What I’ve Learned

Success tells us what we’re good at. Failure teaches us who we are.

Though my given name is Patrick, I’ve been Rick since I was a boy. I’ve been married for more than fifty years to the woman I met when she was fifteen years old and I was seventeen. Our journey together has dipped and soared and swirled in circles, but here we are after all these decades, happy and lively and very aware of how lucky we are. Our daughter Shannon is married to Chris; they have two sons, Jesse and Joe. Our son Brendan and his partner, Diana, together have created the astonishing Iris.

Our younger son, Jesse, was twenty-four years old when he died in 2000 in a traffic accident while serving in the Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa. His death forced all of us to go deep, to find our what we’re made of, and to make up a life singed with tragedy without letting the tragedy define us. The story of Jesse’s death and our responses to it is told in The Awful Grace of God: A Memoir of Faith, Death, and the Survival of Hope, which I wrote as a way to remember him and to figure out what his death did to us all.

I was a Presbyterian minister until I was forty years old, when I lost that career through indiscreet behavior. For over thirty years I’ve been a Marriage and Family Therapist in Pasadena, California. Having made our way as a family through several seriously difficult times, I now spend thirty-five hours a week engaged as deeply as I dare with clients who are making their own way. They’ve taught me how unique each person’s struggles are and how each person must find their own strategies to make their way through. Navigating this confusing, complex, heartbreaking, and inspiring world is what moved me to write The Crack Where The Light Gets In - a meditation on how, across cultures and experiences and generations, we all find our way toward love and grace.

When life gets difficult - when your marriage hits a speed bump; when one of your children is out of control; when work is a deadly bore; when your friend steps away from you; when your health fails; when death comes to a Beloved, or in any of the struggles life brings - there are strategies available. We’ll help you find them so that you, too, can make your way through.