Looking For Dad: A Memoir of Catholic Misadventures and a Buddhist Reckoning

“Looking For Dad” is the quixotic, sometimes melancholy but more often funny confession of a youth searching for personal identity. It’s a search for a father figure (his own father died when he was two years old). What begins as a quest for God (“Father”) and a hunger to be a priest (“Father”) leads eventually to an emotional breakdown and abandonment of the dream. In middle age comes an awakening via Zen Buddhism and then, with reluctance, a renewal of his old journey, with a surprising, if unorthodox, finish. “You needn’t be unbalanced to make a complete fool of yourself in religion,” writes the author, “but it helps." The main events of “Looking For Dad” are a kind of time-piece, transpiring in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just before the Second Vatican Council changed the facade – some say the foundation – of Roman Catholicism. And so a good part of the story moves inside that musty, mysterious environment of authority, archaic symbols and Latin speech. The “oriental” aspect, covering experiences in Zen and Theravada Buddhism, will appeal to the growing number of readers interested in Asian spirituality topics, including fresh literary approaches to the Dharma.