Dear Readers,

I recently did a quick survey of all the blogs that I have written under my Pedal Pilgrim name since 2014. I did this because it has been clearer to me how much I have been an “in between” person for most of my career. The book I am writing is, in many ways, my experience of living in two cultures—cultures that I had hoped would find common ground and a common language.

A quick survey of my 430 blogs over this twelve-year period revealed this:

112 of those blogs were clearly writing from a post-Christian, more spiritually universalistic perspective.
109 of those blogs captured my experiences of both my Rome to Rumi pilgrimage and my Camino de Santiago pilgrimage (the pilgrimage my son calls “a long walk across Spain”).
The remaining blog posts, 209 of them, reflect some version of my wrestling with living and working in two different religious/spiritual cultures.

Diagnostics are great and one of the things that I have discovered by studying the statistics related to my individual posts is that I really have two communities reading my posts. No surprise, right! The other thing I can tell is which posts tend to get more traction.

This is what I know: When I write specifically from my post-Christian, spiritually informed, universalistic perspective I seem to connect to more people and I seem to connect more closely to what they are actually experiencing themselves. I often hear, “You put into words what I was thinking and feeling. Thanks.” When I write from my “struggle of being an in-betweener” I connect deeply to a few people who seem to feel that same sense of “in between” but not to my broader readership.

This has all been a journey of discovery for me. I couldn’t have written anything different than what I wrote because my calling is to write what is honest and real. And what has been honest and real for me is the awkward struggle of being a two-culture religious professional for over three decades.

This has led to a shift that, quite honestly, allows my body to finally relax. In the next couple of weeks my blog posts will make a shift. On Mondays I will post a blog under the title, “Mystic Mondays” where I reflect on the different writings of both religious and secular mystics and the lived experience of seeing the world through the lens of sacred reality. On Thursdays I will post a blog that will simply be titled, “The Book with No Name: Excerpts” I don’t yet know the title. As I write the book itself, it shifts in focus which also changes the working title. Rome to Rumi and The Reluctant Prophet are out.

The feels like progress to me. The emerging book and the blog associated with it will capture my experience of living and attempting to work in these two separate cultures. The Mystic Monday blog will be cleanly and purely in the spiritual and religious culture that best mirrors my heart and soul.

Thank you all for coming along for the ride! I know many of you wondered why I struggled so much with this over the years. The struggle had to do with the belief that these two cultures could find a common language and even a common life. I am not saying that they can’t, but I spent more than three decades trying to bring them together under one roof. It is time for me to now give them their own separate rooms. The book will capture my career-long struggle. The Mystic Mondays (and further writing) will reflect the mystical, universal, and sacred spirituality that has been growing in me over the last two decades.

I am grateful for all of you.

Dear Readers—A Shift

The Reluctant Prophet: Two Cultures

Pedal Pilgrim