Member Profile

I was born and raised on the northwest side of Chicago and never really left the city until I went away to graduate school in my late 20s. The neighborhood was a typical “cops and firemen” neighborhood during the 1970s and 80s, with a strong Roman Catholic contingent. In fact, I was educated mostly in Catholic schools up until my third year in college. While in college I jumped around quite a bit, never really knowing in which direction to go until I settled on history and eventually, historic preservation. After graduate school, my wife and I lived in Oak Park for three years before moving further west to Warrenville, where we currently reside. My curiosity in Zen really began with the Catholic monk/mystic Thomas Merton, whose books I discovered in my mid-30s. Although a monastic in the strict Cistercian Order, Merton wasn’t limited by religious boundaries and during the 1960s he began to explore Zen and Taoism. He basically kick-started my reading on Buddhism but other authors, such as Somerset Maugham and Paul Brunton, led me down different paths, particularly Advaita Vedanta. I spiritually wandered for a while (and perhaps I am still wandering) but kept coming back to Zen. I learned about ZLMC in 2019 and decided to sign up for the Foundations class in early 2020. Since then, I have become a student of Roshi Althouse and have been participating mostly virtually on Sundays.