PORT ANGELES — Tim Schilling has spent a lifetime surrounded by people, but his spiritual path, as he writes in “Lonesome Road: A Memoir of Faith,” has been a solitary one.
The book chronicles Schilling’s life, from unstable years after his birth in Lafayette, Ind., in 1965, to the happiness of his years in Port Angeles, where he graduated from high school in 1983, to train for and ultimately end his studies to become a Catholic priest.
Schilling will be in Port Angeles this week to sign copies of Lonesome Road at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Odyssey Bookshop, 114 W. Front St.
The idea to write a memoir began a long time ago, Schilling said.
“I had multiple motivations, some of which became more clear to me over time,” he said. “Initially, it seemed to be a story that I had in me that I wanted to tell and was worth telling.”
“The other part of it was honoring the people who helped me along the way. Then there’s the delight in revisiting times and places that I loved — going back and spending time in your mind.”
The early chapters of Lonesome Road are dominated by his family’s struggling with the impact of his father’s post-traumatic stress disorder. A Vietnam veteran, his volatile mental state overwhelmed the household. Schilling, his mother and his sister dealt with the unpredictability and disequilibrium his illness created differently.
Schilling was going to be the one who got out of there.
Hard work and intelligence were essential. Those came easy. Schilling was an excellent student, participated in Youth in Government, joined the debate team and stayed (mostly) out of trouble. He ran around with the smart kids, drank and chased girls.
No one pegged Schilling as one who would go into the priesthood.
“In high school, I didn’t believe in God,” he said. “I figured, if I can’t see God, why would I believe in God?”
The change came unexpectedly during his sophomore year at Princeton University, where he found himself searching for something — meaning, answers. He had a long conversation with the school’s chaplain and left feeling liberated from his doubts.
“That night changed my life,” Schilling wrote. “Every day since has been lived in the light of it.”
In that moment, he wrote, “God went from being a question to a presence.”
At the same time, it did not solve all of his problems.
Determined to become a priest, Schilling spent the next five years on a path leading in that direction. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in English, he entered the Archdiocese of Seattle’s Channel program, which prepared people for seminary, teaching or service. The church then sent him to the Catholic University of Louvain to study theology.
After two years at Louvain came another sudden moment of realization on a retreat with other seminarians in Clervaux, Luxembourg. One day after Mass, he wrote, he understood, “I just couldn’t do it.”
Schilling did find his way on a different path, earning a doctorate in practical theology at Utrecht University and working for the past 20 years at the Center for Parish Spirituality, a pastoral resource center in Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
He and his wife Janke, who works in medical research, just celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary. They have two children, Annegien, 24, and Pieter, 21.
Schilling returns to Port Angeles every summer to visit his mother, Kay, and to revisit a place that has had such a deep influence on him. He also reconnected with his father, from whom he had been estranged and now lives in Indiana, receiving the care he needs.
He has written another book, “The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy” (University of Nevada Press, 2024) and is currently working another about poet Anne Porter.
Writing Lonesome Road was at times difficult, he said. Not only revisiting painful memories, but his ruthless self-examination of what he views as his shortcomings and failures.
And there is still loneliness.
“The loneliness, I think, in one sense is that there’s a part of yourself that you can’t share with people,” he said. “You have a pain inside you’re dealing with, you’re afraid to share it, you don’t want to tell.”
It was what he felt, he said, when he was growing up and didn’t want to talk about his father, keeping everything to himself.
“One of the amazing things that I’ve experienced with this book is I’ve had three people who I thought I knew reasonably well come to me and share from their past difficult things that they went through,” he said.
“Realizing somebody else has gone through something or revealed something always helped me because then I realized I wasn’t alone.”
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
Book signing
Tim Schilling book signing, “Lonesome Road: A Memoir of Faith” (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 138 pp., $16)
Odyssey Bookshop, 114 W. Front St., Port Angeles
2 p.m. Wednesday
