Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  One might have expected the BFC and CWLF to engage with each other, or cooperate in some way, given they both considered themselves “disciples of Jesus,” but that wasn’t the case. The CWLF had landed right in the middle of what Richard York no doubt saw as the BFC’s turf. And even if the BFC was nominally ecumenical, York was Episcopalian, and certainly wouldn’t have defined himself as “Evangelical” nor would he have had any desire to associate himself in any way with the right wing Campus Crusade for Christ.

  There were clear differences in style and substance between BFC and CWLF, and personal and territorial rivalries kept the two groups of radical believers separate as each “church” continued on its own particular trajectory. York’s BFC was far more integrated into the secular Movement as organized in Berkeley, and CWLF had, at best, an ambivalent and ambiguous relationship to the Movement it hoped to “save.” Swartz describes a confrontation that might have been typical in the early years of the CWLF. He wrote “ahead of leftist activists in October 1969, CWLFers reserved the steps of Sproul Hall for a lecture by Chinese refugee Calvin Chao on the evils of Mao and the virtues of Christ.” In response, the “inflamed antiwar activists and Maoists set up an amplifier next to Chao, threw rocks into the crowd, and set fire to the nearby ROTC Building.”8

  Nevertheless, despite the early hostility of the Left toward CWLF—which included a spoof flyer headlined “Jump for Jesus! Leap for the Lord!” inviting believers to join CWLF in a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge—there was also a gradual accommodation, and even, on some issues, a convergence, of the secular Left with the CWLF and other radical Christians. For an increasing number of CWLFers engaging with the radical community of Berkeley, the meaning of “witness” gradually shifted from its Evangelical definition of “saving souls” to the more socio-political meaning it had had for those associated with the Berkeley Free Church.

  The CWLF had split the year before I arrived in Berkeley when Jack Sparks and other Campus Crusade leaders decided to move toward affiliation with the Orthodox Church of America. Those who remained regrouped as the Berkeley Christian Coalition (BCC) and began to organize themselves less officially as the House Church of Berkeley (HCOB).

  I soon found a place for myself on the margins of the BCC community and the HCOB, right where I wanted to be. I was perfectly happy to hang out in the basement of Dwight House, especially on Sundays during occasional long afternoon HCOB meetings that followed morning worship services (the House Church was meeting at Dwight House at that time). I suffered through only one of those meetings, and afterwards I fled downstairs where I joined a small group of ex-hippie, recovering, and not-so recovering, drug addicts, alcoholics, and other denizens, refugees from Telegraph Avenue and the four corners of the American Empire. There in the labyrinth of the basement we smoked cigarettes and had long, wandering, intellectual conversations such as nothing I’d experienced in Oklahoma, or anywhere else for that matter. Sometimes a few of us would wander down to Telegraph Avenue and hang out in a café, drinking espresso, and then, of course, the conversations would become even more animated.

  I learned about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the German Confessional Church that resisted Hitler. I was introduced to Thomas Merton, and began reading Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, and the other Existentialists whose books I found at Moe’s Bookstore. With the help of new “­comrades-of-the-cross” I was able to revise my ideas of what Christianity was and explore new, unfamiliar traditions and trajectories others had taken. Unlike the Christian circles I’d passed through in the Bible Belt, here questions, doubts, and challenges were welcomed, and even expected. My new Christian friends laughed at Fundamentalism, yawned at Evangelicalism, sneered at liberal Christianity, and proudly embraced a worldly-wise and radical Christianity.

  I spent evenings with these friends watching double-feature movies of world cinema at the local theaters. I was particularly moved by the Italian films of the seventies: Fellini, Wertmueller, Pasolini, Bertolucci; the French New Wave; Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, Czech: every night a new double-bill of the best films in the world, and the tickets were only $2! A few of the rowdier in the church—and I was immediately one of them—would have regular parties in their rooms at Dwight House and one or two of us would often duck out to smoke marijuana and wander in a daze through the University of California (UC) campus. Together we formed a subculture under the subculture of the HCOB.

