Wednesday, December 28, 2022

“Histoire de Jour”

"What's your soup du jour today?" "Cream of tomato, just like every day."


Yuval Harari notes that while it’s difficult to get 20 baboons to coordinate any organized effort that would produce a widespread effect, homo sapiens has been successful in creating narratives that have allowed our species to organize large-scale efforts to subdue and exploit every inch of the universe that we can reach. Propaganda for the superiority of the human race.. If 20 baboons had been able to listen to a convincing narrative and organize themselves, ”The Planet of the Apes'' might be our reality.


In the history of religions, creating and propagating a supernatural narrative spearheaded the seemingly invincible superiority of monotheism. Stories of the resurrection of Jesus follow Moses’s Exodus, which scholarship has shown to be rabbinic creation after the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple. Then about 600 years after Jesus, the Prophet was visited by the Archangel Gabriel and set the course for the world to experience a more militant version of monotheism. In another part of the world, stories about the Enlightenment of the Buddha touch on another side of the human psyche that propelled the practice of meditation to legitimacy. 


There are many narratives in the political sphere from Mao Zedong’s Long March to Lincoln’s studying law by candlelight; they also help solidify support of large numbers of people to secure a common goal.



The Origin of the Enneagram

As one of  Dr. Claudio Naranjo’s first students when he introduced the system organized as a nine-pointed diagram that he’d learned from Oscar Ichazo, I’ve had a long standing interest in what’s become known as the Western transmission of the Enneagram. Though I’ve written about it before, recently I’ve become fascinated by competing narratives about its esoteric roots. There is really very little difference here from the phenomenon that Harari describes. The proponents of particular styles of enneagram work have crafted creation narratives to take their products to the marketplace. At least one side effect of enlightening mankind is to separate you from your money.

This brand of histoire de jour is at best self-serving, pieced together from bits and pieces of hearsay evidence, and in some cases, outright fraud. 


Here is a preposterous statement on the first page of Helen Palmer’s website for her Narrative Tradition.


With a history of centuries, the Enneagram is arguably the oldest human development system on the planet.  During the past decade, the system has undergone a renewal of scholarly attention within the context of current personality typologies. 


In the interest of the scholarly attention that Ms. Palmer lauds, here’s the clear, distinct, identifiable historical beginning of the Narrative tradition of the Enneagram. The history of centuries condensed into something a bit shy of 50 years. I was present, voila!


In the late Spring of 1975,. I found myself in a large living room of a non-descript house on Berkeley’s Arlington. Kathy Speeth had organized a series of nine evening presentations about the Enneagram for the “therapeutic” community. In attendance 15 or so therapists who are interested in the Enneagram but not members of Naranjo’s SAT group. Among them was Helen Palmer, who had been hearing about the Enneagram from Claudio’s students in her own practice of psychic readings.


I remember these conversations quite clearly. They were a departure from the usual work of Naranjo's SAT group. Speeth and Bob Ochs had asked me to be on a ‘panel’ of Seven’s, ego ‘Plan’ as both Ichazo and Naranjo referred to the point “Gluttony.” This was the first time several people of the same fixation spoke in front of a group and answered questions (the identical format of Narrative Tradition). There was at least one evening for each of the 9 major fixations.


Naranjo directed the sessions, laying a foundation with descriptions of the 9 points. In itself this was not unusual, but his comments were definitely tailored for an audience of trained psychologists, and not the more conversational tone aimed at a student’s personal work that he normally used. The authentic tone of self observation may have been present, but I felt that the obligation of explanation (perhaps performance) distorted the feeling of each point.


Other enneagram enthusiasts proffer other histoires and sources. For example:


  • Egyptian Gnosis, apparently because in Heliopolis, the center of worship of the Ennead, there were nine deities of ancient Egyptian Mythology about which we know next to nothing. 

  • Some proponents of the system trace the variations of the Enneagram symbol to the sacred geometry of Pythagorean mathematicians and mystical mathematics, but Pythagoras left no clear teachings though apparently he once went to Heliopolis with its nine gods, or something.

  • Plotinus’s Enneads. There! A use of the Greek word for 9. However we have to credit a dude named Porphyry for the somewhat artificial division of Plotinus’s writings into six groups of nine. Thus I think that connecting the Enneagram with neo-Platonic thought is a stretch too far.

  • Adam and the Kabbalistic Trees--leave no stone unturned, and rope in Jewish seekers.

  • The Secret Teachings of Jesus (via the Desert Fathers)--sure why not, but far more persuasive is the Jesuit connection. The frontispiece of the Arithmologia by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher(1601–1680), published in 1665, shows a figure not identical but somewhat similar to the Enneagram.

  • “Originally created in 1915 by philosopher George Gurdjieff.” This historian sources G. I Gurdjeiff and the Naqshbandi Sufi order a little more than 100 years ago. However there is absolutely zero evidence in the voluminous writings of Gurdjieff that he ever used the Enneagram in the way the Naranjo, Ichazo et al use it. Zero.

  • I am particularly fond of the story that a book fell from a shelf in the esoteric library of Ocsar Ichazo’s uncle in Bolivia and opened to a page with the 9 pointed diagram.

  • Claudio Naranjo claims his source of the teaching were mystical experiences in the Arican desert. He claims the historic origins of the Enneagram are esoteric gnosticism and occultism from channeled material gained from automatic writing and then verified through observation.


While I am persuaded by Professor Harari’s embrace of history as a means of coordinating mass human efforts. I am equally suspicious of lesser enterprises employing the same methodology. These people are selling snake oil. They are using the “histoire de jour” like a fine French restaurant getting rid of yesterday’s leftovers for a profit.


“Something is missing” is a constant storyline running through all these narratives. We lose our connection with the divine and have to reconnect, and in most cases, are unable to complete the circuit without some assistance that costs money. It is one answer to a felt experience of the human condition, but it is just the most accepted answer. There are others, but their popularizers were not as adept as the ones that captured humankind’s attention.


At best these histoires are "Cream of tomato, just like every day." But probably they’re closer to yesterday’s leftovers..


