A Shiloh Sister's Story

by Jeanie Murphy

"In the late 1960s, a nearly unbelievable event occurred on the West Coast of America. Thousands of young Americans became involved with one of the most unpredicted social movements in the history of this country--the so-called Jesus movement, accepting a brand of fundamentalist-oriented Christianity that many thought was dead."
--Organized Miracles: A Study of a Contemporary, Youth, Communal, Fundamentalist Organization, by James T. Richardson, Mary W. Stewart, and Robert B. Simmonds (Transaction Books, 1979; out of print.)

Shiloh was the largest of the Jesus People communes of the early 1970s.
--J.V.P.

I N 1971, A GIRLFRIEND AND I WERE HITCHHIKING across the country from Boston, heading for Delano, California, where we planned to bring our bursting 19-year-old talents to the aid of Ceasar Chavez. Somehow, we found ourselves in Corvallis, Oregon, looking for somewhere to hide from the man who had given us a ride to Albany, Oregon, some 10 miles away. I wore thick, heavy hiking boots, a huge white shirt made for a 6-foot-5-inch man tucked into jean shorts, and a sheath knife hanging from my belt against the side of my left thigh. I carried a pack that towered about a foot over my head. I hoped everyone would believe I was a powerful, dangerous figure. At this point, I was having trouble believing it myself.

My friend and I ended up taking refuge in the Shiloh house in Corvallis, one of many Christian houses that Shiloh Youth Revival Centers ran at the time. Like the other houses I was to get to know, the Corvallis house was old, sagging, and sparse in furnishings. Yet somehow, it was comfortable. They put up the hordes of street people like us who were traversing the country at the time, and did so in the name of Christ. I was a little thrown when I came in the door and saw a crown of thorns hanging on the wall and, near it, a picture of a gooey-eyed, gigantic Christ knocking against the United Nations building in New York. But the people were friendly and obviously part of the counterculture. And the first lesson I had received was that I was much more vulnerable than I thought.

I ended up converting to Christianity there, but my position was ambiguous since I was not an official member of the commune, and therefore not quite what they called a sister. One of the brothers told me months later that he had not realized I was a girl for the first few weeks. Most nights I slept outside in the treehouse in the backyard on a mattress on boards with quilts piled over it. To help pay for our upkeep, my friend and I went out to work with the others. Shiloh typically chose jobs that would allow the able-bodied to work together so that they would not become isolated and tempted back into "the world." We were mostly young and strong, and picking fruit was fun. However, when we came home--grimy, aching, sun-dazzled--we came home to sisters who had worked in the kitchen most of the day to prepare our supper. To me, these women, confined indoors to the kitchen and to the menial household chores, were like slaves. It never occurred to me that I too had been slaving, out in the fields and orchards. My work felt ennobling, entirely unlike "women's" work.

I went home briefly at the end of the summer, but my family back in New England was mystified and outraged by my outspoken and often obnoxious Christianity. My friends couldn't make much of it either. In January 1971, I came back to Corvallis in desperation, unable to find a place that fit anymore.

The dark winter rains of the Northwest fell relentlessly. Coming to the old sagging house felt as if I were crawling into a smothering grey nest of asceticism that consisted of plain food, long hours, and, yes, women's work. Housekeeping was as difficult as algebra and as foreign as Swahili, and accepting it, let alone mastering it, became part of my "trials," or "cross." I learned how to darn socks over a light bulb by darning a bagful of them--literally hundreds of socks. I learned how to scrub floors and even make a rice pudding that would set without eggs. But I also learned how to tear off on a bike at 4 a.m. to deliver papers or to screech up to the dumpster at the local market to snatch the discarded (but wrapped and almost perfect) vegetables before people from the other communes got there. Thus, I found I was expected to be both virile and boyish as well as womanly and domestic. The first alternative definitely had more appeal to me. Yet in the second I began to find the luxury of quiet, of stillness.

