Hippies in the Church

I was very excited to see that there is a new Russian web site called Hippies in the Church. It has a list of monks and clergy who were at one time involved in the hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Here is a rough translation of its introductory blurb:

In December 2018, the Metropolitan of Belgorod and Stary Oskol, John rather favorably spoke about youth subcultures of the second half of the twentieth century. But even more interesting is the last phrase:

“In the 20th century, as a protest against a consumer society on Russian soil, under the influence of the West, subcultures developed that acquired a special social orientation, at the same time it was a search for spirituality. The first subcultures are dudes, hipsters in the early 60s, then there is a period of the sixties. There appear hippies who belong to different religious directions. They even had the slogan: "Christ was the first hippie because he was protesting against the existing system." I must say that this subculture is very close to the Orthodox Church: in the USSR, the Church was persecuted, and hippies sympathized. Many clergymen and mothers sitting here have gone through this subculture. ”

The recognition of Metropolitan John is worth a lot. However, there was no list of hippies (rockers and punks added) who became Orthodox priests and monks (lay people also added) until recently. A small list was published by historian Irina Gordeeva on Facebook. Based on this list, a much more extensive one has arisen, which I quote below. It continues to be replenished and refined (last updated July 1, 2020)

My interest in this topic goes back 60 years, to July 1960, to the founding conference of the Anglican Students Federation (ASF) of South Africa, which was held at Modderpoort in the Free State in July 1960. It was held in rather inauspicious circumstances, during the State of Emergency that followed the Sharpeville Massacre, and I travelled to it with two students, Benjamin Photolo and Jacob Maleke, who actually lived in Sharpeville, and who, though they were not themselves witnesses of the shooting, knew several people who had been affected by it. For more on the background, see Tales from Dystopia VI: 1960 was a very bad year | Khanya.

One of the speakers at the was Brother Roger, of the Community of the Resurrection, who spoke on Pilgrims of the Absolute. He spoke of a number of counter-cultural figures, some Christian, some less so. Among them were Leon Bloy, Benedict Joseph l'Abre (one of the few Western "fools for Christ") and Beat Generation authors like Jack Kerouac.  He said they were all looking for something that was not found in the conventional and respectable values of their society, and that, whether they knew it or not, they were looking for God, and he asked why the Church had so often hidden God from them behind a camouflage of respectability.

Brother Roger, CR

It made quite an impression on me and others there, and Brother Roger was asked to speak again on the same topic the following year, and I have posted a combined version of both papers here: Pilgrims of the Absolute. For the next couple of years Brother Roger guided my reading, lending me books from the Community of the Resurrection's well-stocked library (which was also the library for St Peter's Theological College, which they ran, and among the students there at that time was Desmond Tutu, who later became Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town. Brother Roger introduced me to authors like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Charles Williams and others, and also to the Beat Generation authors like Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes.


It was mainly the Beat Generation who took the technical term "cool" from jazz and applied it to everyday life, and in doing so brought it quite close to some technical terms in Orthodox spirituality -- see Coolness and dispassion | Khanya. Brother Roger referred to Francis of Assisi as "God's cool cat", or God's hip cat. , and one of the beat poets referred to their generation as "Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". Jack Kerouac never realised the ideal of a Zen Catholicism he sketched in his novel The Dharma bums, but his friend Gary Snyder, a Buddhist (Japhy Ryder in The Dharma bums), spoke of a "rucksack revolution" of young people leaving the rat race of the acquisitive society and wandering around spreading a message of love and peace. Brother Roger rather hoped that some of the youth at the Anglican Students Federation conferences might catch a similar vision, but few did.

By the end of the 1960s "hipsters" had got shortened to "hippies" and happily accepted the label "freaks" applied to them by straight society. Among them were some Jesus freaks, and for a time they locked as if they might represent a real Christian counterculture, but many were coopted by suit 'n tie evangelical Christians, who turned many of the symbols of the movement into kitsch merchandise.

One of the evangelists who got involved with the movement came closer to the "rucksack revolution" idea. He was Dave Berg, who founded the Children of God, who lived in Christian hippie communes throughout the world, and saw themselves as colonies of the Kingdom of God. They produced an interesting handbook for members, Revolution for Jesus: how to do it. Unfortunately Dave Berg, who called himself Moses David, or just Mo, succumbed to a temptation common in such movements -- he allowed himself to become the object of a personality cult, and the emphasis gradually shifted from leading people to Jesus to leading them to himself, and that particular branch of the Jesus movement went off the rails. I believe there is still a remnant somewhere, calling itself "The Family".

