A road less traveled: Vocation, sex, and religion

This chronicle of embodied experience charts the pilgrim's progress of a qualitative researcher during a research trip to New Mexico. The story traces a path from his spiritual awakening as a teenager, through his painful coming out in his thirties as a gay man, to an eventual collision of conflicting issues in his fifties while traveling on the road to a healing shrine with a group of Hispanic Roman Catholics. His participation as a researcher forces him to come to grips with the events of his life as he realizes the vital connection between body and soul in the long journey home.