The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy Process


The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy Process

Originally posted July 31, 2004, 1st revision 9/16/2006, 2nd revision 6/6/2011, 3rd revision 5/18/2021

© Kenneth Ireland, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2021



I began research for this paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple, the Origins of the Hoffman Process” when the current owners of Hoffman's licensed intellectual property began to rewrite their marketing copy. They recast Hoffman and his Process, editing out the contributions of many people who worked hard and selflessly to help Hoffman flesh out his rudimentary insight..


There was another purpose behind my writing. I was trying to resolve my reservations about Hoffman and his work by simply recounting facts and events. However, after trying to disentangle Hoffman's bizarre and abusive behaviors from the modality of the Process itself, I see nothing original or other-worldly about his insights or his methodology either as presented nearly 40 years ago or in their current iteration. I'd advise anyone to undertake an ordinary course of therapy with a licensed professional rather than the HQP.


I have just finished a long piece about the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy and my sexual abuse by Hoffman. I intend for it to be part of a larger spiritual memoir, but that will be at least a year out.

 

To be more web friendly I have divided it into Part 1 and Part 2


Introduction


When creating an historical account, you have to start at the beginning to get it right. If you’re lucky some facts, times, and dates can be accurately reconstructed and pinpointed in documents, letters, transcripts and personal calendars. Some of the messy parts of bringing something new into the world will inevitably be buried and lost. The current owners of the Hoffman Process have recast, revised, and distorted the history. They need to create a compelling narrative to sell the Process. I do not rely on the Process for my livelihood which lifts that burden on telling the truth.


I will argue that they are following in Hoffman’s own steps in creating the narrative of a distinguished psychotherapist appearing in a psychic event in order to resolve his botched karma, and create a plausible claim that a tailor from Oakland could be the source of a complete psychological treatment.


The original Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy (FHPT) was created by Bob Hoffman between 1968 and 1973. Claudio Naranjo,the Chilean psychiatrist who introduced the “Enneagram” into the western psycho-spiritual conversation is the best known of the professionals who contributed to Hoffman’s Process, but there were many others. Hoffman sought input from many sources (who sometimes did not even know that he was talking to others about the same issue). But he always attributed the final product to his spirit guide, Dr. Fisher.


The myth that the Process came full blown from a pure source, and neglecting people who did the difficult work of bringing something new into the world is false. In addition, fostering outrageous expectations creates false standards to evaluate personal experience, and makes it  more difficult to use one’s own inspiration to gain self-knowledge and liberation. In other words, it undermines what it sets out to do.


No course of psychotherapy can produce real changes in people if it remains only theory. It changes. It reaches into areas that its creators cannot predict. If promises and expectations cannot be fulfilled, they have to be modified or eliminated. However, this evolution is distinct from marketing. Sadly, in our culture, promoting a brand name, writing persuasive copy, will prevail and in the process the contributions of many talented people are cut and lost. Their contributions were marginalized and their value neglected or attributed to others.


If nothing else, what follows can be an inclusive footnote to the revised story.



My Purpose and Sources


I propose to outline the early development of the FHPT from the basement ‘reading’ room in Hoffman’s clothing store on 15th Street in Oakland to the SAT group process. I will not cover any of the subsequent additions and deletions since the creation of the seven-day format. My focus will be the 13-week process, the exercises and mind trips (now called ‘visualizations’) that remain the framework of the HQP, to see if this yields an insight into how a very simple insight became an expensive course with sequential series of scripted emotional events, a product in the human potential market place.


The primary source of information about the early development of the FHPT is my own experience. In 1972-73, I was in the first SAT group that Naranjo used to create a group process to accomplish “a loving divorce from mother and father” that Hoffman promised. Later in the spring of 1973, I was one of approximately 55 people Hoffman invited to be in his first 13-week group that he himself “took through” the Process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The following year I was trained as an FHPT therapist and group leader which became my primary work for several years. I lead the 13-week processes for PSI and later, I worked privately with smaller groups for another three years.


Another source is Hoffman himself and my conversations with him from 1972 until his death in 1997. Our friendship was strained and painful. While he was alive I could not talk about my observations that gave me some insight into his inner workings, puzzles and deep-seated unhappiness. Extremely concerned about his public image, he asserted that he had to present himself to the world as straight. Most people close to him, certainly those who worked with him, knew that Hoffman was gay, but he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. In this day of liberation and acceptance, his deception and his closeted life, cannot be overlooked. A good case could be argued that the process itself grew out of his conflict about being a man who loved men, his difficulty forming and nurturing close relationships, his creativity and sensitivity, and perhaps some of his inner doubts about the worth of his work.


I do not know all the people who contributed to the development of Hoffman’s work. There are many. I have not included hearsay material from people with whom I did not work or with whom I didn’t have focused conversations. Many disappeared after working with Hoffman and making a significant contribution to the Process, such as Dr. Ernest Pecci, M.D., a psychiatrist who founded PSI, The Center for Psycho-Spiritual Integration, to present the 13-week Process. I trained as a therapist under Pecci and worked with him for more than two years in the 70’s. Pecci’s psychotherapeutic model was influenced by New Age spirituality. My last personal contact with Pecci was a phone call about 1977 when he told me that Hoffman was going to sue everyone that he, Pecci, had trained unless we ceased to offer the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic therapy to the public. (Nearly everyone who was offering some version of the FHPT ceased under Hoffman’s threat of legal action, with the exception of one or two practitioners who had split with Hoffman before PSI, substantially altering or modifying it. He was also not successful in shutting down the Anti-Fisher Hoffman Process that was offered in the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashrams in Pune and Antelope).


Some key people are dead. Julius Brandstatter is the man who coined the word ‘Quadrinity’ to reflect the four aspects of being human—physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional. I met Julius and his wife Miriam when they returned from Israel in the 70’s; their work with Hoffman continued through the re-casting of the Process into the current seven-and-a- half-day format. In the opinion of most observers, their contribution was never fully acknowledged by Hoffman. I had several long conversations with Miriam in 2006. It was she who created the organization and flow for Hoffman’s early sessions. Hoffman would call Miriam in Israel and tell her what he presented that week with SAT, and later in Tolman Hall. Miriam, a trained psychotherapist, then returned what she had presented in Israel, as an orderly, effective outline which Hoffman filed and used for the next Process. Both Julius and Miriam are now dead.