The Durban colony of the Children of God, 1974: Deborah, Jonathan, Stephen, Shemaiah, Sharon

 Another of these evangelists, however, Jack Sparks, followed a different path. He became became involved in the Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF), which produced a Christian underground newspaper called Right On. Jack Sparks was led to Orthodoxy, and became an Orthodox priest, and died a few years ago in Alaska.

So I am interested in the Christian arm of the Hipster-Beat-Hippie movement, and I think it would be rather good if the project of documenting "Hippies in the Church" was not confined to Russia only, but should become a worldwide one. So if anyone has any biographical information on hippies in the Church, or anecdotes of such a movement, please send them to me and I'll make a preliminary collection, and pass them on to any official collectors, should any appear. My contact info here Steve Hayes - personal links.

Alice's Restaurant

Last night I watched Alice's Restaurant for the third time.

The film was made in 1969, and in a way was a kind of epilogue on the 1960s.

The plot is fairly simple. Two funerals and a wedding.

Ray buys an old deconsecrated church and Alice opens a restaurant in it. Arlo goes to see Alice for Thanksgivng and as a favour takes her trash to the dump. When the dump is closed, he drops it on top of another pile of garbage at the bottom of a ravine. When the local sheriff finds out a major manhunt begins. Arlo manages to survive the courtroom experience but when he is to be inducted into the army via the draft and is asked whether he has ever been arrested, he has to say yes. Has he been convicted of a crime? Yes. Even through the crime was littering, he is sent to the group with major criminals.

One reviewer at the IMDb site says

Alice's Restaurant is about life and loss, and the traps we allow ourselves to get caught up in. It's about addiction, youth, anarchy, death, and aimlessness. It's a celebration and a lament for all those things.

As we were watching it, there is a scene with a tent evangelist, and they are singing Amazing Grace. Val remarked that that must be one of the overplayed hymns ever, like Kum-ba-ya. And I recalled that when I first saw the film, in Windhoek on 15 December 1970, it was the first time I had ever heard Amazing Grace, so it came to me as fresh and new then. I heard it quite a lot thereafter, and I wondered it it was the film that was responsible for its subsequent popularity. Certainly in my mind that song was always associated with the film, and in 2006, when the family asked what I wanted as a birthday present, one of the things I mentioned was the DVD of Alice's Restaurant, so I could remind myself of where I first heard that song.

A couple of years later, when I was living in Durban, staying with Larry and Carol Gilley and their family, they had an old hymn book with Amazing Grace in it, and I used it a few times in church services, and at that time, too, I had never heard it anywhere else but in the film. And a couple of years later it was heard everywhere, though in a slightly different version, with different music for the third line.

When I first saw Alice's Restaurant I was living in a Christian commune in Windhoek and that was one of the dreams of the 1960s that didn't quite come true. And at the end of the film Ray and Alice get married, and they have a big celebration with lots of friends in their church-cum-restaurant. Then one by one the friends leave, and Ray and Alice urge them to stay. Ray says they will move to a farm in the country, where they can all live together and see each other whenever they want. They go to the door, and see of the last of their friends. and Ray talks some more about that, in the same way that we often talked about such things in those days. Then he goes inside, and Alice is left, alone and lonely, at the door. And that seems to sum up the 1960s.

In the same year that the film was released, a book was published, The Lonely Crowd, and the visions of communal living expressed by Ray in the film were intended to be a solution to that, but at the end Alice is left alone on the steps of a deconsecrated church, the symbol of a failed Christian community.

And so it calls to mind another song, not in the film, released a couple of years later, about dreams of freedom:

Yesterday's dream didn't quite come true
We fought for our freedom, and what did it do?
Now no one can see where they stand.

It's cool to be hip but not hip to be cool

A couple of days ago there was some discussion about the following article in some Usenet newsgroups. I was interested in it because of the use of the word "hipster". It seemed to be used with a meaning very different from the meaning I understood.

I'm interested in words and how they are used, partly because it used to be my job as an editor for several years, though it would probably be truer to say that I got into the job because of my interest in language and usage rather than the other way round.

Anyway, the article was The Daily Cardinal - Song causes local hipster to self-destruct:

MADISON, WI—Tens of twenties of Madison’s hippest are gathered in mourning this afternoon following the news of the tragic death of local hipster Charles “Wayne” Duchene, 22, who died a horrific and most likely cliche death late Monday evening at a Foo Fee Foe concert.

