From the SF paper, a spiritual journey:

Often you hear stories about people starting out as a Catholic and leaving Catholicism behind after getting into Eastern religions. But you went back to it. What do you make of that?

Three things came together for me at this point. One was that I was in Jungian analysis, and I had heard that Jung said to Catholics that if they could find it in their hearts to go back to the Catholic Church that he would advise they do so because all of the elements were in place in Catholicism in terms of helping bridge the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious worlds.

At the same time, I also happened to find a book at a New Age bookstore called "Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism." It was a very powerful book for me because the author had also spent time searching around and ended up delving into esoteric spiritual ideas before converting late in life to Catholicism. It helped me see that there wasn’t a contradiction in being a Catholic and living the path that I wanted to live [seeking out truth in various spiritual traditions].

On top of that, I happened to overhear these two guys talking at a restaurant in the Castro, where I lived at the time, about a priest who performed the Mass entirely in Latin at a church down the street, so I went to hear him. There was something really moving to me about the way he said the Mass, the kind of consciousness that he embodied, his tenderness, the way he kissed the altar in the middle of the Mass.

Somehow these three things coalescing around me convinced me to return to the Catholic Church.

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