The Examined Life of Bishop Pike

...His plunge into the Judean wilderness to find the real Jesus for himself seems great...

...As the reporter concluded: "They prayed/or all their enetmes, all together...

...Against the background of an inauthentic Church his own Christian and human authenticity becomes clear...

...The impression is that .he always went to "where things were at," rather than to where he was led by an inherent set of values that can at times leave one alone even among progressives...

...BOOKS What R e a l l y / / a p l N . , ~ d 1'o The Class o f ' 6 5 ? MICHAEL MEDVED and DAVID WALLECHINSKY Random House, $10 While browsing in a bookstore recently, I heard an intense young clerk describe this book to a customer as a study of "the Cultural Revolution's impact on the lives of our generation...

...They record the stories of individual members of the generation, told in their own words...

...I pass over Pike's interest in spiritual:-sm and the long and tedious examination by his biographers of the psychic phenomena in which he was involved...

...As with spiritualistic phenomena generally, the greater problem is the lack of meaning, not the defective evidence...

...Two witnesses, Bishop Robinson and, more importantly, his close associate, Darby Betts, declared of Pike that he never listened...

...I finished, then, the first part with Commonweal: 53 a decidedly negative view of Pike...

...With all his personal failings, Pike, not his Church, was the bearer of the Spirit...

...Not nihilistic or maudlin, for it includes glimpses of individual success and acts of personal and political courage...

...He had "a wandering eye and not infrequently wandered with it...

...His inability to cope with his unloved but obstinately clinging mistress, Maren Bergrud, and his undignified response to her suicide came from a man unable to face responsibly what he had done and what he was...

...It is difficult to distinguish how much was the expression of himself and how much the result of his manipulation by others...

...But, as most of us have been forced to admit, these great expectations have not been fulfilled, neither in our parents' terms nor in our own...

...These profiles imply some of the common characteristics of our generation, without slighting its complexity and variety...

...But in fact it was an intellectual response of boyish naivet& to the cultural complexities in which the Christian faith is now enmeshed...

...There was an uncertainty in his personal and social relationships which made his responses unreliable...

...Oddly at first, but I think perceptively, Darby Betts, who knew him more than most, suggests that he should have been a celibate because he sacririced everything and everybody to his work...

...Without entering into the details of the heresy charges and of the canonical difficulties surrounding his marriages, I cannot do more here than state my own judgment...

...His comment immediately aroused my skepticism, for the loose family of pseudo-sociological phenomena known as the "New Consciousness," "The Movement," the "Drug Culture," the "Sexual Revolution" and the "Aquarian Age" has elicited more superficiality, empty counter-cultural jargon, and sheer nonsense from American writers than any other area of our national life during the Sixties and Seventies...

...We haven't had a chance to consult about it," was the reply...

...Bluntly, the Episcopal Church in its dealings with Pike showed itself as a corrupt institution, representing a degraded form of human social existence, with a false set of values...

...That is not the bold living out of a new morality, but the disordered experienee of an unintegrated personality...

...But painful, in the way ~hat remembrances of any passage from innocence to experience can be...

...But the malice of those threatened men sprang from the denial embodied in the narrow institutions of their Church of those values which constitute human liberation...

...His irregular sexual behavior tells the same story...

...Hence, for example, the inadequacy of his first reaction to the burning of draft records, namely disapproval, because "It's illegal...

...raThe Death and Life of Bishop pike remark, remembering Pike's desire to experience everything and the difllculty therefore of imagining a celibate Pike But his first thought is truer than he realized...

...But this was not a lack of courage, but the failure of social connection of the free-floating "celibate...

...Worse, his going into the desert with only two bottles of Coca-Cola for drink was a lack of common sense that symbolically pointed up the empty unreality of the whole enterprise...

...In contrast, Pike in his life within it and struggle against it stood for a genuine desire for truth and reality, for freedom and generosity, together with a sober recognition of the value of suffering and of the transfiguration it could bring...

...A few indicators must sufftce...

...He "liked his women on the plump side, he confided more than once t o close friends...