The most important person in this story was dead before Hoffman gave birth to the Process. Dr. Siegfried Fisher assumed the status of legend and myth in the story of the Process as Hoffman’s guide. His name was removed from the original title when his son filed a lawsuit. He said that Hoffman had been his father’s patient and that his professional reputation was threatened by Hoffman’s claims. I will briefly examine both claims below.


Many of the people with whom I had extensive conversations were estranged from Hoffman, among them Ilene Cummings and Stanley Stefancic, who both served as Executive Director of the Institute after Hoffman’s return from Mexico. Besides long and thoughtful discussions about the origins of the Process and the contributions of various players, Stefancic showed me several documents, lists of the unique terms and phrases that were intended as teaching tools in the HQP (e.g. “negative love,” “giving to get,” “illogical logic, nonsensical sense”), as well as descriptions of several elements in the Processes, (including the bitter sweet chocolate ritual, and spirit guide and sanctuary mind trip), that Hoffman and his lawyers prepared when he was considering lawsuits against those he considered pirates. (I have used quotes around words and phrases that Hoffman habitually used to describe either his methodology or the concepts that were derived from the Spiritualist Church.)


Other people were constant friends and supporters from their first meeting with Hoffman until he died. Although I know these people and had many conversations with them, I have not used anything they told me in my presentation because I do not have their permission. Cynthia Merchant, personal assistant to Hoffman and Hoffman Quadrinity Teacher, worked as editor of the lengthy transcripts of Hoffman’s presentations that became the core of today’s Process. Ron Kayne, early supporter, by Hoffman’s admission, created the “guide and sanctuary mind trip,” as well as being the ghost writer for Hoffman’s book, Getting Divorced from Mother and Dad and the first version of The Negative Love Syndrome.


When I became serious about uncovering and documenting the origins of the FHPS, I interviewed several of the members of Naranjo’s first SAT group who had worked individually with Hoffman. Ron Deziel gave me important information about the bare bones of Hoffman’s initial work heavily laced in psychic practice borrowed from the Spiritualist Church.


Most of what I will present is not easily reconciled with the image of an inspired “intuitive,” or kindly and wise Jewish grandfather.However I feel it vital to record another version of Hoffman’s inspiration and preserve it in a small corner of the universe, and especially to note in some detail Naranjo’s contribution. If we allow a story of real creation and inspiration to be sanitized, the contributions of this highly talented man who was present at a certain moment and responded wholeheartedly to Hoffman’s questions and requests without concern for his own personal gain and enrichment might be forgotten.



The Inspiration


I heard Hoffman describe the inspiration for the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy many times. The rather bare outline of this bizarre otherworldly encounter never varied. In the middle of the night in 1967, the figure of a recently departed friend, the psychiatrist Siegfried Fischer, appeared at the foot of his bed and revealed to him the missing link in psychoanalytic therapy: the concept of Negative Love as the stream of negative behaviors unconsciously passed from one generation to the next. Then Fischer’s spirit-being took Hoffman through his own psychic therapy, uncovering the roots of his own inherited patterns of behavior and liberating him with a new understanding that reached into the depths of his emotional being. Hoffman said that he was able to forgive his parents for all the negativity he had experienced growing up. He knew that “everyone is guilty and no one is to blame.” He then severed his karmic connection to his parents’ negativity. Fischer disappeared with the promise to return and assist Hoffman to complete some of his own unfinished work, his karma, and that Hoffman could help him “move on.” Hoffman said he heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fisher how he, a tailor, would enter the world of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the endless cycle of analysis.


Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his wife’s family, a German psychiatrist who managed to escape the country in 1936, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed the basic outline of the Fischer story from the public record. Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40’s and practiced psychotherapy at Langley Porter; he wrote Principles of general psychopathology: an interpretation of the theoretical foundations of psychopathological concepts, (New York, Philosophical Library, 1950).


Hoffman presented a scenario of convivial after-dinner conversations with Fischer. They chatted and argued about the existence of the psychic realm, life after death, and questions about the efficacy of psychotherapy. I can’t overemphasize the Spiritualist Church’s doctrine: “truth” spoken by disembodied spirits to spirits inhabiting human bodies, satisfying karmic obligations. Fischer was the scientific materialist and would have none of it. Hoffman’s telling had the feel of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, the psychic declaring victory after death.


After hearing this part of Hoffman’s story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psycho-analysis, that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy himself. I began to suspect that he had been Fischer’s patient and quit, still in transference. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s patient and he said yes, that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son Michael. I have confirmed through reliable sources that Hoffman himself was Fisher’s patient “for years,” but Hoffman lied about his personal friendship with Fisher in order to present himself as a reliable source.


Fischer’s son maintained that he was never a close personal friend of Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. Hoffman continued to use “Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy,” and Fischer's son, David, filed a lawsuit against Hoffman. Hoffman did not contest David’s claim, and changed the name of the FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, Hoffman still claimed, both in private conversation and group presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide. 


Hoffman claimed that Fischer guided him as he began to work with people who started to come to him for psychic readings. From my conversations with several people who did psychic therapy with Hoffman in the “reading room” of his 15th Street shop, Hoffman’s initial work contained the following elements. After some discussion of the problems that were plaguing a person’s life (and legendary “forceful” persuasion), and making lists of his or her parents' negative traits, Hoffman instructed clients to write an emotionally-charged autobiography of their life from birth till puberty. Then he began to direct the “prosecution” of Mother and Dad for programming a defenseless child with negative emotional traits. An “anger letter” to his or her parents capped the prosecution which provided some release as well as giving Hoffman an opportunity to evaluate the depth of the client’s emotional state.


Then Hoffman “psychically read” the emotional history the client’s parents, living or dead, describing events without prior knowledge, often including times and places, that explained and cemented difficult emotional traits into their emotional make up. This was the parents’ “defense”: to see that negative love was passed from one generation to the next. This is the concept of “negative love”: that his or her parents had unwillingly “adopted” these negative traits themselves, driven by their own emotional history and therefore could not be blamed. These deep, psychically verifiable, understandings led to the experience of forgiveness and compassion for one’s parents. “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”


And finally, through the mediation of Fischer and their personal spirit guide, the client got “Closure” by cutting the psychic ties to his or her parents. In a “mind trip,” the client yanked out the umbilical cord that connected his or her emotional child to their parents and allowed them to grow up to their chronological age. As an emotional adult, the client could for the first time experience unconditional love for their parents. The tools for breaking the habit of negative behaviors, now just phantom symptoms of imagined hurt, were repetition of positive traits, a process called “recycling,” and avoidance of negative behaviors by “putting your awareness on your awareness” using rudimentary self awareness exercises. There were also tapes of sessions with Hoffman and written negative trait lists and positive alternatives for reinforcement.