Three weeks after joining Shiloh, I was engaged. Years afterwards I found out two other men had planned to ask me to marry them when my fiance beat them to it. Hormones raged, as hormones will among humans in their late teens and early twenties all living in close proximity. But marriage was the only option. For the men, the choices were not as plentiful. The ratio of men to women was high; I suspect not too many women found a life of unremitting work, especially housework, fulfilling or tempting. Or perhaps it was the fact that women had little voice in Shiloh.

My four years in Shiloh were the only period in my life (after age 10) that I didn't keep any kind of journal. It seemed much too dangerous to do so, although no one ever forbade it. In Shiloh, women didn't give Bible studies (until a few years later, and then only to other women). Women didn't lead anything unless they happened to be married to pastors, and then they led other women in housewifely tasks.

However, it seems to me that the fact that I sang and played instruments made my experience as a woman in Shiloh a little different. Music was cherished in Shiloh because we had no radios, no televisions, no tape players--at least not for the hoi polloi. People wrote exquisite (and dumb) songs, learned old hymns and spirituals, and played (mostly guitar) before nightly Bible studies. You were lucky to have a musician in your Shiloh house. Since my old "worldly" tunes and songs were forbidden, I learned from hymn books and other people, and later I even went to the library and dug up George Pullen Jackson's book of "white spirituals" and learned these haunting old melancholy laments. I also wrote songs from the first encounter I had with Shiloh. I was allowed a voice that actually introduced nightly Bible studies taught by the brothers.

But I had to be careful. Later, after I left Corvallis for another Shiloh outpost, in front of 200 people or so, I sang "The Great Speckled Bird." The next day, I received a talking- to. According to the pastors, this song did not have "correct doctrine." I was not to sing it anymore. I felt I had done something bad, but I wasn't exactly sure what, and I became much more nervous about what I could sing and what I could write about in my songs.

In the spring, most of us who were able-bodied were called up north to Shiloh's huge infamous Berry Farm at Cornelius, Oregon, the boot camp of boot camps, where we slept in the migrant cabins, ate bizarre and sometimes Spartan meals, and worked 10- to 14-hour days that started at 4 or 5 a.m., depending upon what shift you were on. There were about 200 of us at that time, and we were grubby. We were rather proud of it, or at least I was. We were macho berry pickers, field workers, and among many of the women out in the field, an Amazonian spirit prevailed. I raided the Communal, a pile of discarded clothes and articles found in every Shiloh house, to find the baggiest, most disreputable overalls and long underwear. I strode through the fields in big rubber boots.

Here, even the kitchen sisters were tough. They chopped chickens' heads off and hung the headless creatures to bleed on the wash lines, right next to the drying clothes. In the kitchen, they stood on a stepladder to stir the huge pot (christened "Big Mama") that held our typical breakfast: powdered milk, sugar, cinnamon, and chunks of bread, mixed into a sweet, hot, soggy mess they called bread pudding. They were admirable.

After a few months, we were organized into evangelical teams and sent down to "The Land." The Land, which had near-mythical status, was a ranch near Eugene. Here we were to be schooled in the Bible and then sent out to various cities across the country to start more Shiloh houses. Once people came into our new house, we were to send them back to The Land, and there would be more teams to start more Shiloh houses.

At The Land, the head person in Shiloh, the Elder of Elders, John Higgins, Jr., was disgusted by our grubby appearance, or so the word trickled down. Team pastors were advised to see that the sisters spruced up. Once again, I felt jerked by the invisible chain, threatened with "woman stuff." One day when I had the usual chore of scrubbing outhouses, I changed into my nastiest jeans and sweatshirt, grabbed my bucket, and made a circuit of The Land to do my scrubbing. In the course of this circuit, I was rebuked three times "in the name of the Lord" by three different deacons and pastors who happened to pass by. A rebuke "in the name of the Lord" was serious, heart-stopping business, and sisters could never do it to brothers, only the other way around. I had been rebuked "in the name of the Lord" by my own fiance back in Corvallis when I had first joined Shiloh. I had trotted down the basement steps and seen what looked like a washing machine on top of him. "Holy shit!" I had exclaimed, in my still new and unregenerated way.

