Word: piked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...
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...