Duchene’s body was found in a puddle of his own PBR at approximately 11:15 p.m. Monday night at the entrance of The Dank Bank, an obscure venue located just off the Capitol Square.

Now this is a student publication and it's obviously satire, but they have to be satirising something. I had to ask about PBR, which I at first took to be one of those three-letter abbreviations for various medical conditions that hypochondiacs sprinkle their conversations with and expect the rest of us to understand. It transpired that it did not stand for something like Personal Bodily Refuse, but was an allusion to a local beer, though I gather many people who know the brew think there is little difference, but more of that later.

So what is a hipster?

As I understand it, a "hipster" was orginally a jazz fan, and especially a fan of "cool" jazz, a "hip" or "hep" cat.

In Beat Generation circles it was extended to mean someone who was hip to the lies of mainstream culture, and who disaffiliated from it and rejected its values, who did not get over excited over the things pimped by the advertising industry and so on, who was detached from all the frenzy about brands and fashion. That was the essence of "cool" in those days.

As Lawrence Lipton put it in his book "The holy barbarians" (Lipton 1959:150):

The New Poverty is the disaffiliate's answer to the New Prosperity. It is important to make a living. It is even more important to make a life. Poverty. The very word is taboo in a society where success is equated with virtue and poverty is a sin. Yet it has an honourable ancestry. St. Francis of Assisi revered poverty as his bride, with holy fervor and pious rapture. The poverty of the disaffiliate is not to be confused with the poverty of indigence, intemperance, improvidence or failure. It is simply that the goods and services he has to offer are not valued at a high price in our society. As one beat generation writer said to the square who offered him an advertising job: 'I'll scrub your floors and carry out your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool for you or rat for you.' It is not the poverty of the ill-tempered and embittered, those who wooed the bitch goddess Success with panting breath and came away rebuffed. It is an independent, voluntary poverty.

So the hipster, or the beat, had a cool and detached attitude to the frenzy of the striving for success in mainstream society.

"Beatniks" were groupies or wannabes. The word was coined by a journalist by analogy with "sputnik" -- beatniks were those who were in orbit around the beat movement, but were not central to it.

By the late sixties "hipster" had got shortened to "hippie", and while the hippies were successors to the beats as a countercultural movement, they were a little less cool. To be "cool" suggested being detached, laid back, not excited by the constant changes of fashion and the striving for success. It was the role of a passive and cynical observer.

Hippies were more active, and more positive in trying not merely to disaffiliate from mainstream culture, but to try to create an alternative to it, an alternative culture and an alternative society.

But the impression I got from the article that sparked off this post is that the writer was using "hipster" in an entirely different sense, to mean something almost opposite from what it meant in the 1950s and 1950s.

I wondered how widespread that usage is -- can anyone explain the writer's usage, and do they share that understanding of the word today, and how did it get to mean almost the opposite of what it meant 50 years ago? "Cool" seems to have changed its meaning a lot in the last 50 years, so I wonder if "hipster" has likewise changed, so that it no means nearly the opposite of what it did back then.

I watch "Top Gear" on TV, and there they discuss what constitutes a "cool" car, and it is clear that their idea of "cool" is very different from mine. My 1961 Peugeot station wagon, with rusty door panels and empty cold-drink cans rolling around on the floor, bought cheap from an open air used car lot where a rickety wooden shack was the "office", bought on the "zero maintenance" plan, was my idea of a "cool" car, but I doubt very much if the "Top Gear" people are using "cool" in that sense.



Another thing that illustrates the change in the meaning of words like "cool" is Levis jeans. They were cool back then and they are regarded as cool now, for entirely different reasons, and for entirely different values of "cool". When I bought my first pair of Levis there was only one shop in Johannesburg that sold them, imported them from the USA. It was not advertised and nor were Levis. You learnt about it by word of mouth. It was also a decidedly unfashionable shop in a decidedly unfashionable part of town, Jeppestown, which seems to have escaped the gentrification that has transformed other run-down suburbs. Levis were the opposite of fashionable, tough working clothes that one bought a couple of sizes too big because they would shrink to fit. No one with any fashion sense would be seen dead in Levis. How have the mighty fallen!

But the guy whose death was described in the article in question sounded anything but "hip" to me, the very opposite of "hip", in fact. So I still wonder what the writer meant by "hipster", and whether other people understand "hipster" in the same way, and can explain what they mean by it.

