About Dave Sloan

Dave's Short-winded Bio:

Dave Sloan writes and speaks across the country on "GOD OF DESIRE: From Dating to Courtship to Paradise." Dave has appeared on many radio and television programs, including CNN News and EWTN's Life on the Rock. His Twelve Principle Program shows how to begin every relationship as brothers and sisters in Christ who can discover the wonder of one another without fear while growing ever closer to the God of Desire.

Dave's long-winded bio:

At twenty years old I fell in love with a sixteen year old track star at a Catholic High School.

She had eyes of blue fire and blond hair that flew when she ran like the wings of an angel soaring into flight. She had a heart alive with love and she gave all the love she had to me.

She thought I was her hero. For reasons I can't really go into, she needed a hero. I wanted to be a hero. I had tried for much of my life to become a hero. But I had failed. I wandered early into my mother's alcohol and my father's pornography. I had developed some bad habits.

I had become habituated to treating women like so many of my drinking and drugging buddies treated women. And so I betrayed this wonderful girl whom I loved more than I had ever loved anyone or anything.

I'll never forget what it did to those eyes of hers to find out the truth about me, about what sort of person I was and what a fraud was the love I had given her.

The relationship became a very long, drawn out disintegration into madness for us both. My drinking and drugging and shame over my behavior spiraled downward into a despair that left me often wondering when I was going to kill myself.

I stalked her and broke into her house to read her diaries and even punched out some windows one night on way too many mushrooms just to watch the glass break and my hands bleed in every color of the rainbow. They bled so much more than I had realized they would. I bled as if my heart itself had burst open.

Her parents charged me with lots of stuff I had done and lots of other stuff too and I wound up eventually in a scuffle, trying to escape from some police officers. I had five years of wrestling experience behind me, so the altercation was rather messy.

They put me solitary confinement for two months. I was in placed in cuffs and shackles anytime they took me out of there for hearings or to the clinic to be deloused or to hold the little phone to my ear and talk to my mom through the little plexi-glass square. They took me alone in cuffs and shackles out to the little concrete walled rec yard.

I had a sense of being unclean, of being stained with an irremovable filth that penetrated my very being.

Then they put me in population for two months. Most of the guys in there were large and black and full of rage at the white people who put them in there. The white guys walked around cowed, looking at the ground. I liked the black guys better than the white ones, but they didn't care about that. What they cared about was that I was white, and I didn't know how to walk around looking at the ground. I only knew how to walk like a wrestler.

They promised me from the beginning that my options were to fight or submit to sex.

At night while they slept I stayed up training, trying to be as ready as possible for the conflagration which was sure to come. I did not know how to pray, but I know I had a guardian angel watching over me those two months, because the altercation never came, not to me personally. One of the guys did poke out the eye of my chess partner as we were playing. He stood and looked at me to see what I would do as my buddy writhed screaming on the floor beside me. I did nothing. I had not turned out to be anybody's hero. I just wanted to go home.

I was released, but I had no home to go to. I wound up more strung out than ever, living on the streets, sleeping in abandoned cars, under bridges, in the weeds with door mats above and beneath me, in the press box at the stadium where I had gone to school, where so many of the kids still remembered me as an athlete. One morning I woke up to the sound of cleats sprinting to the top of the stadium. When the team reached the top I curled up into my blanket and heard one of the players say, "That's Sloan in there."

I had become so dirty, so filthy as to wonder if I was simply ruined beyond all repair. The LSD was tearing apart my brain and the filth and shame seemed to have stained me all the way through to the core.

Most of those who knew me had come to know me by the nickname "Lonesome." I was that guy you see stumbling down the street with long dirty hair and beard and sunken eyes that cannot look back at you. I was gone. I worried a lot that I was going to prison, because I could not work and had to steal to eat, and I was on probation. And I knew what would happen to me in prison. My angel would leave me and I would never be strong enough to survive the rage which would be directed at me.

I worried most that whatever it was inside of me that was still human, that was still connected to hope and goodness and love, would be extinguished forever. I was very, very afraid that my soul was going to die, and that if anyone did ever come to save me it would be too late.