The original elements of the Process, according to Ernie Pecci, were the prosecution of Mother and then the defense of Mother, the prosecution of Father and the defense of Father plus the “Closure.”


One other piece was introduced into the FHPS before Naranjo took on creating the group process with Hoffman. The imagined conversation between the client’s emotional child and the emotional child of the parent came from Transactional Analysis. Hoffman no longer read his patients psychically to uncover his or her own parents’ emotional history. Hoffman found facilitators trained in transactional analysis, and adapted an existing technique, a path that he was to follow many times throughout the creation of the Process.

The Development of the Group Process


I have attempted to describe the huge emotional breakthrough that I had over several weeks in that first SAT group in Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. I also talk frankly about Hoffman’s predatory behavior towards me which included sexual abuse as well as my difficulty dealing with it. I’ve written about his clear violation of ethical and legal conduct as well as my struggle with it in several places including "Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." But that is not the subject of this article.


This was the very beginning of the creation of the group Process. It is very clear from Hoffman’s written notes in Stefancic’s possession that Hoffman credited Naranjo for transforming the FHPT into a group process. It is also clear from every interaction between them that I witnessed over more than 20 years, that Naranjo always regarded Hoffman as a modern day shaman. 


Lacking psychological training, Hoffman needed Naranjo’s validation, but at the same time he never trusted the techniques that Naranjo introduced to yield insight. He felt that psychotherapy was at base a misguided enterprise and any kind of self-observation was, at best, far too slow and, at worst, a head game. His style was to evaluate and attack people, then point to their emotional reactions as examples of negative programming, almost always violating the boundaries of professional behavior.


Naranjo was absent from Hoffman’s group interactions and, I suspect, just let Hoffman conduct himself in any way he chose. But Naranjo did craft the interactive exercises for most of the sessions. I will discuss two exercises in some detail, the “bitch session” and the “child/intellect confrontation.” They highlight Naranjo’s major contribution to the Process and laid the groundwork for the experiential HQP.


Hoffman instructed us to list our parents’ negative traits. He defined a negative trait as any behavior that was “giving to get,” “buying love,” “withholding love.” This warped economy of love thwarted the free exchange of affection to satisfy our innate desire to love and be loved. (Naranjo examines Hoffman’s view in The End of Patriarchy). As we listed our parents’ negative traits, Hoffman insisted that we had adopted them, every one of them, even if we had rebelled against them as children and they occurred as negative reactive behavior. He insisted that this was the sum total of what we knew about love, that our emotional life was infantile, and that we gave emotional love in the vain hope of having it returned, deprived of our birthright to give and receive love freely. This simple model became the foil that Hoffman used to reflect our behavior back to us, a rudimentary self-observation: the memory of past behaviors in relation to our parents revealed how we conducted our emotional life. Our list of negative traits became his confrontational tool. In the SAT group, Naranjo also used dyads and other tools of self-observation, notably the study of the enneagram, meditation, and methods adopted from Gestalt, but Hoffman considered those techniques cumbersome and slow.


We were then instructed to take the list of negative traits and recall scenes from our childhood, before puberty, where we had experienced these traits exhibited by our parents, and write down our reactions. Our emotional autobiography was to be as emotional as possible; we were not to censor ourselves as we wrote. (The Emotional Autobiography is no longer used— Hoffman told me that it was not necessary, but I suspect that it took too much time for the compressed version).


That first Fall there were at least five weeks dedicated to this prosecution of Mother. It was mid-October when we began the bitch session. I mention this because it was the first time I noticed Hoffman’s urge to move the process ahead while it appeared to me that Naranjo was testing psychological methodology as applied to the FHPT. My observation was of course obscured by the fact that I was a participant with enormous transference already underway, but when Hoffman ended the SAT group process before it was even half complete is evidence of their tension..


The bitch session, which replaced the “anger letter,” was an experiential expression of anger, directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. It was first conducted with the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and then providing feedback about the depth and expression of the anger. (A personal note here: this experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs in my entire adult life. It took weeks for me to really allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my rage at my mother, it altered the course of my life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted and I had to admit that I was an angry person. But more importantly, I recognized that I had a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I had constructed my life to avoid these feelings. At that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration of myself to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom.)


The introduction of the “bitch session” was important to Hoffman. It was his first experience of psychological work allowing a person to experience the level of emotional release that he had been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also, in my view, pointed to a rapid way to induce the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the HP. Later Pecci introduced another technique for inducing very early infantile feelings, the “primal,” an adaptation of Reichian body work, borrowing its name from the then-popular Primal Scream Therapy; it also continues, I think, to exist in some form in the current HQP.


The next of Naranjo’s contributions that I would like to discuss is what is now known as the “Child/Intellect Bitch Session.” This does not follow the chronological sequence because it actually occurred after Hoffman had begun to do his own work. While I worked in the first FHPT Process, I continued my participation in the SAT group. One night I took the hot seat when Naranjo himself was doing Gestalt therapy. In the FHPT, the client visualizes his or her self as composed of four parts, the physical self, the intellectual self, the spiritual self and the emotional self. The emotional self can assume whatever age where the client or patient feels some block or experiences some incident that remains unresolved. In a dream sequence that I began to act out, alternately taking the role of a stern mother and a vulnerable child, with Naranjo’s coaching, I experienced myself at war with myself, perpetuating in a kind of stalemate, hiding from my sexual feelings and repressing them fearing my mother’s disapproval. Anger and frustration surfaced, and the solution that I had crafted, the choice of the celibate religious life, began to look like just that, a solution I had crafted and not the vocation that I was trying to follow. As a follow up, it was suggested that I try to craft another kind of truce between the emotional child and the intellectual self, represented in the session as my disapproving mother. I was among the first of several people who used the persona of the child and intellect on the hot seat. Very soon Hoffman introduced an exercise where the emotional child and the adult intellect alternately expressed anger and frustration, eventually arriving at a kind of truce. This became known as the Child/Intellect Bitch Session and continues to exist in a different form in the HQP today.


