DAN MILLER    
(Daniel J. Miller, M. Div., Th. M., Ph. D.)

(Short Version)

I am a father of three adult children. I am a spiritual guide, as well as a teacher, mentor, and supervisor of spiritual directors-in-training. I am a pastoral theologian, retreat leader, the founder and leader of a spiritual formation community (The Human & the Holy), and a writer. I am also—to borrow from Van Morrison—”a soul in wonder.” My passion and commitment are to help individuals and communities weave lives of spiritual depth. My work and hope is to join with others in incarnating and promoting a spirituality with integrity — one that is oriented toward contemplative presence, compassionate action, the works of justice, mercy, and peace, solidarity with the poor and vulnerable, and care for and kinship with the earth. Integral to my spirituality are oohing and aahing and laughter. I am always looking for companions with whom I can walk the talk and talk the walk. Like you, I suspect, I am a holy vagabond on the way to becoming more deeply human and fully alive.

(Long Version)

Born in 1955, I grew up in Seattle, Washington amid the wet grace of Puget Sound and the green lusciousness of the Pacific Northwest. I am the son of parents whom I had the good fortune not only of loving but liking and admiring. Faith-filled and fallible, they modeled spiritual lives that were simple, genuine, non-coercive, and credible. Together with my two brothers and three sisters, we enjoyed the natural revelry of a large family. We shared a predisposition, passion, and a modicum of talent for story, humor, athletics, and the arts.

Influenced in my youth by the vision and spirit of Vatican II, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace and the Jesuits of the Northwest Province introduced me to an integral spirituality oriented toward faith that does justice, being contemplatives-in-action, and appreciating the felt sense of the presence of God in all things. Many years later, I still remember the impression it made on me as a 9th grader that we were reading John Howard Griffin’s book Black Like Me in my Religion class of all places, and that some of my Jesuit teachers were joining the University of Washington students who only blocks away from my high school were blocking the freeway to protest the Vietnam War. These years and experiences planted the seeds of suspicion that later grew to a conscious conviction that the Christ-life is intimately and dynamically related to everyday life and pressing social issues or it is nothing more than a prop or a sham.

A Catholic, I am an apprentice of Jesus with an ecumenical spirit and an appreciation and reverence for any serious spiritual seeker or practitioner. I am committed to and have been blessed by mutually enhancing relationships with people from a variety of religious traditions and spiritual paths.

After twelve years of Catholic education, I attended Pacific Lutheran University on an athletic talent award (1973-77), where in addition to earning my B.A. in English, I was fortunate enough to receive 8 varsity letters in basketball and baseball and be awarded—sans pom-poms—the Most Inspirational Award three times.

Following college, I taught and coached for two years at a Jesuit High School in Tacoma, Washington before changing directions, geographically and vocationally, and moving to Princeton, New Jersey to study theology.

In the 1980’s I earned a Master of Divinity degree and a Master of Theology degree at Princeton Theological Seminary. While on the east coast, I also had the good fortune of studying with Gerald May, Tilden Edwards, Rosemary Dougherty, and Shaun McCarty at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Washington, D.C. where I completed the Spiritual Guidance Program in 1988.

In 1994, after six years of working as a Pastoral Associate at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Enumclaw, Washington, Archbishop Thomas Murphy of Seattle selected me to be appointed as the central leader of the faith community at a Roman Catholic parish in Tacoma, Washington without a resident priest-pastor. Able to lead but sadly unable to be ordained in the tradition of my birth because I was married, I respectfully declined the appointment after prayerful consideration and moved to southern California. In California I earned a Ph.D. in Theology and Personality from the Claremont School of Theology, receiving The President’s Award for Academic Excellence. My dissertation was titled: Radical Amazement and Deep Sympathy: A Mystical-Prophetic Approach to Pastoral Theology and Care Inspired by the Work of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Over the past forty years my professional and pastoral experience have included high school teaching and coaching, parish work as a Pastoral Associate, Liturgy Coordinator, and Minister of Christian Initiation and Adult Spiritual Formation, work as a hospital chaplain, pastoral counselor, adjunct college professor, spiritual director, retreat leader, as well as an instructor, mentor, and supervisor to spiritual-directors-in-training, most recently at the Center for Spiritual Development in Orange, California from 2002 – 2011 and presently with CenterQuest’s School of Spiritual Direction.

In 2010 I was the recipient of a grant from the Louisville Institute for a three month sabbatical program. My proposal was titled: “The Art of the Soul’s Journey.” I was blessed with the opportunity to reactivate artistic interests and creative abilities and to spend extended quiet time in the Spirit-saturated geography of Newfoundland (at St. Mary’s Hermitage on the Grand Codroy River), Vermont (at Weston Priory), and Washington State (at the Grunewald Guild). My sabbatical coincided with the final phase of my participation in a year-long soul-oriented, wilderness-based immersion program in the American Southwest for artisans and leaders through the Animas Valley Institute.

My passion, commitments, and work have always revolved around the relationship between the mystical and prophetic dimensions of faith, the cultivation and embodiment of an authentic Christian spirituality, one that is mature, holistic, enlivening, responsible, communal, dialogical, liberating, and in service to love. Guided especially by the gospel of Jesus as enunciated in the Beatitudes, I seek to understand, live, and teach the integral relationship between contemplative engagement and compassionate action, personal transformation and cultural change, dying and rebirth. My privilege and joy is to support others in the cultivation of a more genuine self, intimacy with God, compassionate solidarity with others especially the most vulnerable, and a mutually enriching relationship with the earth community in all its life forms.

I am concerned with what it means to be human and holy, how to transpose the message and life of Jesus into this time and this place, the necessary and dynamic relationship between faith and justice, and ways to participate in the dream of God coming true “on earth as it is in heaven.” I have been influenced by the simplicity, joy, and earth-concern of St. Francis, the emphasis on contemplation-in-action, encountering the presence of God in the everyday, and being a companion of Jesus by St. Ignatius, and the radical hospitality, sacred rhythm of daily life, and the extraordinary in the ordinary espoused by St. Benedict.

I am especially interested in the lives and teachings of modern spiritual guides among whom Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Henri Nouwen, and Matthew Fox, have had the biggest and most lasting impact on my life. Other prophetic-mystics and mystical-prophets who have been a significant influence are: Thomas Berry, William McNamara, Martin Luther King, Jr., Kenneth Leech, and Frederick Buechner. A lover of words and the deep silence from which they come, I am also the beneficiary of the wisdom of poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jelaluddin Rumi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, William Stafford, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver.   

As a spiritual director, teacher, and retreat leader my intention is to be an attentive, reverent listener, compassionate companion, and creative guide. In 2003 while working at the Center for Spiritual Development in Orange, CA, I founded a spiritual formation community called The Human & the Holy (H&H). More recently, this community met monthly at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Pomona, California. Covid sent us home in March 2020. There is a good chance I will take H&H online in the not-too-distant future. Stay tuned. At our gatherings, we encourage and challenge each other to reflect on and live into the provocative questions and the pressing issues that confront us today. Our commitment is to support each other in living significant lives reflective of the beatitudes of Jesus. Our hope is to embody a spirituality that weds radical amazement and deep sympathy, joins prayer and action, connects pain and humor, and braids the gratuitousness of divine love with the demands that love makes on us.

Finally, of all my roles, responsibilities, privileges, and blessings, the one I cherish most is being the father of three young adult children.

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* Mt. Rainier by John Chao: http://www.photoshelter.com/c/johnchaophoto