By Michael Mallory, Spring 2008
I was walking down Cole Street towards Haight Street in San Francisco. I was to meet my classmates and professor at the historic Hamilton Methodist Church and from there we were going to “do religious archaeology of the Haight.” Even though I had no idea what that really meant, as an anthropologist in seminary the idea of archaeology and religion in the same construct was very exciting. From behind me I heard someone singing a Grateful Dead song. Actually, I heard someone singing behind me, it wasn’t until he walked beside me and started to talk with me that I discovered that he was a big fan of the Grateful Dead and was proud that he could sing most of their songs by heart. We walked together until we reached Waller Street, which is where the church is located, we said good-bye and he continued his song while walking the rest of the way to the Haight. I wasn’t sure that my encounter with this young man had anything to do with “religious archaeology’ but it did make me think. What was it about the music especially of the 1960s that either shaped, or reflected, somehow the attitudes and forms of their spiritual worldviews?
I immediately started to read and research everything that I could in regards to the Haight. From the milieu of the vast amount of data that surrounds this neighborhood I have been drawn to many different types of material. Especially formative in my analysis was the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. From what I was reading, and beginning to realize, this clinic was doing real ministry. The Free Clinic does not belong to a church, nor do they claim any explicit religious doctrine or creed. However, they have as an emblem an image of a square cross with a dove in the center. This can be construed as a Christian metaphor of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Of course, the symbol is also evocative of the medical cross with the dove representing peace. Essentially, for me, it does not matter because the function of the clinic is religious in nature..[1]
Armed with this insight, I offered the idea that we should visit and explore the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic as a religious site. In fact, when the question of where to explore was raised our responses were anything but typical. St. Agnes, the Jesuit Catholic church, and Hamilton Methodist church were the only explicit religious site we visited. We were able to recognize religious sites in the parks that surrounded the neighborhood, in a restored Victorian bed and breakfast on Haight Street and at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.
We went to go visit the Free Clinic. The façade of the clinic is a typical San Francisco Victorian house. There was not a lot of going in and out and we stood in front of the door wondering what was on the other side. We were skeptical to enter for fear of intruding inappropriately with so many of us. So, I walked up the stairs alone just to get a quick look. Behind the door was a flight of stairs that led to the top story of this house. At the top of the stairs was a foyer with outreach materials and other information. Past the foyer, on the south side I could see the waiting room. A hallway extended east and west of the foyer. Lining the walls of the hallways was a photographic display of their history, their community and their accomplishments. I thought that maybe we could all just stand at the top of the stairs to look. A volunteer approached me and she asked if she could help me. Her friendly smile and kind demeanor helped dispel the awkwardness that I was experiencing for some reason. I explained who I was and she invited us in to look around. In fact, she did better than that. She introduced us to Bonnie Ferguson, who has been working at the clinic since 1982.
A little more than half a dozen of us crowded in a small, but long office at the end of the hallway. Walking down the hallway, the walls spoke of a rich history with strong connections to the community. After settling into the office and introducing ourselves, Bonnie began to tell the story of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. “It was June 6, 1967,” she began, “when David Smith opened the Free Clinic.”[2] It was apparent that this story has been told many times. The story of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic is also the story of the Haight-Ashbury counter-culture movement. The elements of this movement are well known: Hippies, psychedelics and other drugs, rock-n-roll, and explorations of new experiences. After the Human Be-In, an event in January 1967 that drew 30,000 young people classified as hippies to Golden Gate Park, word had gotten out that an even larger event was to take place in the Summer. Bracing for the incredible influx of young people was partly the reason why the clinic came into existence. It also had to do with David Smith’s radical concept of healthcare as a right, and not a privilege. This right to healthcare extended beyond medical issues, but also included drug abuse issues and psychological services.