  HCOB was making a conscious effort to build a sense of community in the church, and to explore Christian alternatives to mainstream Protestantism. This led to an emerging interest of the community in Anabaptist9 theology, which fit well with the anti-war, pacifist stance the BCC inherited from CWLF, although some notables, like Radix Magazine editor, Sharon Gallagher, came from families with some roots in Anabaptism. The interest in Anabaptist theology also was the result of a recent visit to the community by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.10

  Yoder and other Anabaptist theologians argued that the early Christian Church of Jesus and his followers had been radical and pacifist but that had changed with the “Constantinian shift” in 312 A.D. That was when the Roman emperor Constantine had a vision just before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in which he saw a cross above the sun and heard the words, “by this sign you will conquer.” Although the shift from an anti-imperialist revolutionary religion of the colonized to a militarized, establishment religion of empire was gradual, with the Constantinian shift the Church had been subverted and perverted.

  According to this narrative, there followed numerous attempts of believers to return to the original faith of Jesus, and these included the monastic movements, the spiritual and even the “heretical” movements of the Middle Ages. But only with the coming of the Anabaptists’ “Radical Reformation,” beginning with Peter Waldo and his followers in the late twelfth century, did a serious turn back to Christ’s teachings occur in the West. This led to a crisis of authority as Medieval Christians asked what exactly constituted “Christ’s teachings,” and who represented them, but it also represented the beginnings of a radical political tradition in the West that would grow out of its religious roots and take distinct secular forms. As Norman Cohn wrote of the Medieval millenarian and apocalyptic movements’ survival into our own day, “stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are still with us.”11 They certainly were with a few of us in the HCOB, even if the revolutionary movements of Christianity weren’t yet on my agenda, and the same spirit was alive and well in Berkeley, even if expressed in the hip argot of the 1970s.

  Radical Catholics, seekers of various sorts, gnostic mystics, and old hippies cycled through the HCOB as well as the collective households, either visiting or staying on for a while. This was especially true of Dwight House, which every imaginable form of humanity passed through, some of them saints, and true prophets and people of uncommon wisdom, depth, and compassion. But there were also the others, each with his or her own unique worldview, con, or delusion, depending on the person. Both saint and sinner found some corner of the House Church to rest in, although some may have never gotten far beyond the entryway. This was, after all, Northern California, a region that has always offered the tantalizing scent of utopia.

  Chief among the many reasons I liked hanging out in the Dwight House basement was because that’s where Karen Bostrom lived, a delicate woman with long, blond hair, a tough facade and a great, but wounded, heart. She would become my first wife in a relationship that, perhaps, was doomed from the start.

  We married less than a year into my time in Berkeley, and I believe we were the first marriage to take place in HCOB. Within a month we’d began to encounter what I would only recognize much too late as insuperable problems. Less than a year into our marriage we went off for six months to live and work in Switzerland, passing part of the time at Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri.12 By then I had a deeper affection for the secular philosophers Schaeffer criticized and a greater respect for their
ideas than I did for Schaeffer and his Evangelical Reformed theology. I found myself challenging the Schaeffer dogma at every meal, and soon Karen and I left the community. A friend in Lausanne got us in contact with a local family who needed help tending their milk cows when they went up into the high slopes for summer grazing. I applied for the job and they hired me so I went to work in the mountains as a “cowboy.”

  I’d brought with me three books, and these would become my only reading for the next couple of months I worked outside of Villars in the high slopes: the Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, The Crooked Lines of God, by William Everson/Brother Antoninus, and a copy of Slavery and Freedom, by Nicolas Berdyaev. I had ample time to read and while the poetry of Everson and Eliot would become a form of devotion for me, Berdyaev would begin a new transformation in my heart and mind. His “mystical anarchism,” as it has been called, was a particular comfort to me there as I passed hours of isolation in the high slopes of Switzerland: an idyllic context for a descent into hell.

