[6] The chain smoking Pike was the fifth Bishop of California and, a few years before he began to explore spiritualism and psychic phenomena in an effort to contact his deceased son, became a recovering alcoholic.

In 1944, he moved to the United States Maritime Commission (MARCOM), War Shipping Administration, but then requested and received inactive duty status due to his ordination as deacon by the Bishop of Washington D.C., Angus Dun, on December 21, 1944.

Using his new position and media savvy, he made the pulpit a place for discussion of the religious and social problems of the day, vociferously opposing the local Catholic bishops over their attacks on Planned Parenthood and their opposition to birth control.

Common topics included birth control, abortion laws, racism, capital punishment, apartheid, antisemitism, and farm worker exploitation, with Pike weighing in at the end to give what he called "a five-minute commercial for God.

He served in this position until 1966, when, plagued by personal loss, absorbed with the paranormal, tired of diocesan attacks, wrangling and administration, and exhausted from hyperactivity, he resigned his office to become a senior fellow for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, a liberal think tank founded by Robert Maynard Hutchins, where he began an extensive schedule of speaking engagements.

He was one of the leaders of the Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State movement, which advocated against John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign because of Catholic teachings.

[16] While at Grace Cathedral, he was involved with promoting a living wage for workers in San Francisco, the acceptance of LGBT people in the church, and civil rights.

[19] Among his notable accomplishments, Pike invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1965 following his march to Selma, Alabama.

The Episcopal House of Bishops, realizing the damage that a public trial of a prelate of Pike's standing would do to the image of the Church,[6] attempted to head off further proceedings in 1966 with a hastily-conceived censure motion designed to satisfy his accusers, denouncing Pike's conduct and doctrinal statements: "His writing and speaking on profound realities with which Christian faith and worship are concerned are too often marred by caricatures of treasured symbols and at the worst, by cheap vulgarizations of great expressions of the faith.

"[5] Attempting to avoid what would be a demoralizing proceeding, the Episcopal Convention got Pike to agree to drop his demands in exchange for their passing a canon that made it harder to bring official charges of heresy accusations, and to institute special provisions for "due process" in any future censures.

In September 1967, Pike participated in a televised séance with his dead son through the medium Arthur Ford, an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ church.

[8] Before his second wife filed for divorce in 1965, Pike had been living openly with his secretary, Maren Hackett Bergrud, until her suicide in 1967 at age 43, after she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills in his apartment after they had had an argument.

In 1968, in defiance of C. Kilmer Myers, the Bishop who succeeded him, he married Diane Kennedy, a Methodist student twenty-five years his junior, with whom he had collaborated on The Other Side.

Wanting to have a feeling for the landscape where Jesus went into the wilderness to fast and meditate for 40 days, on September 2 they drove into the Judean Desert outside of Jerusalem, planning to drive to Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered.

Using an Avis map they'd been given at the airport with their rented Ford Cortina, they took several wrong turns before their vehicle became stuck in a deep rut on a tertiary dirt road.

After two hours of walking in the tremendous heat, and with night approaching, a dehydrated and exhausted Pike could go no farther, and they found a relatively flat rock under a bit of an overhang that gave them some shade.

As the number of search efforts began to dwindle on the third day, she relied on many mediums and seers, including the one who had worked with Pike in trying to contact his son, who offered visions of where her husband's body might be.

He had found a large pool of water in a shaded area of the canyon bed, but instead of remaining there, continued to follow what he thought was his wife's route, leaving a trail of a map, undershorts, sunglasses, and her contact lens case, to indicate the path he had taken.

In a prayer, Pemberton reveals the story of his search to escape ritualization and find illumination in the wilds of Africa, in the same way that Pike ventured into the wilderness around Jerusalem in an attempt to connect to the historical Jesus.