It was not too late. My best friend got sober and came and found me and started taking me to AA meetings. Through the unconditional acceptance and the love of the people there, and the sheer power of the truth in the principles that hung upon the wall, I began to change.

I was crazy. But I attended meetings maniacally. I went to over a thousand meetings a year for the first three years.

Here's what I learned from AA. First, I learned to seek out the most lost person in the room and befriend that person, instead of worrying about whether or not the popular people at the meeting were going to invite me along to the coffee shop afterwards. I learned that I could actually be of service to some lost person, and that service would help to overcome my sense of insuperable shame and filth.

Next, I learned that there is a loving God expressed in that group of people coming together to help each other stay sober (traditions two), and that God has far greater power than my addiction (step two).

Lastly, I learned to come often, come early, and stay late. That's how you find the people who are most passionate, and make those people part of your life. When those people are part of your life, life is good.

My buddies and I threw sober parties with kicking bands and turned life into one rollicking, rolling sober festival.

Things got good. After three years I wound up on scholarship at Emory University. I met the kids in the campus Christian fellowship group and they infected me. They had the most radiant beauty, the most passion, the greatest joy, and the most reasonable explanations of life's conundrums of anyone on campus. I went to their praise and worship services and to their Bible studies.

But I was caught up in one of those life conundrums. I had become a modern American serial monogamer. I was in the habit of pretending that I was in love with my girlfriend and we were going to get married so it was okay to have sex.

I knew that whole rigmarole was a flimsy charade, but I was habituated to using women that way. Part of me really wanted to do God's will. But the rest of me wanted to exploit the fruits of doing God's will so that I could have my way with some lady.

Eventually I really did get engaged to one of those gals and we set a date and planned the wedding and I gave her a ring and we built furniture together for the apartment in which we were living.

We dipped our hands in paint and put pairs of our handprints on the furniture.

She suddenly became a famous DJ in town and left me for the whole rock and roll world. I was devastated. As I used the belt sander to remove our handprints from the furniture I wondered how it could be possible to feel so much pain sober.

I was amazed at the pain. I was impressed at the maker of pain that he could have manufactured so much pain. Here I was, trying so hard to be a good sober guy, just being a bit selfish in certain areas, and yet I was wracked with maddening torment.

In my desperation I called upon God for some relief and he prompted me somehow with something like a voice to go to the Catholic Center at the university. There I found everything I had been looking for all of my life. I found all of the love my heart was seeking and all of the truth my mind was seeking. I discovered that all of my questions had been asked before, and that the most brilliant minds of the ages had built upon one another's efforts in crafting answers that seemed to have all of the perfection of heaven in them.

I also found that holiness is real and attainable, and that Christians can receive the graces needed to really live pure lives here on earth.

I became convinced that Jesus is who the Bible says he is and did what the Bible says he did, and that he had instructed me personally to "do this in remembrance of me."

On Easter of 1993, just before graduation, I became a Catholic, so that I could obey that command.

But the struggle went on between my desire to live a Godly live and my habits of living an ungodly life.

After graduation I needed a place to live so I got a van and a pit-bull. I often parked and slept in the parking lot at the Cathedral. I had a regular gig at a club down the street from the Church doing performance art story telling theatrical experimental tirades and such accompanied by all sorts of musicians dancers gymnasts martial artists and various vagabond madpersons.

I wanted so much to be a Christian but I felt that I could never fit in at that Cathedral. I was a bald-headed poet with a pit-bull living in a van and coming into Mass in a two colored neon tank top and spandex pants. I knew those people could never accept me.

Then, one day during Mass as I was tormenting myself with the litany of the hypocrisy of those around me, I was miraculously delivered from my agony of exclusion. I felt something like the voice of God say to me, "Dave the problem with this Mass is that there is no charity in your heart."

The scales fell from my eyes and I began to see how much the Lord loves those assembled hypocrites in the midst of all their sin. I realized that he loves me the same way in the midst of all my sin. And I wanted more than anything to be a part of that love, to share in that love together as one body of hypocrites trying to become faithful Christians.

And so I simply applied what I had learned earlier in AA. I started trying to help whomever seemed the most tormented after Mass. Try it. It works. I quickly began to feel like I was being drawn into the heart of God's Church.

