Who I Am
“I’m not a body with a soul, I’m a soul that has a visible part called the body.” —Paolo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
I live and inspire wholeness.” — my purpose
The Facts of Life
Education
- Randolph-Macon College, BA 1967
- Princeton Theological Seminary, M.Div., 1970
- The General Theological Seminary, 1970-71
- Virginia Theological Seminary, D. Min., 2009
Career
- Ordained Priest of The Episcopal Church, 1971
- Curate, St. Martin’s Church, Charlotte, NC, 1971-74
- Rector, St. Andrew’s Church Charlotte, 1975-79
- Rector, Trinity Church, Newtown, CT, 1979-92
- Rector, St. John’s Church, Lynchburg, VA, 1992-2004
- Senior Priest, St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Washington, DC, 2004-2016
- Independent Consultant, Coach, Spiritual DirectorFoun 2004-2020
- Founder and Executive Director, Jonathan’s Circle, 2014-2024
Personal
- Born and reared in Conway, South Carolina
- Married to Joseph Casazza
- Two daughters, four grandchildren
Soul Food
Three things in my adult life have taught me much of what I know about soul.
The first was a year of field education that I did because I had to as a seminarian in the late 1960’s. I had grown up in segregated South Carolina in a town called Conway. Not until I was in college, and really not even then, was I ever a part of any school that was racially integrated. In the fall of 1968, just months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I began my experience at Union Baptist Church, Montclair, New Jersey. To all intents and purposes it was a “black” church, though I was to come to understand that there are more than fifty shades of black. In those days it was a new thing to refer to African-Americans as “black.” It became a thing of honor, a badge of pride to claim one’s blackness as a gift. I lived with parishioners on the weekends when I would commute to Montclair from Princeton. I learned how white the world really was. I learned how much I didn’t even come close to knowing about people who were different from me, but yet largely the same as I. And I learned about “soul.” Soul food, soul music, soul dancing: all of them had to do with deep expression of oneself, a way of living that got at the core of being.
The folks at Union gave me perhaps for the first time in my life a truly radical welcome. They honored and accepted me. They taught, tolerated, and loved me. They saw better than I my soul. That was the real soul food I learned to feed upon. And I delighted in it.
God Appears
A little more than a decade later, I found myself in New England in a wonderfully vibrant congregation eager to explore and learn. Soon I began to lead small groups of individuals in a program developed by St. Luke’s School of Theology at The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. Education for Ministry, now a worldwide program with thousands of graduates nearly all of whom are lay persons, had from its inception contained two tracks. One was systematically reading through the core curriculum of a theological education over a four-year period. The other was a systematic approach to theological reflection on one’s life. I learned several methods of uncovering the four dynamics involved in theological reflection: the actual experience, the cultural context, one’s personal positions and beliefs, and one’s faith tradition.
I became converted over the eleven years of mentoring small learning groups to the belief that if God is anywhere, God shows up in the details of your own life. I learned that if I simply scratched the surface of the slightest, most apparently inconsequential experience—much more so the big experiences—I would see swimming around in that slice of life, like fluids always present in a human body, an ideal (perfection), something that would go wrong (imperfection), a crisis of sorts that would reveal reality (perhaps subtly), and the possibility of a resolution or a way forward (hope). I began to see that these things were what all the stories, all the lore, all the symbols, language, rituals of any religion are about. And I began to look at my life differently. In short, I began slowly to grasp that “God” was in fact, not just in theory, showing up in my experience all the time. God Appears
Wholeness
I decided in my fortieth year that I wanted to learn more about me. I found a wonderful Jungian analyst whom I began seeing on a weekly basis. I was not in any kind of crisis that I knew of, though at 42, I was beginning to sense the onset of midlife issues, the main one of which tends to be some version of, “Is that all there is, my friend?”
From nearly three years in psychoanalysis, recording reams of dreams and coming to a clearer understanding of who I was, I discovered what I have come to believe is the best way to understand my life. I knew that my life project was to be, as much as I could manage to, a whole person. I needed to claim every part of myself, especially those dimensions of me that I had been busy denying or repressing or avoiding forever. I needed to learn how not to project either my darkness or my glory onto other people or imagined beings or supernatural forces, but to own those things myself.
Like many others who have gone through a similar process, I then began to understand what Jesus and all the other masters of the Spirit were teaching and doing. They were about living authentically. And I knew that in a profound way I had been hungering since early childhood to live authentically myself.. What I still didn’t quite grasp was that authenticity is a matter of being at home with nature, including one’s own nature. And I didn’t yet know that one’s nature was what the Greeks called psyche, and what I know now as soul.
This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed. — D. H. Lawrence
Now
Since 2020, my husband and I have lived in Cathedral City, California. My chief focus for the last four years has been Jonathan’s Circle, the non-profit I founded ln 2014. I continue to support the mission of Jonathan’s Circle, which is making safe spaces for men to integrate their sexual and spiritual lives, whatever shape they assume in their experience.
My focus remains to live and inspire wholeness. Through writing blogs, fiction, and poetry; through creative endeavors like baking, painting, drawing, and choral singing; through podcasting and other speaking, through physical activities including hiking, gym workouts, yoga, qigong, and daily walks, I do my best to keep body and soul together.
My spiritual life is all of my life including but certainly not limited to my husband’s and my involvement in The Church of St. Paul in the Desert (Episcopal) in Palm Springs. My interests include Native American culture and spirituality, Celtic Christian and pre-Christian religion, Scottish culture and history, art, and music.
My blog Angels and Principalities is a space for integrating faith and political life, I have a passion for justice and peace. My podcast, :Frank Words,” is available on YouTube, on my channel. I’m also have a Substack as Frank Gasque Dunn.
Click on the button below to schedule a free personal conversation. My ministry is my gift to you and others. Suggestions for freewill gifs to pay forward your voluntary contributions are on the Agreements Page.
What About You?
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