Guy Spiro: I always like to start with people briefly telling their story.
Louix Dor Dempriey: I was born December 17, 1961 and raised in Boston in an Italian American family with two brothers and a sister. On the one hand I had a pretty typical life. I was devoted to study and was a straight A student all through school. But I was always deeply immersed and found my deepest communion with God in nature. I was a bit of a Dr. Doolittle as a child. Wild animals would come up to me and I would touch them or hold them. I was constantly going off into the forest and walking along bogs and swamps and rivers, always catching animals and taking them home. I was completely enraptured in nature.
I had my first personal encounter with Jesus at the age of five when he materialized in my bedroom and talked to me for about fifteen minutes. The two most noteworthy things I remember were, he said there would be two turning points in my life, one at around the age of thirteen and the second around age thirty. The first is going to break your heart because you're going to think it's taking you from me. I can't tell you what it is, but when it happens I want you to know now that it was me who actually precipitated it. That turned out to be my leaving the Catholic Church at age thirteen. Naturally, growing up Roman Catholic, all I knew was Jesus, Mary, Joseph, saints, angels, and God. But I felt compelled to leave the church because of certain basic concepts and the dogma of hell and original sin. Both of which are illusion, completely and totally.
GS: My birth mother's family was hard core Fundamentalist and I sat in church as a little boy and said, wait a minute, everyone in this room is going to heaven and everybody else in the world is going to hell? Come on, that can't be true.
LDD: As young as eight or nine, I was arguing with the priests and they were telling me off. I just kept telling them that a child cannot be born with a black mark on its soul. It came out of the hands of God and into the world. A newborn is purer than any person walking the planet, how can they be the blackest and darkest thing? And the whole thing about having to beg for forgiveness all your life so you can get into heaven just didn't work for me. But I loved church and I was so torn. I would be in church and be so God intoxicated that my mother had to pull me out. I wanted to light all the candles. Weekdays after school, I would go and sit in the church because that was where I felt closest to God, either in the church or out in nature. When I left the church at thirteen, I felt like I was leaving Jesus. But he had told me at five, without telling me what it was, that I needed to remember that it was he who precipitated it.
GS: Did you leave the church to move in a certain direction, or could you just no longer stay in the church?
