Nothing that James Pike touched seemed quite the same thereafter. People, ideas, institutions: none of them was immune to the intensity of his presence. All his life he pushed himself at such a headlong pace into anything new—a new project, a new theory, a new friendship—that he often seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His role was to sting minds, being provocative rather than profound. His life was one of dazzling transitions that sometimes made him seem unstable—from attorney to churchman, from Catholic to Protestant, from bishop to dropout. Recently he had turned spiritualist. His last transition—his disappearance and almost certain death in the Judean desert—was the strangest of all.
A life so intense must exact its costs. Pike read, wrote and talked about theology, but he seldom had time to do his own serious thinking. Although books poured out of his typewriter as fast as words clicked off his tongue, he was not a theologian but a publicist of theology. His pace took its toll in personal as well as intellectual terms. He admitted at one point that he had become an alcoholic. He chain-smoked so frantically that he sometimes had two or three cigarettes going at the same time. But in recent years he had quit both alcohol and tobacco cold.
There were deep personal troubles. His 25-year marriage to Esther Yanofsky Pike, his second wife, ended in divorce in 1967. Less explicable in terms of his own energetic personality, but even more tragic, were the suicides of two people close to him. One had been Pike's personal secretary and close friend. The other was his 20-year-old eldest son, James Jr., who shot himself in a New York hotel in 1966. Not long after that tragedy, Pike began involving himself in psychic research and spiritualism. His efforts to reach his dead son were unabashedly and painfully recorded in his most recent book, The Other Side, which he wrote with Diane Kennedy, later to be his third wife.
Glib Sermons. Pike's earlier interest in religion was far more prosaic. Raised a Roman Catholic, he rejected Roman Catholicism in college, drifted into agnosticism, and married briefly (the marriage was later annulled by the Episcopal Church). He became a lawyer and joined the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. Religion did not re-enter his life until after his second marriage, when as a wartime Navy intelligence officer he started going to church again—the Episcopal Church. A deacon by war's end, Pike zipped through heady advanced courses at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, and was ordained in 1946.