Songs for the Journey Home

Jonas Hall is having the worst day of his life. Over morning coffee he sees television news of a bank robbery gone terribly awry. A cell phone video of the event has gone viral on the Internet and he discovers that the unnamed hostage killed in the aborted robbery had been his best friend fifty years ago when they both attended St. Dunstan's Seminary as adolescents studying for the Catholic priesthood. When Jonas gets to his job as a mental health therapist in a local clinic, he is summarily escorted from the premises and placed on administrative leave when two young female patients of his come forward to claim that he sexually abused them during the course of psychotherapy. To add insult to injury, he returns home that day only to be served divorce papers from his second wife. With his personal and professional life in shambles, Jonas embarks on a quest to find out what happened to his best friend Step in the decades since his friend's expulsion from St. Dunstan's. How did Step wind up at the wrong end of a bank robber's gun? The journey leads from a small Connecticut town to the teeming streets of Brownsville in New York City; from the sprawling Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. to the folk music and coffee houses of Albany in upstate New York; from the chaos of the shootings at Kent State in Ohio to the lush Willamette Valley and the pristine forests and rivers of western Oregon. Part coming-of-age story, part saga of fall and redemption, Songs for the Journey Home looks at the contemporary crisis of faith that many people experience when they try to reconcile the ideals of the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life. Jonas must confront his own bitterness and unbelief, the faith he rejected in the face of all that happened at the seminary, his self-loathing and his counterfeit relationships as a therapist. At times grim and gritty, at other times lyrical in its prose, Songs for the Journey Home spans the fifty years from 1962 to 2012 in an adventure of love and loss, treachery and murder, failure and heroism. It challenges the reader to examine the fundamental question of philosophy and spirituality: If this is what I know, then how shall I live?