Sal Umana began his 91-year journey with a strong sense of the sacred in this world. Having been raised as a “cradle Catholic”, he was so schooled in traditional piety that he entered a seminary at the age of thirteen. While studying and living a monastic life for the next thirteen years, he became aware that he was a mystic, even though he did not know what mysticism was. He would say that he still doesn’t. However, he did know that he loved retreats, and enjoyed every moment of silence and meditation that was allowed to him. So much so, that by age twenty-three he wanted to enter a Trappist monastery and live in perpetual silence and contemplation. Denied this, he was then ordained a Redemptorist priest. He spent 24 years accomplishing varied ministries in the U.S., Canada, Italy, and the Caribbean. At age 49 he left the active ministry, studied Clinical Social Work, and became a psychotherapist. His first book “The Midlife Crisis as a Crisis of Meaning” was his thesis for his Masters of Social Work. The rest of his life has been a search for meaning, and his four books have been a development of his main thesis that “It is in dying to our False-self (or Ego) that we are born to eternal life” (with apologies to Francis of Assisi, who was a medieval mystic).