To get back to PBR briefly, the Urban Dictionary defines it as:

PBR

abbreviation for pabst blue ribbon beer, which is simultaneously the best and worst beer ever brewed. it is typically on special at bars for twelve cents a pint. also doubles as a laxative.

Pabst Blue Ribbon is a lot like the band Bright Eyes,
Hipsters love it, but everyone else thinks its liquid shit.

Hipsters again. It's got to mean something in Wisconsin that is different from what it means in the rest of the world... or does it?

Perhaps I should retreat into the past, to when I was a wannabe hipster, and a wannabe beatnik (and if a beatnik is a wannabe beat, then a wannabe beatink is a wannabe wannabe). My twenty-year-old self went to visit Brother Roger, an Anglican monk of the Community of the Resurrection, whom I regarded as the authority on all things hip and cool (he lent me books by Jack Kerouac, and the Lipton book I quoted above, and many others besides). So I wrote in my diary for 23 June 1961

... later went to see Brother Roger. There he sat, outside the priory in jeans and sweatshirt, on the library steps, luxuriating in the sun studying Lipton's Holy Barbarians. Studying, yes, truly it is the text book, and he said that he had a book by Clellon Holmes, The horn, about a jazz man, and he says it in that zestful rapturous way of his, which makes me think he gets the utter limit of enjoyment out of everything he does. "It's wonderful," he says, "simply wonderful." And when he says it you know he really means it. He told me about what he is going to say at Modderpoort, and he isn't giving them Bloy this year, but Jean somebody. The Observer calls him the poet of evil, who has spent half his life in jail, and is something of a misanthropist and hates society, patron saint of the Beats. He gave me a play for the AYPA, by Charles Williams, called House of the octopus, and there was a boy there called Abel, a black boy studying for his matric, and says he is a cat and loves jazz, and Bach, and plays a clarinet which got broken. So I talked a bit to Abel and found he lives in Orlando where he goes to AYPA meetings and is staying at the priory during the vac to study. He is a nice cat, a hip spade cat.

The AYPA was the Anglican Young Peoples Association, a youth organisation with branches in various parishes. Modderpoort was the venue of the annual conference of the Anglican Students Federation, where Brother Roger was going to read his paper about the Jean somebody, who was actually Jean Genet (that was the first time I'd ever heard of him), and you can read his paper, Pilgrims of the Absolute, here.

Yes, I've written about this stuff before, sorry if anyone was bored, but I suppose those who have seen it all before wouldn't have got this far anyway.

Palin, Pentecostals, and Pacifism

Sub Ratione Dei has some interesting quotes and comments on how Pentecostalism seems to have changed over the last 80 years.

Palin, Pentecostals, and Pacifism:

It is true that there are exceptions such as the excellent Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship but it is revealing to note that in the space of one century the predominant, and nigh on exclusive view, has turned from pacifism to holy war (I don’t see how Palin’s remarks can be interpreted in any other way).

When it started, Pentecostalism was pretty countercultural, and sociologists noted that it tended to attract marginalised people. As time has passed, however, it has tended to become more respectable, and this seems to have been accompanied by a move to the right, politically. I wonder if this change in outlook was, consciously or unconsciously, part of an attempt to become more accepted and acceptable in society?

Now, however, there seems to be a strange inversion. On a pagan newsgroup someone said of Sarah Palin, "Since she an 'pro life' anti - abortionist i assume she also favors the death penalty."

Why should it be possible to assume that?

In another forum someone accused Sarah Palin of being a "Jesus Freak". My initial response was, "She's too young". The Jesus Freaks appeared on the scene 40 years ago as the evangelical Christian arm of the hippie movement. Hippies were called "freaks" by straight society, as an insult, but the hippies adopted the term as a badge of honour, and the Christian hippies were likewise nicknamed "Jesus Freaks", and were distinctly countercultural.

But to return to the specific question -- why is it that 80 years ago one could expect Pentecostals to be inclined to pacifism, but now people can safely assume that they will be warmongers, and that the only life they are pro is unborn humans?

If you look at the bottom of this blog, you will see that it is part of the Christian peacemakers blog ring. That means there should be a post on the topic of peace once a month, and this is it.

People Power Granny: Can Intentional Communities be the Answer to this Messed-Up World?

In the past we have had some Synchroblogs about utopian communities and new monasticism. Here's a story about a utopian intentional community that started over 30 years ago and is still going strong.

