After Lex received his Ph.D. in World Religions from Columbia University in 1976 at age thirty-five, his first book was published by Doubleday in 1978, Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions. This book, with its experiential bent and spirit of universality, has been widely recognized as a classic and is used regularly in college courses.

For more than thirty years, Lex traveled the globe making first-hand explorations of various initiatory lineages, always maintaining the clear and balanced overview he expressed in Coming Home. He began his traveling early, at age nineteen, when he lived and studied in South Dakota with Vine Deloria, Senior, a Lakota Sioux elder and Episcopal priest.

Beginning in 1980, Lex made a profound fifteen-year study of Islam and Sufism, which he reported in two of his books, Heart of the Koran and Atom from the Sun of Knowledge. His first-hand experience of Buddhism appears in Mother of the Buddhas: Meditation on the Prajnaparamita Sutra and Living Buddha Zen. His thirty-year involvement with the Divine Mother tradition of Bengal is documented in Great Swan: Meetings with Ramakrishna and Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment. His final book was Living Buddha Zen, which he happily lived in good health long enough to hone to his full satisfaction.

Lex’s experience of being “orthodox in five different spiritual traditions” produced a unique philosophy, a “theory of relativity for religions.” His warm, joyful manner of teaching, celebrating, and encouraging spiritual seekers of all kinds touched thousands of lives.