My grandmother somehow had managed to save $40 from her Social Security checks and the sale of quilts she made, at $25 per quilt, and she secretly passed the money on to me so I wouldn’t go hungry hitchhiking to Montreal and back. She didn’t want the other grandchildren to know she gave me the money and she made me promise not to tell them because, as she put it, “they’d all be a-wantin’ some money, and I ain’t got no more to give ’em.”
James and another artist named David Park and I spent our days washing dishes in the hotel, and evenings studying the Bible and Bible prophecy. The owner of the hotel was a Darbyite, or at least a dispensationalist, and he had a long map of time as taken from the bible up on the wall of his study that extended from near the doorway to the desk by the window at the far side of the room.4 It started with 4004 B.C. when God made Adam and eve, and it ended somewhere in the near future, quickly moving through the Great Tribulation, the coming of the Anti-Christ, the Rapture of the Faithful when they rise from the graves to meet Jesus at his Second Coming, and finally, the coming of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the end of time. I no longer remember the old man’s name, but he dwelt long on the map and studied the final section carefully, certain that the rapture would happen before he saw death. Now, more than forty years later, I believe, at last, he may have been proven wrong.
We took hikes into the mountains when we could, up steep paths through deep forests that led to alpine meadows from which we could see other mountains and valleys, dotted with villages. Once or twice I joined the Baptist youth on an evening of carousing in a local café where James’s brother David practiced the only French he knew on the waiter, “une autre bouteille de vin, s’il vous plait!” We became so drunk we had to hold each other up as we walked back down the narrow streets to the hotel. On the way we slipped into a tent at a traditional Alpine music show and watched Swiss cowboys dressed in their traditional garb play songs in German and French, slapping their knees as they took elaborate steps in a strange traditional dance. We were discovered and thrown out into the night and we giggled loudly as we continued our way, with great effort, back to the hotel.
The evening studies were geared toward somewhat intellectual Baptists so we were introduced to C. S. Lewis (whose books I’d already read), Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, and others. We also had guest speakers visiting, and it was one of these, Dr. James Parker, “Jim,” who had the greatest impact on me.
Jim only stayed with us briefly, but I recall his discussion of “radical Christianity” and the “radical discipleship” of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He brought copies of two alternative newspapers: The Post-American (later changed to Sojourners) from the Sojourners community in Washington D.C., and Right On (later changed to Radix Magazine) from the Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) in Berkeley, California. As I read through the magazines I became very excited. Here I met, in print, Christians who understood their faith as I did. There were articles by William Stringfellow, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement, Phil and Daniel Berrigan, William Everson/Brother Antoninus, E.F. Schumacher, and many others. I no longer felt crazy, as I had for the previous few years, reading the Bible as a hippie in the Bible Belt and thinking I was reading out of a different book from the one everyone else had.
A few months later, back home at college in Durant, Oklahoma, I came across a stack of Right On! newspapers at the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship building. I took one and read the paper from cover to cover and then subscribed.
I was studying journalism at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and one day I heard a rumor that the ROTC would be moving in and occupying two floors of campus dormitories, likely displacing other students in the process. I decided to write up the story, so I went to the dean’s office to see if I could get an interview. His secretary asked what I wanted to talk to the dean about, and I told her. She went into his office and returned a few minutes later to say he was busy and couldn’t meet with me. I returned right away to the office of the school newspaper and a few minutes later Ken Nichols, the head of the Journalism Department came in and said he wanted to talk to me. He’d evidently just gotten off the phone with the dean, and told me I couldn’t write the story. This was my second encounter with censorship in the educational system. I was getting the message loud and clear that “the press is free to those who own it.”
By early summer 1976 I decided to drop out of college and hitchhike to California. My father didn’t ordinarily give me much advice because he knew I probably wouldn’t take it anyway, but on my final morning home, as I prepared to leave, he decided to do what he could to dissuade me from what he suspected might be a disastrous trip to Sodom and Gomorrah, or at least prepare me for what he thought I would find there. First he warned me to watch out for the transvestites of San Francisco, who, he said, were quite convincing until you felt the bulge under their dresses. When he thought I grasped the dangers of the transvestites, he turned to the second lesson. This one he’d doubtlessly learned when he was living in Oakland in the late thirties and it was based on the simple fact that Californians hated Okies. “You gonna find out when you get out there they gon’ treat you worse than a dog,” he finished.
“Dad,” I responded, probably in a tone of mock exhaustion, “people in California will never know where I’m from. I don’t have an Okie accent.”
At that point he gave up. We loaded my pack in the car, I kissed my mother goodbye and my father drove me to the interstate where I would begin hitchhiking into my new life in California.
Chapter Three: Berkeley: The Utopia after the Revolution
Fortunately, in 1976 a considerable number of people in Berkeley didn’t yet know “the Sixties” had ended. Graffiti for the New World Liberation Front, “NWLF,” sprayed in red on the wall facing People’s Park indicated that some Marxist-Leninist-Maoist guerrilla activity was ongoing in the area, even if most armed revolutionary activity had come to an end with the dramatic, bloody attack on the Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles two years before. There were still many signs of an active counterculture, like food coops, housing and worker cooperatives, and a lively cultural scene with many regular poetry readings, a number of repertory movie theaters, active café life and, of course, concerts and happenings, and everything else, at People’s Park. It was, for me, a little paradise, the utopia I’d sought my whole life as I hitchhiked around the US, but never, until now, knew actually existed.
I had only the vaguest notion of the recent history of Berkeley, and even less familiarity with the recent history of radical Christian participation in what had been called “the Movement.”1 Aside from a handful of Baptist hippies, like James Elaine, most of the “Jesus people” I’d known up to that point were just fundamentalists or, at best, Evangelicals with sideburns, long hair and sandals. Until my arrival in Berkeley I’d been relatively isolated from the Left wing of the Jesus movement, and until I’d been introduced to Right On! by Jim Parker in Switzerland, I hadn’t even known there was a Left wing. In Berkeley, I was soon to discover, there were hippie Christians, and early on many of them had been allies, if not collaborators, with secular leftists in what they had seen as a revolutionary process.
Certainly, the Left wing or, what one writer has called “the Moral Minority,” of the Christian churches, was never granted a big role in North American society, and it certainly garnered fewer news headlines than did Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” and other right wing Christian groups.2 Nevertheless, the acts of courage and protest of the “moral minority” were greater than their numbers, even if those acts were routinely dismissed or ignored by the press. There were, for instance, the radical Quakers, and many other radical Christians, who had made up the core of the Abolition movement of the 19th century, and had protested virtually every imperial campaign the US had engaged in from the Mexican-American War on. The Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), went on peace and human aid missions to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, putting the spotlight back on this small group on the margins of the