A Different Kind of
Spiritual Reading
Do you feel like you could pray more? Reflect more? Journal more? Is it tough to bring spiritual life into everyday life?
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Instead of trying to muscle through St. Augustine or compromising with some bookshop self-help Christian reading, here's a new approach.
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Go Your Way is a collection of modern stories of accessible young adults like you and me — people with doubts, excuses, and bumpy roads — who are just trying to live out their faith. Jump into their stories and see what resonates with you. You can enjoy a fictional story while finding truth that will speak to your heart.
Guest on
Viatorian Voices Podcast
As part of a series on Viatorians' hobbies and interests, Dan had a chance to talk about his love of writing and the ways that writing is a ministry for him.
This included a look at Go Your Way — Dan talked about telling an engaging narrative with accessible, relatable characters and offering stories that are readable while bringing some substance for readers' minds and hearts.
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Dan is a pre-associate with the Viatorian Community, a Catholic community of professed religious brothers and priests together with women and men lay associates. Pre-association is a two-year formation process by which Dan and others can study Viatorian spirituality and engage in faith-sharing together, discerning an eventual commitment to join the Viatorians as lay associates. For more on the Viatorian Community, visit their website or Instagram.
Guest on
Cath-Lit Live!
Dan was a guest of host Amy Cattapan on the YouTube series Cath-Lit Live. Dan shared about Go Your Way, and then Amy and Dan also got to discuss how nonfiction writing can inform fiction writing, how fiction stories can inform good discernment, and how ministry focused on accompaniment needs to be a bigger part of Church life going forward.
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Amy belongs to the Catholic Writers Guild and is helping lead their 2023 conference. For more information, visit their website and check out their conference information.
Interviewed by
Millennial Journal
Dan was a guest writer for Millennial Journal, and for its tenth anniversary, editor Robert Christian interviewed Dan about life, faith, and writing ahead of the release of Go Your Way.
Here's a snippet:
I also believe that you write what you know. In reflective pieces and other essays, I was usually responding to a moment. With fiction writing, there’s a blank slate to play with. So once I could hone in on the things I know and the things I wanted to explore about them, it kind of took off organically for me. Spiritually and in pastoral ministry, I’m drawn most to walking with youth, vocational discernment, and building community life. So that’s what the stories center on, and then it’s up to readers to take it as they will.
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I think a lot of my friends and family members hesitate to do much spiritual reading beyond a daily Gospel reflection or something. I hope the stories I wrote are a nice halfway point between those short reflections and something more intimidating like Aquinas or systematic theology.
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The Stories in Go Your Way
1
What There Is
to Be Done
Theresa Acutis is an earnest, dedicated, and faithful history teacher. She believes her work as a teacher is a ministry, a vocational response to God's ongoing invitation. As she and her husband discern starting a family, Theresa is feeling drawn to school leadership and directing student life, just as the current director mulls retirement. Everything from the great conversations with her husband to the mixed bag of interactions with students and colleagues can impact her, and she wrestles with "getting Screwtaped" as she seeks the will of God for the next steps of her life.
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What There Is to Be Done is a story of discernment, of relationships and community life, of faithful and hopeful realism. Always secking balance and thoughtful nuance, there comes the realization that between here and our hopes are the things that are simply before us, and we can invest great love and find great grace in them.
2
Abundance,
not Scarcity
Noah is doing just fine. His job is fine. His social life is fine. His faith life is fine. When he decides to go on an alumni retreat with his high school, it sparks his prayer life. And he realizes that, even if he is fine, he is underfulfilled and stagnant. As Noah follows the jumpstarted threads of this prayer, he sees capacities he had yet to realize in himself, and starts to wonder what path he might follow next instead of sticking to the "fine" one he's on.
Abundance, not Scarcity focuses on God’s ongoing invitations. God gives each of us many gifts, talents, and passions. It is up to us to discern by prayer and action what are merely our capacities and what we are drawn by desire to seek and do. God seeks to accompany us with grace to help us discover our multi-potentiality and respond in love and service. This is the story of one person who took a little longer to realize this and now is moving to pray, act, and serve.
3
Bigger
than Ourselves
St. Brendan Parish has been designated "needs review" by the newly initiated diocesan parish review process. This means something is bound to change, and many fear bad news. All the while, parish life goes on — youth nights, food pantry distributions, Sunday Masses, parish council meetings, and more.
Bigger than Ourselves digs into the lives of the people that make up St. Brendan Parish. From teens to elderly parishioners, from parents with kids to celibate parish priests, each one of them has a story to explore. In some ways, each of these stories are uniquely each their own. Yet, at the same time, they’re also experiences that are deeply shared. These people and their stories make up St. Brendan Parish. Together, they find themselves a part of something interconnected and communal and come to identify how they can be the hands and feet that carry their community forward in Christ.