People Power Granny: Can Intentional Communities be the Answer to this Messed-Up World?:

One good example of an intentional community that left the rat race but not the world is the Farm in Summertown, TN. Started in the early 70's by a 'family' of hippies, this community today still is alive and well. But in its 30-plus years of operation, members have gone out into the world to help the suffering, have provided training for the re-birth of midwifery, have created a watershed protector of their local river and have introduced kids in the cities to life on the farm. This community speaks out against illegal wars and other injustices. They have incorporated the internet and other new forms of communication to get their messages out to the world. As a matter of fact, residents of the Farm are often leaders in the world fighting the Powerful.

If you've ever thought of joining an intentional community, or are living in one now, you can find more resources on this site.

The unrespectability of our religion

I was transcribing some of my old journals this morning, and came across what I had written when I was 19 in response to reading about Leon Bloy.

When I got home I finished reading Leon Bloy and marvelled at his faith and devotion. He had been prepared to live nearly all his life in poverty -- nay, in destitution -- for the sake of Jesus.

Like Clement of Alexandria, like St Francis of Assisi, he gave up all for love. "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God." The beatniks are looking for what St Francis was looking for; they are after the absolute values of God rather than the relative values of this world. "A saintly clergy means a virtuous people; a virtuous clergy means a respectable people; a respectable clergy means a godless people."

Christians must never become respectable. Respectability is the curse of true religion. The slavish following of convention and the mediocrity it leads to, or springs from, are the enemy of all true Christianity. People become indistinguishable, they merge into the mass of the respectable, conventional mass of unthinking semi-morons that people this globe; they have no variety, and variety is the spice of life. They are tasteless, "and if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" Most Christians do not take their faith at all seriously -- in one sense -- they are prepared to live with it, but only just. They will not live for their faith, and certainly will not die for it. Saints were too unconventional, too unrespectable, to be imitated. People pay lip service to the examples of the saints, But if anyone should try to follow their example he is denounced, and they say, "Religion is a good thing, but that is taking it too far." The person against whom such an accusation is levelled has probably just begun to take religion at all seriously. Christians are a lot of hypocrites people say, but if they try not to be hypocrites, then they are fanatics. The unrespectability of our religion! (Journal entry: 17 August 1960)

That was over 40 years ago. I had been introduced to Leon Bloy by Brother Roger, of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. Bloy's ideas were more than 60 years old then, and yet they seemed equally relevant to the 1960s. And now I keep reading about similar ideas in emerging church circles, including such things as urban monasticism. I look back at and cringe a little at the teenage arrogance, and wonder if our generation turned out any better than those we so self-righteously denounced.

Things have not changed much since then, it seems. A recent survey shows that most Christians in many countries see themselves first of all as citizens of this world rather than as citizens of the kingdom of God. Our citizenship is in heaven, says St Paul, but most have other gods. This is perhaps not so surprising in Russia, where atheism was the official state-sponsored religion for two generations, but it is a little more disturbing in other countries.

There also seems to be an anomaly in the case of the USA, where a higher proportion said that they saw themselves as Christians first, and citizens of their country second. But I wonder -- I suspect that many of those who said that would respond to their country's recent wars of aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq by saying "My country, right or wrong".

Hippies

This is the kind of thing I usually post in my LiveJournal, but since I haven't been able to think of much to say here recently, I thought I'd post it here as well.

, you're now logged in!

Below you'll find your test result. After, continue on to your
homescreen to discover what we're about.

continue to OkCupid homescreen >

Faerie-Child You are 40% experimental, 31% feral, 54% spiritual, and 10% square!

Well done! You're a faerie-child. You always stand out from the crowd by the way you dress, but unlike the Feral, not by the way you smell (unless it's the smell of sandalwood, jasmine, and ylang ylang). You're not particularly into free love and mind-expanding substances, but you are a free spirit, who believes that there really are magick and miracles in the world. The hippie world needs you because you bring a little magic into their lives. If you believe that opposites attract, you probably find yourself around Ferals. If you are more inclined to enjoy the company of those with similar attitudes, then other Faerie-children, as well as the Alternate, Neopagan, and Mystic are for you. The other categories are Raver, Treehugger, Ful-blown Hippie and of course, the Non-hippie

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on experimental You scored higher than 99% on feral You scored higher than 99% on spiritual You scored higher than 99% on non-hippie

Link: The what kind of hippie are you Test written by pragmaticdreams on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test