By the end of November, Hoffman ended the group experiment with SAT. He told us that he would take us to a place where we could stop--the defense of mother, and that he would conduct his own 13-week group process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. (I later learned that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and was going to retire to Mexico to either heal or die; that he had made the decision to entrust his group process to Pecci; and that the training in Tolman Hall was to introduce a pool of people to the group process who might be trained as therapists, or ‘teachers’ as we were called.)


A hallmark of the 13-week process was the order and the pace. The specific assignments for each week were due three days after the session; Hoffman reviewed them and his taped comments were back in your hands at the beginning of the next session. In every session Hoffman lectured, shouted, cajoled, confronted, intimidated, humiliated, bullied, abused us. He called us assholes and negative love buyers. Perhaps this behavior forced some people to examine themselves, but it far exceeded professional boundaries appropriate for therapist/teacher, student/patient relationship. Hoffman justified his behavior by claiming that his basic message was so simple that it was hard to grasp without his unyielding confrontation: human beings deserve a satisfying emotional life but are prevented from achieving that goal by the adoption of the negative traits of their parents.


He conducted other portions of his course through “mind trips” and I will mention two of them, the parents’ funeral and the birthday party, because together with the other exercises already mentioned, these fill out nearly every essential element (except “Vindictiveness,” “Play Day,” and “Dark Side”) of present HQP. After the prosecution and defense of both parents, we were asked to close our eyes and imagine that we were awakened in the dead of night by a phone call: our parents had been involved in a car crash and were near death. We were asked to follow the course of events from the emergency room to the graveside. Bob told me that this “came through” as he was speaking. Furthermore he said that if we experienced a full range of emotion, we could actually set aside our anger towards our parents and begin to experience unconditional love for them. There was another mind trip when we were asked to visualize the birthday party that we never had, where we were celebrated and feted for who we were and not who we had to pretend to be in order to experience our parents’ love. During the whole time I practiced the 13-week FHPT, I know that Hoffman struggled with achieving a high level of emotional experience he considered necessary to produce the emotional freedom he saw as the goal. Both remain today in the HQP as elaborately produced events, with music, props, food. When combined with suggested visual images, they can and do induce the powerful emotional states. I suggest that Naranjo’s early introduction of experiential exercises into Hoffman’s basic framework made it possible for Hoffman to create the controlled emotional rollercoaster of the current HQP.



Conclusion


As the history of the Process is being revised and cleaned up as a product of the human potential movement, I have tried to leave a footnote about the people who helped Hoffman in order that their important contributions are not neglected, attributed to others, or lost regardless of copyright.


I had hoped to shed light on how an “inspired insight” makes itself known in the world, examining how a core insight into human nature could become a coherent, repeatable experience that would provide people with access to their own emotional life and deepen their awareness of their own spiritual lives. Frankly I do not know if any process is able to deliver this result in a sustainable way, but there is always the possibility that even a split second experience of unconditional love might be enough to alter centuries of abuse.


However, I am certain that I demonstrated that the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy and the subsequent Hoffman Quadrinity Process came into existence through the combined efforts of Bob Hoffman and Claudio Naranjo, that it required both men to bring it to life, that the HQP would not exist at all without the generous contribution of Naranjo. Hoffman borrowed widely and used anything that he thought might be useful. He relied on Naranjo more than anyone, but also others like Pecci, to fill out his vision and give it legitimacy.


Naranjo was constant in his friendship and support. I saw Naranjo demonstrate respect and love for Bob Hoffman from the time he provided him with a group that he could use to create the FHPT to his last meetings with Hoffman when he was dying from liver cancer in his Oakland home. Naranjo thought of Hoffman as a modern day shaman. On the other hand, their relationship was not easy—Hoffman, untrained and impetuous, a tradesman by nature and choice, Naranjo, skilled and intellectual, a thorough professional—they were an ontological odd couple.


And finally, a personal evaluation, one that was also hard won.


In the last analysis, it is not difficult to create the circumstances for unique experiences that are extraordinary or yield real insights.


Teachers, real ones and charlatans, have been doing this for ages. Their bag of tricks include meditation and self-analysis, as well as trance and hypnosis, auto suggestion, even bullying as a way of barging through defense mechanisms. Despite his claims to the contrary, Hoffman made ample use of the more nasty tricks with complete impunity, always taking the higher ground. (He was, for example, never angry with anyone, but ‘righteously indignant.”) But when it comes to actually seeing if his results were lasting, the evidence is scarce or relies very heavily on anecdotal evidence. Many people say that the experience was powerful, but if they made real changes in their lives, if they were happier and not living under another despotism, however benevolent, the majority of those I interviewed had found a sustainable spiritual practice and devoted themselves to it.


In my own experience of directing people in the Process, I cut as much as I could of the trappings of the spiritualist church. I found them fraudulent, or at best embarrassing and useless. I dropped Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was all the therapy that anyone needed, that it was Freud’s missing link. I introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early emotional programming influences their lives here and now. But listening deeply to 40 individuals a year began to take too much of a personal toll for a meager income, and I stopped offering the Process when Hoffman threatened a lawsuit. I certainly had no stomach and no money to face off in court over his intellectual property..

 

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021


Monday, December 26, 2022

The Pope's baritone

On Christmas eve I started watching this bit of fluff “Inside the Vatican, episode 1” on YouTube. Suddenly a rather handsome man with a lovely voice was singing up a storm. He was Mark Spyropoulos, a British baritone with Greek roots, who found himself in the oldest church choir in the world, the personal choir of the pope, Cappella Musicale Pontificia.

Mark started talking about singing the Nicaean Creed solo during the televised mass that goes out to millions upon millions. One day he realized how many people had heard him make this profession of faith. He’d sung it at every papal mass for 3 years.

He quoted the Latin: Credo in Unum Deum. “I believe in One God.” He went on, “I didn’t sing, ‘We believe in One God.’” It was he, Mark, who made a very personal profession of faith. He asked himself: Did he really believe in the One God? And what did that even mean? “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like a fraud. I’ve just declared the beginning of the Nicaean Creed in front of the Pope, surely I should be sure of what I’m saying. Sometimes I know what I'm singing and sometimes I don’t.”