I applied the old rule, come often, come early, stay late. I began to get close to some very faithful, passionate, and committed Christians. The joy of the Gospel began welling up within me, and before I knew it I was teaching Bible studies and founding and leading seminars.

Still, the old struggle went on. I had habits of getting into relationships with women wherein we both had mixed motives and wound up rationalizing sex. I was a deeply habituated serial monogamer.

I knew it had to stop but I didn't know how.

Then a holy Priest introduced me to a very troubled, very beautiful young woman and told me that I was supposed to help her out. I told him it was a bad idea, that I was in the habit of messing up with gals like her. He looked intently into my eyes, made the sign of the cross on my forehead, and said, "Be holy."

Somehow, I felt it take. I felt the cross seared into my mind. And I knew that this young woman deserved for a man to truly treat her as a brother, to protect her and help her and seek nothing from her.

I knew it had to be done, and that I could not do it. So I began to look for all the help I could get. I went to a chastity conference. When I got there it turned out that the conference was intended to teach us how to teach chastity to teens. I asked who teaches chastity to grownups. The speaker, Ellen Marie, a nationally known chastity guru, said she knew of no one doing chastity for adults. I told Ellen that I would, because I knew I wasn't the only one who needed this help. She promised to help me. And she has helped me. Thanks Ellen. And thank you to all the people who have helped me in this journey into purity. Needless to say, I cannot do this. But God has sent many people to help me along the way; so apparently, this effort is in accord with his will.

I dove into scripture looking for chastity resources. And I fervently prayed the prayers I found in Ezekiel 34 and 36, in Psalms 32 and 51, and all through the Gospels and the Epistles. I implored the Lord to restore me, to wash me clean and make me whole, as he had promised through the prophets that he would do.

And the fruits were amazing. I started giving chastity talks all over the place, and I found great peace in my own heart. I must tell you that there is great joy in being able to tell people the good news of the Lord's plan to make us new, to restore to us our innocence. I don't believe in secondary virginity. I believe the Lord can do a whole lot better than secondary. He is the maker of all innocence. He can give us pure hearts. There's nothing secondary about that.

Best of all, as a fruit of this work, I wound up with children in my life. I was invited to live with two friends of mine and their four grandchildren. There is nothing in this world to compare with the love of children. This is what is most terribly missing from the lives of most single people today, the sense of being part of an extended family, with brothers and sisters and the love of children. I am no longer living without that love. Praise God!

A group of people began getting together regularly to pray and seek the virtue of purity. We looked to scripture and to two books about human sexuality by Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility and The Theology of the Body. The group grew, and we soon made an interesting discovery. We discovered that some members of the group were beginning to be attracted to each other. But we didn't know what to do about that. We discovered that learning how to be pure was not enough to teach us the practical steps to take in dating and courtship.

One night my friend Louis Edwards was roused from bed by what he and I both believe was the Holy Spirit. He stayed up praying for hours and called in the morning to tell me some excited news about dating and courtship.

He said that we needed to learn how to practice low intensity, non-exclusive dating as a way to get to know the people to whom we are attracted. At first I was scandalized by his report. He went on to explain that we shouldn't be consumed with anxiety or make some federal case out of beginning to get close to someone. We had already learned from our studies that love has to be based on the whole truth of whom the person is that we love. We can't truly give ourselves to someone if we don't know who they are.

Much of what he said contradicted how we had been living in seeking purity, but it fit what we knew to be true from our studies. And we quickly realized that the people around us in the Church were just as confused as we were about dating and courtship.

So, we shifted the focus of the group to prayer and discussion of dating and courtship. God of Desire is the result of these manifold workshop sessions and much prayer both individually and together as a group. We think this information has the power dramatically to transform the lives of those who will give it a try.

In my presentation of this material I've been very careful to be as non-denominational and inclusive as possible. These ideas are for everybody, regardless of faith background. The material which is explicitly Catholic is presented in separate section of the site. The answers we have in common are profound, and much needed in the lost world around us.

"Beloved, let us love another, for everyone who loves is a child of God, and knows God." (1 John)