Thomas Moore

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. My father taught plumbing and my mother was a housewife. My brother, Jim, was born when I was seven and together we grew up in the warm embrace of a large extended Irish-Catholic family. I attended a Catholic school and as an altar boy spent time around the priests and nuns. It was therefore quite natural for me to leave home when I was thirteen to enter a prep seminary in a Chicago suburb. I became a Servite, a religious order founded in late medieval Italy. We weren't exactly monks, because we prepared for an active life of teaching and ministry, but we were monks in that we meditated, chanted Divine Office, and lived the vow of poverty-we had everything in common.

In the seminary I discovered I had some musical talent and a passion to compose. At nineteen I took the Queen Mary to Ireland where I studied philosophy for two years. I returned to the Chicago area and spent a year focused on my musical studies. It was the days of the Viet Nam war, the Second Vatican Council, and flower children. I felt deep changes taking place inside me, and shortly before I was to be ordained a priest, I left the order.

I tried to become a musician, but my interests in religion and philosophy got in the way. Eventually I got a Master's degree in theology from the University of Windsor in Canada. Then I went to Syracuse University for a Ph.D. in religion. There, blending religion, psychology, and the arts, I received exactly the education I needed. I taught psychology for a year at Glassboro State College and then took a position in the religion department of Southern Methodist University.

I've always been a maverick teacher and I couldn't force myself to write in proper academic style, and so after seven years I was denied tenure. By then people were asking me to be their psychotherapist-I had done some training at Syracuse-and I carried on a private practice from 1976 to 1992. In Dallas I became involved with The Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, which offered me a kind of post-graduate experience of teaching and study. James Hillman, Patricia Berry, Robert Sardello, Gail Thomas, Ivan Illich, and Rafael Lopez-Pedraza regularly spoke and taught there. I gave seminars on archetypal psychology and mythology.

In 1985 I left Texas and tried to find work in New England. Doors closed everywhere, and so I continued in private practice. I taught part-time at Lesley College in Cambridge, and I became an itinerant teacher in many small New England towns. In 1992 Care of the Soul was published and I was able to support a family and live the life of an independent writer. I loved writing, and in the next decade I published many more books, tapes, CDs, and videos. In the academic year of 2000-01, our family lived in Ireland, where my wife, Joan Hanley, did some remarkable projects in the form of public art, and I did some background investigations for a book which is yet to be written on Irish spirituality.

I have a daughter, Siobhán, fourteen years old, who has musical talent and a fiery personality. Abraham, seventeen, is a talented artist, very adaptable and calm. The children have been in a Waldorf school all these years and grew up in the countryside of New Hampshire.

Wayne Walder

I have been a minister for about 10 years.   Before that I ran a business for more than 20.   I have always loved work and spirit and was able to combine them for many years.  But when my father died in 1995,  while looking at his coffin, I realized life was not forever.  This inspired me to enroll in graduate school and get my master’s degree at the University of Toronto. I realized I wanted to do more than dabble in spirit.  The ministry required I work as a Hospital Chaplin at Scarborough General Hospital, and intern in a small community in N.Y.   I have learned so much on my path to ministry, especially how important spirituality is to deepening a life.  My journey into ministry has been a good one.  
 
Currently I am the minister of the Neighbourhood Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Toronto. I helped begin it with 3 people in January of 2000.  It now has more than 120 members and is currently becoming a green community, using public money and private investors to generate solar electricity. In a secular country like Canada, this is a small miracle.
             
Building a religious community from scratch was far more difficult than I thought.  Communities mature like people and I did not know that.  It also takes time for them to mature.  Time breeds trust and only with trust can people grow together spiritually.  Most people do not know these things because they do not stick around in a community long enough to find out how they work.  This is one of the reasons I work in religion, to understand and express the importance of community in spiritual development.  It certainly has changed me.     
           
My spiritual interest centers around mysticism.  I am amazed by the similarity of mystical expression throughout religion.  There are so many ways to connect to spirituality.  Each year I lead silent retreats and pilgrimages to exotic spiritual places.   No matter where we go, it is easy to see similarities in religious culture.  Once, we were with a Shaman on the banks of the Aqua Caliente river in Peru.  His rituals looked so similar to Roman Catholic rituals I experienced as a child, I silently smiled.  
 
In the last 5 years I have worked for the International UU Ministers Associations in both Canada and the U.S.   I have helped develop more than 100 programs and structures for religious continuing education.  I met Tom when he was offering a lecture at one of these events.  I am really looking forward to the development of Soul Spirit Dialogues.
 
My wife Joan and I live in the East End of Toronto.  We have three grown children Lee, Keith and Simon, who are leaving our nest.  To cope  we recently bought bicycles.