“If you ask me if I believe in God, my reply is that I don’t understand the question. What do you mean by God? These are massive questions.”

“I’m a baritone. What do I know?”

And apparently it became a kind of personal crisis of faith. Aside from the musical insider joke, he really didn’t know. Then he told a story of a rather beautiful personal revelation; I think it was while singing a Bach piece, the 1747 version as opposed to the earlier 1745, the one that Francis preferred. Apparently Francis is a kind of hands-on boss when it comes to certain details.

“Well, what do I know? I'll tell you what I know. I can tell you that when I am immersed in this music, I feel in touch with something.”

Singing he got that he really believed in a power greater than himself. He was actually far more eloquent than my jesuitical argument.

Medici Archive Project, Music Program. Vox Medicea (directed by Mark Spyropoulos).

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

There was a death in the village

Yesterday was a difficult day in Jogiwara. I woke to cries of anguish when Hari’s mother discovered the lifeless body of her oldest son. The sun was barely up. Hari came into my house unannounced and told me that his brother had died in the night. I got up, put on some clothes and went to the room where this lovely, friendly man’s body lay. His face had been covered with the blanket that had kept him warm during his last cold hours. 

People had already started to gather. There is no ritual book. Tradition takes over. It is all unspoken. People talk amongst themselves, but there are very few words spoken. No one has to tell anyone what to do. People know their roles exactly. The men and the women separate. The women gather around his mother and his wife. They fill one side of the room, and sit quietly. Some of the women cry, but surprisingly no one tries to comfort his mother. They just listen silently; they help her when she gets up. The young girls sit with the women. His nieces cry. At some point Hari’s middle daughter tells me tearfully she doesn’t know what to do. She looks at me. I cannot help. Saying I am sorry is not enough, or it feels totally inadequate. 


There are almost no tears among the men. The young boys, the oldest is his son who is just 20, stay close to the men, and help where they can, but they look a bit lost. Later at the cremation ground, his young son will be the only person dressed in ceremonial white to light the fire. I get the impression that this is one life lesson that has to be learnt by imitation. A few men sit with the body opposite the women. His uncles, both the Sikhs and Hindu are joined by one Tibetan, a monk who lives in the village. He married but still shaves his head. All the men are older than this young father . He was not yet 50. He had been sick. He had been in the hospital, but still his death was sudden. I try to read the hidden signs of grief but I am lost. The women show much more emotion than we are comfortable with in the west. The men are far more restrained.


More men gather, but for the most part stay outside the room. More arrive. I notice that some of them begin to disappear into the forest that abuts the house. A steady line begins to shuttle back and forth carrying wood, large logs, and small brush. My guess is that up on the road a jeep has arrived to carry the wood to the cremation ground. Each village has their own. I have been to three cremations during my time here. The first was an ex-pat Brit. It was traditional; the Indians took over; we, his western friends, stood and watched. Then my cook's mother died. We went to a gnat more distant from the village, down a long steep path to the river.  


After about 3 hours, his body is carried from the room to a wide area outside the house. Some of the men begin to prepare it for burning. There are elements to add, flowers, seed and a yellow scarf. A more colorful blanket is spread over his body, and he is carried to another jeep on a palette. If there are prayers I don’t hear or understand.


By the time I reach the cremation grounds the bottom of the pyre has been stacked tightly with kindling underneath.. Only men are allowed; a large number are doing the work of carrying and preparing the logs. The pandit actually seems more like a work foreman than a priest. The fire must burn for at least 5 hours so that the ash is fine enough to be carried to the Ganges, 11 hours away. Suddenly four or five women push in. They cry and shout. Again I am startled by the indifference of the men. After a few minutes the women are ushered out. Then his body, enclosed in a metal grate, is moved onto the huge stack of the wood that came from the forest next to my house. It feels intimate. More work assembling more heavy branches on his small body with care. Many hands. The priest has to make sure that the fire does its job and burns his body, and that the logs don’t fall and spill his ashes into the wind. They have to make it to Rishikesh. His assistant smokes a cigarette. It’s just a job. 


It has taken a long time, but when his son lights the fire, it starts quickly. If the wood was green, it seems to burn hot. The men take off their shoes and put either green leaves, what’s left at the beginning of winter, or small pieces of wood, soaked in water, into the fire. We wash our hands and leave. 



Monday, December 19, 2022

Taking about talking about God

A correspondent was asking if the Nicaean Creed's phrase "True god of true god" implied a multiplicity of gods,

Can I post a fairly long response? There is a piece missing from this conversation. In the days of Google translator we think that there is a simple equivalency between words of different languages. That is especially true when it comes to language about God, god, gods, Greek gods, the Hebrew god of Abraham, Allah etc. They are all words that stem from a particular time and place.

The Council of Nicaea was held in 381, in a town in modern day Turkey after the emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman empire from Rome to Constantinople. It was the first council in the history of the Christian church that attempted to address the entire body of believers. It was convened by Constantine to resolve the controversy of Arianism, a doctrine that held that Christ was not divine but a created being.

So it is not about a multiplicity of gods. It is about the “essence” of god and Jesus. It was also the beginning of the move (or maybe an expression of a movement already afoot) to formulate church doctrine in terms of Greek philosophy. The council fathers (no mothers represented) were trying to formulate a statement declaring that the Lord Jesus was (and is) god by asserting that he was (and is) of the same essence as god.

The language of the Council was both Greek and Latin. The official text coming out of the Council was Greek. I don’t know Greek, and even with a dictionary I can't be precise. In Latin however, God of gods does not refer to any multiplicity of gods. I think it is probably best described as a logical tautology: “God is of the essence of God.” Deum verum de Deo vero; natum, non factum; ejusdemque substantiae qua Pater est. As a matter of fact, looking at the Latin, the elaboration of the tautology, “light from light” (light is always of the essence of light) seems to be missing, perhaps an addition or a variant text.

