Spiritualism: Search for a Dead Son

SPIRITUALISM

Search for a Dead Son

“Have you by now heard anything about Jesus?”

Under any circumstances, this would seem a curious question for an Episcopal bishop to ask of his 22-year-old son. The circumstance under which it was actually asked was odd indeed. The scene was the home of a Santa Barbara spiritualist, the Rev. George Daisley, in the summer of 1967. The questioner was the Right Rev. James A. Pike, the resigned Bishop of California and a staff member of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. With Daisley’s help as a medium, he was communicating with his son James Jr., who had killed himself the year before. Young Jim’s answer was a bit ambiguous: “I haven’t heard anything personally about Jesus. Nobody around me seems to talk about him.”

This bizarre conversation is recorded in a new book called The Other Side (Doubleday; $5.95), which Pike wrote with the help of Diane Kennedy, the executive director of a private foundation that handles his business affairs. “An account of my experiences with psychic phenomena,” the book is a straight-forward chronicle of Pike’s 21-year effort to communicate with his dead son. It also contains a father’s painfully honest account of the sad events that led up to James Jr.’s suicide in February 1966.

Pike and his son, as the bishop readily admits, had not been close for much of the boy’s life. While his father kept busy with church affairs, young Jim as a teen-ager was turning on to the hippie way of life. In his freshman year at San Francisco State College, he moved out of the family home for a pad in the Hashbury, where he experimented with marijuana, peyote, LSD, and Romilar. In 1965, Pike was granted a six-month sabbatical to study theology and church history at Cambridge. He invited his son to accompany him, in hopes of helping him kick the drug habit. Jim accepted, but he took along, as the bishop discovered later, a supply of marijuana and the addresses of some London contacts.

Pike admits that he allowed his son to use LSD in their digs at the university. “Had I forbidden him to take trips in the flat,” the bishop writes, “he would no doubt have gone out with friends when he wanted to drop acid. And then I would have accomplished nothing except alienation.” By the time Pike returned to the U.S., he was convinced that the gap between them had been conquered. He was stunned when a priest interrupted evensong services at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to tell Pike that his son had been found dead in a Manhattan hotel room.

Shortly after Jim’s death, Pike returned to Cambridge, where he was suddenly afflicted by a series of inexplicable experiences. Clocks in his apartment kept stopping at 8:19—the hour when James Jr. had died in New York. Books and cards kept toppling over to an angle that matched that of the hands of a clock at 8:19. Eventually, Pike consulted an Anglican cleric who was interested in psychic phenomena; he suggested that Jim was trying to get in touch with Pike from the beyond and recommended the bishop to a “sensitive” named Ena Twigg. It was in her London sitting room, Pike says, that he first got in touch with Jim. “I am not in purgatory,” the boy told his father, “but something like hell, here.” He mustered enough wit, however, to remark: “Remember our discussions about life after death? Well, I guess we settled that one.”

Jesus Was a Seer. In the many meetings since, according to the bishop, things have improved: Jim reported back to his father that he was “genuinely happy” and had been assigned to help other suicides. Pike reports that he has also spoken with his old friend and teacher Paul Tillich, and even with the late medium and spiritualist writer, Edgar Cayce. He has also learned a little more about Jesus: “They talk about him—a mystic, a seer, yes, a seer.” According to Jim, Jesus is “triumphant,” but “they don’t talk about him as a savior” but as “an example.”

Thanks in part to his conversations with young Jim, Bishop Pike now accepts the idea of a life after death—a belief that he at one point had abandoned, along with faith in the virgin birth, the Trinity and other major Christian dogmas. Still, not all readers are likely to be convinced. They may ask why a bishop who has been so skeptical of the received Christian tradition should so readily accept the assurances of assorted spiritualists that there are cats in the afterlife and that husbands and wives will experience a new kind of nonsexual spiritual relationship. As for the dead Jim, he appears in the book to be so vague and formless as to seem nothing more than a loving father’s wish fulfillment.