Go Back, You Didn't Say May I

About the Book

Vietnam. Civil rights. Politics. Campus rebellion. Urban warfare. Therapy. Murder. Sex. Drugs. And a lot of personal intimacy... In this reprint of a diary written thirty years ago (and originally published in 1974), Thomas L. Jackson--priest, mental-health professional, husband, father, businessman, carpenter...and pilgrim--offers his innermost thoughts and outward actions amid both the daily joys and constant chaos of times and places that forever changed America’s view of itself and the world. From Washington to Detroit to New Jersey to Ohio University to Los Angeles to Upstate New York, the days and nights of collision and community add up to an odyssey beyond the expectations of a young priest trying to make some sense out of a self, a society, and a church facing a post-modern world. The author’s “Afterword” leads the reader to the sequel, In Any Given Moment...

About the Author

From standing alone in a doorway of a house on an early-May morning, looking out on the torn backstreets of a Texas city in the early 1990s, Fr. Tom Jackson--a “marginal” Episcopal priest and former “shrink“--began to experience a new life in what seemed to be a strange place…and the house would quickly become known as “St. Dismas House” (named for a criminal/saint)…and the House would fill and overflow with hundreds and hundreds of folks…and a roller-coaster ride would follow: a community life of work and ministry and emotion and loss and gain …and there would be more Houses and more folks and more kaleidoscopic life. Although this personal narrative is a continuation of the journey described in Fr. Tom’s earlier diary, Go Back, You Didn’t Say May I, it is, in fact, an entity unto itself: a record of the risks and glories of real people dealing with the life-and-death vagaries of Companionship at the turning of a new millennium…one day at a time.