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.