"Ames Gilbert" wrote on the Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog, August 23, 2009:
In September 1994, [Fellowship of Friends President] Christina Bishop (as I knew her) [aka Kristina Nielsen] called me for a meeting about my activities. I suggested we meet for lunch at the Lodge, and took my tape-recorder, as was my habit in those days (I still have many tape cassettes, some of them now crumbling, from those last months).
Here is the heart of the conversation, with the numerous ‘ah’s, ‘umms’, partial sentences, interruptions, cross-talk and so forth of the actual conversation edited out.
C. “… I really want to know why you’re resisting so much. Robert has never personally harmed you, and swears that sex with Troy Buzbee was consensual and that he didn’t know he was under seventeen. So why are you pushing so hard? You’ll only have to leave, and you’ll lose everything.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
A. This is pretty strange; you’re a representative of an organization that holds a central principle, “Verify everything, question everything”, and yet when I do, you react blindly to protect the organization’s identity, which in this case is Robert’s identity clothed with a few layers. So I’m not going to talk to you as a representative. I am willing to talk to you as an individual and on the basis of friendship. Do you want that?
C. Yes, I do. I’ve known you for sixteen years, and I feel that we are friends.
A. Well, I can’t say that, but there has always been that potential; we haven’t spent enough time to actualize it, that’s all. But I’ll talk to that potential. I’m acting now, publishing my newsletter, talking to people despite Robert’s demand to stop, because it’s the right thing for me to do at this time. I’m at the point where if I don’t act, my conscience will die. I’ve been burying it for sixteen years, and this is my last chance.
Look, I joined the school to develop my conscience, to learn the difference between morality as predicated by society, and my true internal guide, and I’ve found that I’ve actually joined an organization that preaches wakefulness and induces sleep. I have to take this chance, and I can no more help it than Robert can help trying to squash it. I feel I’ve woken up from a nightmare, I’m on the surface coming up for breath for the third time, and that what is happening will lead to my freedom. Robert can threaten that my soul will go to feed the moon, but he doesn’t know and can’t know. I’m taking back my power regardless of the consequences, and for me, this is being true to myself.
This is the most important thing in my life, and means more than life. It’s just the way I’m built. I can’t claim to be right, but neither can you or Robert. No one can know for me. I feel I’m a child of God, a particle of Source, and Robert has no place between me and God.
So, there it is, go and tell him that, if you dare! I honestly think he won’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about…”
I like to think that Christina appreciated this conversation (melodrama and all), but that is unknown. What I did hear is that when later she became director of the London center, she was asked for advice by a struggling student who was considering leaving the FoF. I was told that she answered that it was a matter of conscience, and that if the student’s conscience said it was better to leave, that was the correct course. This was reported to Burton, and he demanded that she and her co-director husband leave the FoF, which they did. She is dead now, but I hold her in my memory as one of the few honest, open, and decent ‘authority figures’ I knew in the FoF.
As you drive north on State Highway 99 through the Sacramento Valley, rice paddies give way to farms, which in turn segue into chaparral and then the foothills of the Sierra Nevada: a region of scrub oak, pine, manzanita, redwood, and not much else. As you twist east from Marysville along State 20, civilization intrudes only in the form of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Oregon House and, a few minutes later, the incongruous clearing that marks Renaissance Vineyard & Winery.