What we have is the answer of the council to the followers of Arius. Jesus is truly god of the truly god, he was born (as a human while still remaining god) but not made (in the same way that god made Adam). He, the Father and the son and the spirit (filioque) are substantially the same. The filioque would drive another split, but that just gets way too complicated. I vote for Unitarianism just because it’s simpler and more beautiful, but that’s a pond I don’t want to dip my toes into here.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Driving in India as Spriritual Practice

Let’s begin our journey by taking a spin around an Indian traffic circle. For rigid westerners the driving here is totally insane; thinking that the roadside altar dedicated to Mother Teresa of Calcutta actually points to an Indian Catholic church is as misdirected as believing that the road crew in charge of installing shrines had a master plan. 

I wondered if following the blue dot on Google maps could help me trace the route that the Apostle Thomas took to India. After an interesting side trip into Nestorian Christianity, and questions about the exact nature of Jesus as both divine and human, I decided to return to the original focus of my exploration. 


Continuing my madcap trip around the Indian traffic circle, I wound up in Chennai where completed an informal pilgrimage to the three basilicas dedicated to one of the Apostles of Jesus. I visited the Basilica of Apostle Thomas, and felt that it pointed to something larger than just maintaining the prevailing view of what Christianity.


I’m going to try to construct a meditation about Thomas. Let me try to rip away some of the garbage I think surrounds Thomas, and point to why I think we might pay attention to him as we meander through India, or the world.


I will posit that we don’t know much about Thomas is because he was not a church guy. I think he actually might have been the smart ass geeky kid, maybe even an obnoxious asshole.  I found this brief article about the “Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Pagels and a talk she delivered at Stanford 17 years ago, My friend Bonnie Johnson would have loved Pagels’ work, and you might appreciate how Thomas sides with the slaves who are unwillingly forced to disrupt things trying to get a high caste lady’s sedan chair to the front of the crowd. 


After Jesus was crucified, the Apostle James and a few others stayed in Jerusalem, preached about the risen Jesus and kept kosher. Paul went off trying to translate his take on radical conversion into Greek, adopting the first non-Jewish cultural idiom. Peter traveled to Rome where he, according to legend, set the course for the Teaching of Jesus to dominate the western world. 


But Thomas apparently went in the exact opposite direction; he struck out for India, alone or with maybe a few followers. The churches, the communities he established were not as cohesive as the ones established in the Greek and Roman worlds. Maybe my speculation that the Indians were just just not going to submit to conforming beliefs way back then, like right now, is basically correct, and any communities he established disappeared or were absorbed by local cults. India in the first years of the common era was religiously similar to what I experience today, mystics and wandering sadhus.


The most famous story about Thomas, and he is only mentioned a few times in the official record, is that he did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead because he hadn’t seen him, that he would not believe until he actually placed his hands into the wounds of the torture that had killed Jesus. So Jesus appeared and held out his hands with the wounds still open. Thomas says, My Lord and my God, I believe. Then Jesus says:  "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed [are] they that have not seen, and [yet] have believed.” Pagles says that this is the formal, or dominant church getting a recalcitrant believer to cast aside his or her doubts and enter into the fold. But something else might have been going on.


What if our Thomas was really just a stubborn guy who not only demanded a different kind of evidence when it came to belief, but insisted on an interpretation of the message of Jesus that included everyone, not just the proper ladies but also her slaves, the outcasts, even the homeless? And since the older Apostles who were in charge couldn't forbid him coming to the Lord’s table, they just sent him to India, and told stories about him, barring him from the proper European landholdings.


You don’t have to join me in India to upset the picnic table. That is not a rhetorical question.


The ride around India (or anywhere) is much better with a companion; I remember Ashish Gupta driving for the first time in India, in Goa where the traffic rules are slightly more recognizable for the likes of us. It is the main headquarters of the Jesuits in India and has been since about 1543 plus or minus so there is a bit more ingrained European sense of order in some things. But Ash still almost got us killed. My last longish trip here was twice to Amritsar where I got my Covid Vaccination. 12 hours round trip to a private hospital that would give foreigners a jab. It really did save my life, and I was scared to death on the highway across Punjab where drivers think nothing of driving against traffic on a two lane divided highway if it gets them closer to home. 


So I don't have any real question. It is more of a floating inquiry--how we open to the Spirit for more than just pinpointing a destination. My observation is that it's almost as if to thwart our good intentions, sometimes the movement of the Spirit is like barreling up the freeway in the wrong direction, or maybe to be accurate, facing that guy who needs to get back to his cows who's barreling towards us, and we know we really shouldn't trust his driving. 


And if you can't join me in India, (not a declaration or assessment but a kind of wild daydream--you, me and Rinku driving across the high Himalayan plains in Kashmir!), we still travel as spiritual companions and check out Saint Thomas. What a blessing.


Of course after all that travel--a post card!


Monday, December 12, 2022

My friendship with an Anglo-Catholic Bishop





I just learned that my friend Edward Harding "Ed" MacBurney died last year (October 30, 1927 – March 17, 2022). He’d almost reached 97 years, and I imagine that they were very good years. He had a zest of friendship. He was immensely likable, intelligent and a dedicated listener, the kind of person who loved a good conversation, especially if it opened the door to a topic close to his heart and he thought it might lead somewhere. He held clear positions with regard to matters of faith, but the term pastoral would also be a good fit and blunts any harsh doctrinal edge. 

My mother remembered that at a certain point in life my grandmother faithfully read the Sunday obituaries in the Bridgeport Post to see how many friends she’d lost. Now in the day of Google, I join my grandmother in this pursuit, but I do not consider it at all morbid. I even do it with the joy of honoring my friends by revisiting our conversations, seeing how things stand and where we would be today if we were able to continue talking. 

And it’s conversations with Ed that I want to talk about. During my college years, he and I were quite close. Then I entered the Jesuits, and Ed’s priestly life started to move towards “The Right Reverend.” Over the years we lost touch except for an infrequent exchange of long letters. He became more conservative and I gravitated towards a very secular version of liberation theology, verging on agnosticism. However when we inevitably disagreed about somethings that he considered essential, even sacred, I never felt estranged or judged. I hope I can return that favor now as I talk about our friendship. 