  The Russian philosopher had deeply inspired Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who had “indoctrinated” Dorothy Day with Berdyaev’s “personalist socialism.”13 Berdyaev himself had referred to the personalists around the French magazine Esprit (Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, and others) as being “the most interesting movement” in Western, Catholic Christianity, and “in Protestantism the most remarkable figure is [Christoph] Blumhardt.” Christoph Blumhardt was a founder of Christian Socialism in Germany and Switzerland, an influence on the young Herman Hesse and close to the Anabaptist Hutterian Brethren.

  Toward the end of his life Berdyaev believed that “the world is entering upon a socialist and communal period,” but he continued to reject “the metaphysical untruth of collectivism, which denies personal character and the freedom of the creative act.” For Berdyaev, the creative act was the greatest human endeavor because “in creative activity there lies a mystery which cannot be rationalized nor reduced to any form of determinism, nor in fact to anything coming from outside.”14

  Rejecting both communism and capitalism, Berdyaev insisted on a communitarianism based on respect for the individual’s personality and sobornost, a Russian concept meaning “spiritual community or common life.” He detested Russian communism for “leveling society” and reducing all human endeavor to the lowest-common denominator; he had an equal disgust for the selfish individualism of the United States, a country he refused to visit. Berdyaev’s socialism had a Nietzschean side to it, and so he also had great disdain for bourgeois culture.

  After years in the Evangelical tradition that advocated a certain passivity before God—since humanity can do nothing to save itself but “believe in Jesus”—and a distinctly negative view of “sinful” human nature, Berdyaev’s optimism, his Nietzschean exultation in human will and his Orthodox universalism, was a great relief. It also presented itself as a path out of my emotional hell as my first marriage disintegrated.

  I studied Berdyaev in the solitude of the chalet, looking out the windows occasionally to rest my eyes on, and marvel at, the enormous mountains and beautiful green valleys painted with cascades of wildflowers. I read Eliot and Everson, lingering especially over their religious works like Eliot’s “Choruses from the Rock” and his “Four Quartets,” and the marvelous devotional poems of Everson’s The Crooked Lines of God.

  My wife Karen had gotten a job in a school teaching children English, and she made the trip down the valley every day to work while I stayed at the chalet tending the cows. Impossibly, we both were becoming more depressed in the wonderland of the Swiss Alps. This paradise of majestic mountains and rivers, serene forested slopes leading up to bare rocky crags and winding green valleys would have been the perfect setting for a romantic first year of marriage, except that now Karen had decided she wanted to return to California and file for divorce.

  I followed her home and soon I was back in Berkeley where I picked up my old life again, now with eighty-five cents in my pocket, no work, no place to live, and even further out on the margins of the Christian community. Fortunately I ran into Marc Batko, a street theologian and translator of German theology, and he offered me the floor of his studio to sleep on until I could get on my feet.

  I eventually put together enough part-time work that I was able to get a room of my own, and then I got steady work in Logos Christian Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue.

  At Logos Bookstore I was introduced to a whole new world of theology. At first my job was simply to open boxes of books and stock the shelves under the management of the bookbuyer, a brilliant and likeable man a few years younger than me named John Young. He had long hair and a beard and he knew every book in the store and the whole field of theological writings. The bookstore was owned by an Evangelical couple from over the hill in the more conservative area of Walnut Creek, but John had very eclectic tastes and he had a special interest in the obscure areas of Patristic theol­ogy, Catholic Scholasticism, and Eastern Orthodox theology so he kept the second floor stocked with the “good stuff.”

  It was the Eastern Orthodox theology that most interested me as I continued to study the works of Nicolas Berdyaev. I explored Timothy “Callistos” Ware’s history of the Orthodox Church, and then went on to read other modern theologians like John Meyendorff and Vladimir Lossky before plunging into the writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian’s writings on “Divine Light” and Gregory Palamas’s theology of the “Uncreated Energies of God,” and other mystical notions central to the Orthodox church, but strangely paralleling ideas also found among Quakers and other “unorthodox” western mystics.

