Just about the same time, summer of 1959, George had a full-blown mystical experience while at Lakeside, the Methodist Chautauqua on Catawba Island, a few miles east of  Port Clinton.

Those hierophanies would lead me through work at Emerson College in Boston, Harvard Divinity School just across the Charles River in Cambridge, and later through doctoral work across the country in Berkeley. They would lead him into ordination at the First Church in Boston and the Unitarian ministry in which over some 40 years in very liberal interfaith ministry his sermons begin, not so much with texts of scripture, as they do with music. It would lead him into involvement with death and dying (particularly voluntary dying of the suffering), even into practices of Eastern meditation such as the rise of the kundalini sexuality.  Music sounds the way emotions (better put, experiencing the Holy) feels. So can sex, carefully practiced and dying  lead one face-to-face with the Holy.       

At  Emerson (1960-64), centered as it was in Boston’s near Back Bay, George became absorbed in that City’s 19^th century heritage of transcendentalism.  His roommate, David Lane, and George published a  paper on the religious roots of the School and its Founder, Charles Wesley Emerson . The paper created a furor among secular detractors, but later became the springboard for the College’s centenary biography, A Century of  Eloquence, and a prophecy for its current development.

“I suppose students flourish when they have a mentor. For me it was a Harvard doctoral student, Peter Fox Smith, son of the founder of Cleveland’s Red Raider Camp. Peter refined in me a love of the transcendent in religion through his appreciation of the limits of knowledge which he found through his study with Paul Tillich and fascination with the Catholic bishop, Nicholas of Cusa (‘there is but one Truth, and it is that there is no Truth’), and Madhyamika Buddhists Vasabandhu and Nagarjuna (What is Truth?  The Buddha answered in silence.) Their via negativa, like the ineffability of music, can lead also to the Holy. Peter and I shared a love for music and its academic study during years we were at Harvard. His dissertation centered on Wagner; mine, some years later, on Vaughan Williams. Only recently did I discover that for decades he has provided commentaries on libretti for Granite State opera buffs over Vermont Public Radio.”

“Peter seduced me into Harvard. Unlike Emerson, which was an adventure of the mind, Harvard was a ball-buster. I was the valedictorian at Emerson.  Harvard did not rank students, but from the honor scholarships I held I must have been somewhere in the top 20% at the Divinity School Class of 1967. In contrast to the Christmas morning-like delight of study at Emerson, life at Harvard was frenetic and frantic. I did get two straight A’s. Most students got none. One of those came with a paper, published in The Annals of the Unitarian Historical Society, on Cleveland’s industrialist Jephtha Wade and his ill-fated effort to establish a liberal (Unitarian) seminary on the property he later gave to the City, today known as Wade Park. The property now houses the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Art Institute, as well as the Cleveland Institute of Music, and others.”

After Harvard, Berkeley was a breeze. George arrived in October, 1967, at the height of Berkeley’s student activist. He was in the forefront of the march on the Oakland Army Induction Center, yet found many of the marchers mean-spirited. He spent most of the march protecting a potted tree from those who would have otherwise destroyed it. He remembers vividly reading Ernest Troeltch on Luther and Calvin the afternoon Governor Ronald Reagan ordered the California National Guard to bomb the Berkeley campus by air with tear gas.  At least one of the canisters crashed through the glass door of the Meiklejohn Social Sciences Library where he was studying. He was not happy with the California Governor. He, in contrast, did not know what to do with my letter of complaint and sent me a form letter thanking me for my support of his policies with students at “Cal.” The movie, Berkeley in the Sixties, tells the story. The spirit of those radical times continue for George with Link-TV, Free Speech TV, KPFA in Berkeley an Democracy Now where his viewing and listening loyalty continue to focus. (Yours should too!)

After brief stints teaching Sociology at the University of the Pacific and Washington & Jefferson College, he found his way to the pulpit of the Unitarian Church in Charleston (SC). He was, however, a mystical Christian and the congregation’s atheistic minority, despite his having tripled the growth of the church, cast him out a decade later. He would have stayed there forever, and missed life’s greatest adventures, but at the time he figured that Charleston’s Unitarian Church had been there since 1772 and would probably abide without him until flood waters overtake the city. He started congregations on Hilton Head Island and in Myrtle Beach. He also built a fantastic passive solar envelope house, designed by San Francisco solar architect, Lee Porter Butler. Check it out if ever you get to Charleston at the corner of the Intercoastal Waterway and Folly Road. It is still there today, looking more handsome than ever, but with compromises on the passive solar features that made it originally outstanding. A great feature was a California style hot tub suspended in the solarium over the front entrance to the innter house. The tub looked southwards through a wall of glass to the Intercoastal Waterway just beyond.

George left Charleston to help develop an AIDS hospice on the property of the Hare Krsna compound near Wheeling, WV. The project fell apart when the DOJ came down on the head swami for his extensive criminal mischief.  He did make good friends while at New Vrindaban and explored the composer, Hrishikesh Das (now Henry Doktorski), music of the modernized Hindu traditions. There also he met his life partner, Thomas McGurrin. They have now been together for 20 years. And he met a life friend of the mind, Tom Ammons, Oberlin graduate in philosophy, and then, as now, engineer at Pittsburgh’s classical music station, WQED-FM

Tom opened the way for his to become known as Pittsburgh’s Church Man, a reviewer of religious services for QED’s Sunday Arts Magazine.  He went on to review services for city magazines and even several times for ABC’s Good Morning America.  The Church Man gave me my first fifteen minutes spate of  fame on national and international media.

His work with the dying gave him a second, though one not as welcome. Even while reviewing churches, he became quite active in Pittsgurgh’s Hemlock Society and in 1995 helped a man dying with ALS cross over. Since 1997, independent of the Hemlock Society, the Compassionate Chaplaincy has aided more than 100 people. They are now fund raising to build the first Right to Die hospice. One discover he made came thanks to the Irish government’s effort to extradite him in 2007 to stand trial for being present when an 49 year old Irish woman took her life in January, 2002. She had long suffered with Cushings Syndrome. Thomas and George flew to Dublin to be with her. Five years later, he was forced to spend four months in jail, pending an extradition to Dublin. He was released after his attorney argued successfully that thought some states would agree with Ireland, a preponderance (along with the Bible) would not. Not only that, in many states, including West Virginia, despite popular misbelieve, counseling, aiding and even abetting a suicide are not unlawful. The same is technically true of Ohio, where assisting a death is also not criminalized. Hence the prospect for a hospice were one can choose to die by withholding food and water (15 days) for by the use of helium (15 minutes). He was a part of the small team that met in the summer of 1999 in Berkeley that came up with the helium method. The Compassionate Chaplaincy was the testing arm for that method and several other methods which a person could use to end his life inexpensively, quickly, and safety.

While the hospice project continues to percolate, Tom Ammons and George are working on a program to educate diplomats in the ways of world religions, both to make them sensitive rather than ignorant, and to aid in better negotiations towards peace. They are talking to Washington, a nearby college, and a nearby resort.

George is also planting yet another church congregation, this time in Lewisburg, WV.  The focus is on interfaith spiritual experience.

He foresees no retirement ever. His papers have been turned over to a biographer and a long-time friend, Dick Cote, who is currently working on a book. Friends to the End on the right to die movement. He tells George the papers will go either to the South Carolina Historical Society or to Harvard.