This day on The Land, it was the third rebuke that I now remember the best and with fondness. The poor pastor who rebuked me, all of 19 or 20 years old, like me, saw me drop my buckets and rush past him into the laundry room and break into a storm of sobs. It was one of the few times I wanted to leave Shiloh. I sobbed and imagined myself running down the long driveway or through the woods so I wouldn't be seen. This brave man came in, calmed me down, and did an unheard-of thing: He apologized and told me he had been a jerk. That is the only time I ever heard any male in Shiloh say anything like that, and I was overwhelmed and confused. I was also delighted.

I have mentioned that I was engaged almost from the day I entered Shiloh. I supposed I was in love with my fiance, but I was constantly having disturbing crushes on all kinds of other people, and others had them on me. But I and the people I knew well took the injunction to chastity very seriously. The Rapture would be here any day. Jesus was coming back. It made a nice excuse for me to prolong my engagement and go out on a team. My fiance was upset, but the idea of marriage terrified me. I still wasn't quite sure how I had managed to get into it.

After our team was sent out to Madison, Wisconsin, my pastor and another pastor from the area tried to talk me out of going to San Francisco, where my future husband was pastoring a house he had started with his own team. They suggested that I could do much more as a "patroness," a new position Shiloh was creating for women to act as pastors to other groups of women. But I was sick of being lumped with the other sisters. I didn't like what most of the women had to do, and I couldn't know that these new teams were going to be planting trees and working Shiloh's crab boats up in Alaska. If I had, I'm not sure my fiance would have won out. But he did, earning the money for me to fly west.

We were married at The Land. Our parents were there, and so was one of my old friends from before Shiloh. It was disastrous. Riding away in the van with my husband, I felt a sudden choking sorrow that had to do with my sisters, who were now separated from me in complicated and inexorable ways. There was nobody to talk to. I wanted to cry. I was 22.

I became pregnant almost immediately, for even though Shiloh approved of birth control, we didn't really want to think about it. My husband was busy pastoring the house. I was supposed to instruct the sisters in cooking and get ready for the baby. I hated being placed in this isolating position of authority. I resented the marriage that had changed me from fruit picker and hitchhiker to mother and housewife. I swelled to ungainly proportions and sank into depression. This did not lift until 1974, when we were precipitously ejected from the commune. My husband had alleged that a "slush fund" was feeding money to the head leadership, the "elders" and "pastors" of the commune, who were using it to live in sybaritic decadence.

We ended up in Portland, Oregon, "marked." "Marking" was like the Amish shunning, in which the Scripture says, "Mark them which cause divisions." (Romans 16:17.) It was used to isolate and separate anyone who challenged Shiloh's authority. I hated my husband then for dragging me out of the world I knew, back into the one that had died for me. I hated the fact that as his wife, I was therefore culpable in Shiloh's eyes, even though I knew almost nothing about what was going on. And my separation was a raw wound that oozed and throbbed. I played my guitar and banjo and sang the old songs late at night in our sterile, cheap apartment living room, while my family slept. I was now a mother of two children, forever cut off from the wild, apocalyptic, yet cozy, close, intimate family I had known. I would never hear 200 people singing out over the field of damp strawberry leaves as the mist swirled though the hills and the sun throbbed into red and then golden life. The world had snatched me back. And it would be many years before I dared accept who and what and where I was: a woman often unsure of herself, growing older daily, surrounded by people who didn't necessarily know the answers or even the questions, with dualities opening out in every direction.

Jeanie Murphy returned to college and received her M.A. in English. She lives in Puyallup, Washington, where she coordinates the English department at Pierce College and teaches the Bible as literature. She and her second husband, also a musician, play together in a band. They are members of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), where they feel they have found their spiritual home.