  The Eastern Orthodox faith has traditionally been characterized as “optimistic” by contrast with the Roman Catholic and Protestant West with its emphasis on Augustine’s notion of “original sin.” The story of Jesus is framed in the West by Roman legalism: God offered his Son to pay for the sins of humanity in a legal process by which one life is offered to redeem another. In Orthodoxy the point is not to be “saved” but rather to join God in the work of continuing creation. The stress is put on humanity’s divinity, the fact that we were “created in the image of God” and have within us a divine nature. Berdyaev summed up the Orthodox view by saying that humanity’s “chief end is not salvation, but rather to mount up on the wings of creativity.” Like other Orthodox theologians and philosophers, Berdyaev believed in theosis or “divinization,” based on the idea proposed by the early Church Father Irenaeus: “if the Word (Jesus) has been made man (sic) it is so that men may be made gods.” The Orthodox believes that through active co-creation, humanity finds what Aristotle would call its “entelechy” or end and meaning.

  Meanwhile, I moved to Berkeley Way in Berkeley, thanks to Dave Smith, a UC philosophy student I knew from HCOB who invited me into a very affordable, but unstable and disastrously dirty and cluttered house. Upstairs and in the rear lived an ex-convict, we’ll call Aaron, who slept on a table in the center of his room which was otherwise almost bare. On the two entrance doors to the room he had padlocks installed on the inside. Aaron was already in the process of moving out as I came in. Dave lived in a room just off the kitchen, and in the front lived one of the owners, Calhoun Phifer, a very affable middle-aged ex-Cal student who had worked for the Union Pacific Railroad for the past few decades. And what a very dear, delightful, and generous soul Calhoun Phifer was. On a weekly basis he cooked a huge meal for everyone and left the kitchen a complete mess. But the whole house was really a mess. The dining room was full of stacks of dishes: they covered the central wooden table, the bookshelves, and they had even begun to grow beside the fireplace, where burnable trash was incinerated. There seemed to be a greasy layer over everything in the common area, on top of which were several layers of dust.

  Eventually Dave moved in two other Christian philo­sophers, Kevin Rath and Steve Lohrey. When Calhoun moved out, the four of us occupied the house, although other housemates were always coming or going, including an outc
ast or two from the streets or the House Church, and usually a guest or two occupying the living room. Our house eventually became known around our community as “Calhoun House” in honor of our gracious landlord, and little by little it took on its own identity as a “party house” where the wilder members of the House Church would come to drink, listen to music, and hang out or spend an afternoon drinking coffee and talking philosophy or politics.

  I went to work for Radix Magazine part time as circulation manager. This was simply a fancier title for the work I’d done at BCC as mail clerk, since my Radix job involved mailing out the bi-monthly magazine. I also took it on myself as part of my job to promote the magazine through poetry readings and an occasional art exhibit in the community.

  In fact, since my divorce the only thing that kept me going was creative expression in poetry. We had a small poetry group that had initially been formed around the HCOB, and we met monthly to work on poetry. There were some very talented writers in the group, including Fr. William Ruddy, who eventually introduced me to his friend, the poet William Everson, when we took a trip to Everson’s home in Davenport, just outside of Santa Cruz.

  William Everson (Brother Antoninus) by that time appeared to be far older than his sixty-seven years, with his white hair and beard and the tremor resulting from Parkinson’s Disease. Be he was also very friendly and down-to-earth and patient and we quickly became very comfortable with each other. As we left I invited the old poet up to read in Berkeley and he accepted the invitation. For the occasion I produced a small pamphlet of poems from poets who were on the bill for that night’s reading and called it Poems of the Third Epoch. Everson was curious about the title and I explained that it referred to the Trinitarian conception of history originating in Joachim di Fiores and developed in Nicolas Berdyaev as the epoch of the Father (the Old Testament period), the Son (the New Testament period) and the Holy Spirit (“the new epoch of creativity in a testament being written on the human heart”). As I wrote in a revised version of the pamphlet, I saw “these three epochs exemplified on a personal level in the career of William Everson.”15