I met Ed during my freshman year at Dartmouth. He was the rector of the Saint Thomas Episcopal Church that stands very close to the green. I don’t think that he had that title, but he was a de facto chaplain at the College. I saw a committed Christian and a priest who was always open to talking with students. I liked him immediately. The Newman chaplain, Father Bill Nolan, was a bit crusty for my taste in the all-knowing way of immigrant Catholic seminary training, as dogmatic as the rote study of Aquinas produced. To me Nolan’s attempts to be open-minded as befit an outsider at a prestigious waspy institution seemed superficial, even shallow. Ed was far more approachable perhaps because he didn’t have the immigrant Irish hurdle of having to prove himself. He was a Dartmouth graduate as well, and although as much of a traditionalist as Nolan, he was quite relaxed about it and spelled out his line of thought in a very personal way. Our conversations were like entering a well ordered house and feeling at ease. 

There was a small chapel in the rector’s house; it even had a small foot pump harmonium. At 5:30 Ed led Evensong from the Book of Common Prayer. I liked learning to sing the psalms in plainchant, or Anglican chant, and started including it as part of my practice. Nolan also said mass at 5 in the Aquinas Chapel at the end of Webster which I attended at least once or twice a week, but I actually preferred Evensong. There was never any pressure from Ed to switch allegiance. He told me in a matter of fact way that he’d entertained the idea of becoming Catholic, and had thought about religious life, joining an Anglican Order, the Cowley Fathers. When we talked about my intention to become a Jesuit, he encouraged me. 

In1963 I decided to go to the Universite de Caen for a semester abroad. Ed was planning a trip back to England, and invited me to join him for what he called “the crawl,” following a winding path from London north to Leeds and then south to Canterbury, cramming as many Anglican cathedrals as we could into the two weeks I had before I left for France. We visited Oxford where he’d been influenced by the nostalgic practices of the Oxford Movement at St Stephen's House. We drove over a long flat plane to Ely Cathedral where he’s been ordained, and of course included Westminster and Coventry. I forget the order. He introduced me to his friends. In Leeds I met the engaging Franciscan, Brother Michael Fisher whom I kept in touch with for many years. At the Cathedral of York I did not hit it off with a rather stuffy dean and his wife. Ed was disappointed. At several points we stopped at a motel or modest roadside inn and shared a room. I recall that after he’d put on his pajamas, he knelt by the side of the bed and prayed which I found very sweet. I am pretty sure that we ended our trip in Canterbury; then Ed drove me to Dover where I continued my journey onto Paris via train and ferry.

I look back on our crawl as a kind of Anglo-Catholic pilgrimage. I’ve located various dots on a map as accurately as possible to see where I physically was on this journey. With some grace and forgiveness for the intervening years, it’s close enough. But to get back inside the mind of the 20 year old Ken might actually take a bit of magic. The hopes, dreams, and aspirations of my college years go hand and hand with acquiring experience and knowledge, questioning, experimenting, trying to find my place in the world. Retracing those steps is far more difficult. The dots are not physical, their movement influenced by the position where I stood in the moment as well as where I stand now 60 years later. 

“Follow the Money” 

I remember that Ed had just come from an Episcopal conference in the US where Bishop James Pike had been slated to give a high level talk on the ecumenism coming out of Vatican II. Ed complained that all the controversial firebrand could come up with was how efficient it would be to save money not duplicating secretarial services. He expected some encouraging words about the “big questions,” and was disappointed. Then he laughed. A missed opportunity. I don’t remember if he mentioned Pike’s championing the ordination of women, but he certainly would have been against it. 

Let me fast forward 35 years and bring my wonderful friend Bonnie Johnson into the conversation. Ed and Bonnie would have loved one another despite being theological miles apart. Bonnie was a devoted Christian as well as an astute observer of the American Episcopal church. She brought Bishop Pike’s economic analysis back into the theological conversation about the big issues. She contended that as congregations became smaller and poorer, the acceptance of women priests grew simply because they’d work for less. Women now make up 40% of working clergy in the US. Though I hesitate to state anything definitively because reading their balance sheets is confusing and beyond the intention of this paper, both membership and revenues have also decreased substantially in most parishes although contribution seems to be up overall, an anomaly that I cannot figure out.

But just a snapshot from the available data In 2022 is telling. The salary of an Episcopal priest in the US is $52,707. There is an enormous fluctuation across various dioceses and churches, salaries ranging from $10,193 to $267,214. In 2002 male clergy earned 20% more than the female counterparts. Today the wage gap has been reduced to 13.5%. Perhaps a major reason for the gap is that larger, wealthier parishes prefer men and smaller parishes rely on married women whose income supplements their husband’s. Another reason for the decrease might simply be the increase in the number of women priests and the resulting proportional distribution of overall revenues. Anglo-Catholics continue to make a strictly theological argument, but Bonnie always looked at a wider picture and included several possible factors. It might be blasphemy to classify Deep Throat as a theologian, but I think “Follow the Money” is a valid line of inquiry. Ed might have been appalled but I’m sure he would have tried to continue the conversation in a civil manner. 

When I returned to Hanover from France in January, Ed told me that he was getting married and asked if I would be an usher at the service. I said of course, I would be honored. I think that I joined at least one of his wife Anne's sons, and Gaylord Hitchcock put on his best suit. I remember being at the rectory one afternoon several weeks before the ceremony. Ed took a phone call within earshot. In his cheery voice he arranged an appointment with the caller. When he hung up--this was definitely pre-cell phone--he turned and told me that he and his friend, Dr. Someone, had arranged to talk about “the birds and bees.” He laughed, and I’m laughing now just remembering his joy and his innocence. 

When Tara Doyle, whom my partner and I knew from MacLeod, stayed with us one Christmas, she wanted to attend Christmas midnight mass. I was assigned to choose the venue. Even though we knew that we had to arrive very early to get a seat, Grace Cathedral would have the best music plus we were meditators and welcomed a half hour in silence in a magnificent church while empty pews filled behind us. It was also about as high church as I could find. When it came time to receive communion, I didn't hesitate to kneel at the rail in front of the main altar. The priest who offered me the sacrament was a beautiful African American woman. It was perfect. 

References: 
https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-episcopal-priest https://www.christiancentury.org/article/news/gender-pay-gap-among-episcopal-clergy-shrinking-persistent 
https://www.catholic.org/news/politics/story.php?id=3086