Experience

• Decades of experience offering spiritual direction and supervision and forming spiritual directors and supervisors in both academic and non-academic meetings.

• Co-creator of the Together in the Mystery model of supervision for spiritual directors and of Three Association: A Supervision Podcast for Spiritual Directors

• Director of Fordham Graduate School of Religion’s Advanced Certificate in Supervision program.

• Contributor of essays to books and journals on the topic of spirituality, spiritual direction, and supervision.

Biographical Statement

My Catholic childhood shaped my love of God and ritual and beauty.  It stirred in me a felt sense of Divine Mystery meeting, inspiring, and healing us through the most ordinary of elements: bread and wine, water and oil.  In addition, the majestic coastline, volcanic hills, and sweeping dunes of California’s Central Coast entranced me early, invited me into a deep and sustaining relationship with the natural world that grounds and informs my work with others even now.

The Jesuit sense of finding God in all things accords beautifully with my own experience.  The fruits of my 30-day silent Ignatian retreat remain with me decades later as do the graces of a sustained inner exploration afforded by psychoanalysis.

In more than two decades of teaching at San Francisco Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian seminary in San Anselmo, California, I experienced the considerable grace of collaborating in a cross-cultural, ecumenical environment.

Returning to Jesuit education, I collaborated in designing and offering an Advanced Diploma in Spirituality (Supervision) at Manresa Jesuit Centre of Spirituality in Dublin, Ireland in partnership with St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth. Following this, Fordham University’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education invited me to design, direct and teach in their Advanced Certificate in Supervision program.

Though my Ph.D. is in Christian Spirituality, in addition to Biblical Studies and the History of Christian Spirituality, my course of study included deep dives into poetry and philosophy, into Judaism, Bakhti Hinduism, and Buddhist Vipassana.  I have taught spirituality and world religions at the university and graduate levels and trained spiritual directors and supervisors across the US and in Ireland.