized. How can lack of value be perceived unless the perceiver is in a position where he must see things in a different light? ⁵He is not yet at a point at which he can make the shift entirely internally. And so the plan will sometimes call for changes in what seem to be external circumstances. These changes are always helpful. When the teacher of God has learned that much, he goes on to the second stage.”
ACIM - M-4.1-A3:1-8

There was nothing easy about those years from 1985 to 1990 on any level. I had many jobs, including working as staffer for a home hospice nursing company for AIDS patients and doing volunteer work for what later became Project Angel Food. I also started producing my own public access TV show on the Course and was leading small groups. Marianne was very helpful in guiding me early on and she even let me use her apartment to have my Monday night group. But by 1990 I had failed at just about everything I put my hand to and was about to lose my apartment once again and so at 30, with just a small suitcase containing everything I owned in the world, I moved to Santa Barbara in failure and financial ruin. A friend from the church had moved there the year before and said I should move into her house as her roommate. Frankly, I thought that I’d rather be homeless in a beautiful place like Santa Barbara than in Los Angeles and I did not want to move back to Pennsylvania so I jumped at the opportunity. Over and over through all those years someone would show up at the perfect time and take me in. It retrospect I now see that the Plan was unfolding in such absolute precision every step of the way. Each time I “failed” and thought I was lost, a brother (usually a woman) would reach down and give me a helping hand up – over and over and over again.

“Your way is lost, but think not this is loss. In your newness, remember that you and your brother have started again, together.” ACIM - T-17.9:2-3

In August of 1990 I arrived in Santa Barbara with just some clothes and 10 videos from my LA public access show. My dear friend Zan drove me from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara in her convertible Karmann Ghia - everything I owned in the world fit in this tiny car. This is where the miracles start to build up momentum and my learning is consolidating. Everything from the previous 5 years starts to become useful to the Plan. In November of 1990 I begin lecturing on the Course on Saturday mornings in a small room at Unity of Santa Barbara. At the same time the public access station there begins airing those 10 shows that I had on tape. We started with 12 people that first Saturday and within 6 months had grown enough to move into the beautiful chapel. I also added a Tuesday night lecture. There was no spiritual support for people with AIDS in Santa Barbara at that time and since I’d had a lot of experience with that, many of those with HIV and AIDS began attending. I was openly gay, pretty outrageous and I talked openly about sex (and my language is pretty salty.) I was used to this and thought it very normal because all my spiritual teachers were outrageous. But, Santa Barbara had never seen anything like this so word spread and people came.

In February of 1992, the Santa Barbara News Press did an interview with me about the Course lectures as part of their Sunday “Religion” page. It was titled, “Voice unleashes a religious flood of books, classes” – meaning the Voice that Helen took down in shorthand. And the “flood” was because the article also mentioned that Marianne has just been on the Oprah Winfrey Show and that “A Return to Love” had debuted #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. After that, we grew very quickly and soon there were more than 200 people at each of my lectures with standing room only in the Unity Sanctuary.

Over the next decade we changed venues several times, I did Easter services annually at the County Bowl and because Marianne moved to Santa Barbara in 1993, we did Christmas Eve services together for years. I counseled, officiated many wedding and memorial services, MC’d fundraisers and moved around quite a bit while in this “development of trust” phase the Manual for Teachers talks about.

By the time I turned 40 in 2000, my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and sister had all passed away. In July of 2000 I moved back to San Diego and for years did a Wednesday night service at the local Church of Religious Science while still teaching in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs. I was thrilled to be asked to speak at the Miracle Distribution Center Conference in Anaheim and to begin writing for the Holy Encounter around this time. And in 2012 I started filling in for Marianne Williamson at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills when she was out of town and that was another miracle assignment which led to meeting a lot of wonderful people and some delightful experiences. I’ve written about a dozen books now and am living back in West Hollywood again. Three of my brothers and about a dozen friends have passed away in the past decade and so most of my immediate family is gone except for my brother Jack and me. My life is very simple and quiet with a very small circle of people.

Just before the pandemic, in January of 2020, I received the guidance to stop public “live” teaching and to do only online classes. This seemed totally crazy at the time, but it meant I was already up and running in March when the world shut down. I will turn 66 on July 1 and I always say that I am Jesus semi-retired executive secretary and I am on a “need-to-know basis.” I teach online and write articles on my Substack and do my best to follow whatever Marching Orders I receive from Holy Spirit. The guidance almost never makes sense at the time, but it is part of the bigger Plan that I only see in hindsight.

So, that’s how I got here, to this point of the Plan. I don’t know what’s next but then I never have. I am just walking through the open doors.

And for anyone who is interested, click this link for a chronological timeline of the major events of My Life in the Ministry.