I started to begin to see how the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic joins the ranks of religious personnel in the work of social transformation. The Free Clinic has built a strong community presence in the Haight precisely because of their ability to respond to the demands of rapid social upheaval. They were innovative in the design of their outreach, such as providing medical care at rock concerts. In a sedentary, stratified society religious functions are specialized and dispersed. The overall concept is that we engage the other in ways that make us enter into collective identity with them, even if just temporarily. The weaving back together the disparate parts of our communities into a cohesive whole are partly what Philip Wexler defines as mysticism.[3] The Haight Ashbury Free Clinic was instrumental in helping people re-construct themselves and their place in this world. One of the greatest services that began in the early 1970s and still continues today is the Rock Medicine program. The Rock Medicine philosophy, as it is stated on their website, is to “take care of the individual right now and return him to his friends or his family and do away with the necessity of either hospitalizing him or getting him involved with the law.” [4]
The Haight-Ashbury was in the midst of a revival that will lead, or perhaps is still leading, to an awakening.[5] It was Wuthnow that recognized a shift from the “institutional religiosity of the 1950s to the ‘seeking,’ ‘freer, self-improvement, market-, and technique oriented religions since the 1960s, and now to a still more individualized religion of spiritual practice.” (119). It is a common practice, and often complaint, that we Americans change the form of other traditions religious expressions. This misappropriation, some would say, is an insult to the tradition it attempts to represent. Yet, if we look closely at what is happening all the time, we might recognize briefly that we are moving along a current, or a stream, of life. Ideas and concepts do collide, and new ones do emerge, there are new and complex formulations of how we understand each other, the planet and the cosmos happening all the time. Yet, there is a tendency today, as I recall that young man, who was singing Grateful Dead songs, to enter into the memory of the past. Ultimately, I began to think, could it be that the connection between the Frontier and the Haight experience of the 1960s is about social transformation.
According to Ferenc Szasz, “unlike their northern or southern counterparts… the forces of organized religion in the West essentially created the institutional infrastructure for their subregions… during this period, clerics from all faiths were viewed as civic leaders.”[6] Also, the Frontier West was associated with new space and territory. The journey to the West meant a journey to new life and possibilities. The poor did not make this journey necessarily, but people who had enough money to make a trip of this magnitude. The pressures to succeed complicated the feelings of hope, prosperity and happiness. The hard reality of the Frontier life did not always meet the expectations that people were expecting. A good example comes from the lyrics of a song written during the era of the California Gold Rush.
Oh! I wish those ‘tarnal critters what wrote home about the gold
Were in the place the Scriptures say “is never very cold.”
For they told about the heaps of dust and lumps so mighty big,
But they never said a single word how hard they were to dig.
So I went up to the mines and I helped to turn a stream,
And got trusted on the strength of that delusive golden dream;
But when we got to digging we found ‘twas all a sham,
And we who dam’d the rivers by our creditors were dam’d.[7]
The verse that follows comments on the embarrassment he would feel to return home so instead he must go faraway although he does not know where he is going. The frontier experience was a state of liminality in which social and personal transformation was possible. Even if that transformation, ultimately, was not a positive experience.
The similarities of the Frontier mentality of the American West and the social movement that become emblematic of the Haight-Ashbury contribute to the idea that the experience of the Haight was akin to this journey into a new frontier—a crossing of boundaries into unknown territory. The difference, however, is that the Haight movement was an inner-world journey. The transformation was a redefinition of self that contributed to a revitalization.[8] It set the stage for post-modernism and deconstructionist views which expanded the concepts of human and civil rights. Temporal distance makes it near impossible to recognize fully the ramifications of this social movement. It has only been one generation since the Summer of Love, and it seems the events of that particular past is tethered to our present time. The process of deconstruction had to happen, which lead to post-modernity and a heightened sense of alienation. New technologies, and a social consciousness revolving around networks, are revitalizing communities. It seems that there is a desire for unity while maintaining distinctiveness that is at the heart of a mystical sociology. It is not just an innerworld journey. It is a journey that leads to unity and a sense of wholeness.
All these thoughts of journeys, transformations and revitalization started to connect to the ideas of mysticism by Wexler. While writing in my journal and reflecting on the modalities of the beat and hip generation (beatnik and hippies) I thought of a new modality—urban mystics. I write, “I heard this term, urban mystic, at the Gnostic church last week. It sums up what I think our generation is experiencing. Are we seekers of the pleroma, willing to be transformed by different methodologies while remaining devoted to our own destiny?”[9] I started to see that our conflations of religious expressions are really about using “technologies” to facilitate personal and social transformation.