...The journalist asked a dignitary--"Can't you guys even pray/or Pike...

...Accordingly, this is a rather sad book...

...The narrative, which is not arranged chronologically, is divided into two parts, each offering a different portrait...

...The biographers are over-concerned to sift the evidence and establish what actually occurred and how...

...It checked, infected and disorted his intellectual contribution to society and to the enterprise of human liberation...

...I have to take the figure of Bishop Pike as presented in the narrative of Stringfellow and Towne and discuss the values and disvalnes it embodies, leaving to others the question how far the personage of their narrative corresponds to the real, historical person...

...In selecting the members of this Palisades High senior class as the focus for its 1965 cover story on "Today's Teenagers," Time magazine presented them as exemplars of "the smarter, subtler, and more sophisticated kids . . . pouring into and out of more expert, exacting, and experimental schools...

...Bet~s immediately withdraws the The days when Bishop Pike was missing in the Holy Land coincided with a general convention o~ the Episcopal Church held at Notre Dame University...

...A newspaperman tells me that he noted no prayer was said at the convention when the report o/ Pike lost first reached South Bend...

...With all his pastoral concern, Pike was not in touch with others, and the incessant talk reveals a person closed off against the deeper springs of his own self...

...Medved and Wallechinsky pull it off by exercising, for the most part, a wise forbearance from the facile analyses and gauche generalizations which characterize so much of the writing on the subject...

...At the next session, my in/ormant reports, there was a prayer---a "composite" prayer, he called it, mentioning in the same breath Bishop Pike and Ho Chi Minh...

...The second part places him in the context of the Church...

...What I saw in the first part was a person showing a bright facade, but within sadly estranged from the reality of himself, of others and of the world around him...

...In retrospect his life may be seen as a long struggle to free himself from organized Christianity, beginning with his departure from the Roman Catholic Church and ending shortly before his death with the announcement of his departure from the Episcopal Church and the recognition that the organized Church was a sick--even dyingNinstitution...

...It seemed only reasonable to predict, as the article did in its subtitle, that they were "on the fringe of a golden era...

...I may merely note that the account is wellwritten, the documentation without apparent gaps and, judged by internal criteria, the interpretation plausible, consistent and honest...

...On one notable occasion, Fisher, when visiting him as Archbishop of Canterbury, told him bluntly to shut up, but even Fisher could not stop the endless verbal flow and get him to listen...

...And, of those to whom much is given, much is expected...

...However, when I turned to the second part my evaluation gradually changed and I came to see Pike as indeed a flawed but essentially good and noble person...

...Organized religion was the curse of Bishop Pike...

...Bishop Pike's life showed a disconnection from the reality of other persons and society, characteristic of many celibates...

...One had to fight to be heard by him...

...One way or the other, it did not alter my assessment of him...

...There is of course much in it that calls for positive comment upon him, but the negative elements predominated for me...

...The malice of churchmen against him amounted, as StringfeUow rightly observes, to murder...

...It did not help but exacerbated the failings of his character as an individual...

...He was not in fact responding to the reality of the desert, but to his own subjective purposes and mental formulations...

...It was a kind of inadequate socialization...

...What changes one's view of Pike is the contrast that emerges between the values he stood for and the values represented by the Church...

...Although all his life he supported the right causes, he lacked truly internalized criteria for judging them...

...The question his biography provokes is how to prevent the destructive effects of religious institutions when these are in a state of rot because deprived of an adequate functional relationship with society...

...I was gratified to find, however, that the authors actually managed to THE CLASS OF '65 ED MeCO~I.I,E deliver what the blurb on their book's packet promises: "a remarkable social history of a generation . . . and of the America in w~ich it came of age...

...They were, as the authors ironically observe, "part of the healthiest, most beautiful, best educated, and most affluent generation in the history of the world...

...It is a book whose value lies not so much in its own insights or conclusions as in the sober 21 7a~m'y 1977:54...

...What Really Happened basically consists of the judiciously edited transcripts of interviews with 30 of the authors' olassmates at Palisades High School in suburban Los Angeles...