For the frontier of the Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s and 1970s, this experimentation with various religious ideas offered substantial new perspectives in the realm of self-identity. Acid tests, and other drug experimentation, Wexley reminds us, created a sense of “metaphysical illumination” or “inner light,” but “later it was interpreted religiously and disseminated as a mystical spirituality.”[10] In other words, although drug use contributed to a religious experience, the search for a religious experience was not about the drugs. Drugs became part and parcel of the spiritual awakening, but it was not the cause. In fact, it has been alluded by some scholars that I have read, that it could have been to their detriment. One commenter stated that drug use and experimentation was like a diving into a pool without knowing how to swim. Spiritual transformation without proper methodologies to navigate through the hallucinogenic experience was near impossible. Experientially, the sensations and insights were overwhelming and satisfying but it failed to create the social cohesiveness that this movement set out to establish. To be sure, that was not the only factor that led to what seems like a abrupt stop to a major paradigmatic shift in human consciousness. Then again, the temporal distance problem does contribute to the fog of confusion surrounding the social revolution that we are in the midst of. What I experience as a “stop” in the social movement could actually be part of the process of social change.
The research that I have embarked on is larger than I have been able to grasp. It is clear to me, however, that Frontier never really closed, but that it got replaced with a new frontier—the frontier of the self. This journey into the wilderness of our own identities has been largely facilitated by the conflation of Eastern and Western ideas. The American West is about adventure into new territory. Entering into new territory develops a sense of liminality. A state of liminality produces a sensation of being betwixt worlds that contributes to a cognitive dissonance. The art of reintegration and revitalization is the art of ministry. Religion functions to decrease cognitive dissonance and to harmonize and bring balance to the mind and to society.[11] Yet, creativity and the ability to enter into another person’s “moccasins” rely on a person’s ability to dissolve, or at least make porous, the boundaries of self that they cling to. The ramifications of this type of re-selfing is the beginning of reconnecting the disparate parts of ourselves that post-modernist have deconstructed. The process of revitalization is connected to the process of destruction.
The Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic occupied the pastoral and religious role that was needed to accommodate this social transformation. Certainly, they were just one of many elements contributing to this social upheaval. The transformation is incomplete. Lack of discipline and political power has caused this movement to take different shapes throughout the years. Yet, the quest for social unity while respecting individual difference has not been realized. Our future depends on learning the valuable lessons, both good and bad, that the Haight-Ashbury social movement provides.
[1] Needleman, Jacob. The Indestructible Question. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. What do I mean by the function of religion? It has to do with the way that I understand religion in its broader context. Jacob Needleman directs my thoughts most succinctly from his book The Indestructible Question. He acknowledges that the question of the meaning of religion has become quite popular these days. For him, “the fundamental message of the religious traditions is that man does not know himself.” (37) Needleman sees a “unity which underlies an outer diversity” of religious expressions. Each religion has its own methods and practices. Each elaborates that “method includes all the forms and ways by which tradition guides human beings as they face the demands of survival, the social and physical needs of everyday life, the fact of death, and the innumerable joys and sorrows of human life of earth.” (37-38). It is a process of transformation, but when used for egoistic aims it loses its religious function.
[2] Other sources site June 7, 1967 as the founding date.
[3] Wexler, Philip. Mystical Society. An Emerging Social Vision. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Wexler says “Mysticism is defined by practices that recompose the inner self by working to transcend time and space; aim to create a more fluid self, if not dissolve it entirely; show how the individual can simultaneously be present in this and other worlds; and attune the self to become relationally receptive and tied to a larger absolute universe, which generates meaning and vitality.” (23-24)
[4] George R. “Skip” Gay, M.D, Founder & Former Director. http://www.rockmed.org (accessed 5/21/08)
[5] I use the definitions of revival and awakening as defined by William G. McLoughlin in his book Revivals, Awakenings and Reforms. He says, “Awakenings—the most vital and yet mysterious of all folk arts—are periods of cultural revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and extend over a period of a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values take place. Revivals alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a whole people.” (p.xiii)
[6] Szasz, Ferenc M. Religion in the Modern American West. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2000. p21
[7] Written by James Pieront Esq. in 1852.
[8] In the view of Philip Wexler, “imagination, embodied sensory presence, and the reintegrated Self/Other constitute the revitalization practices that have come to replace the sociocultural as mediation between structure and being.” (30)
[9] Personal journal entry: April 4, 2008
[10] Wexler, p. 119
[11] see Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2002.