“Compassionate Listening”

and other writings by Gene Knudsen Hoffman,

Quaker Peace Activist and Mystic

Edited and introduced by Anthony Manousos

“For more than half a century, Gene Hoffman—through her essays and poetry, her workshops and speeches, her travels and her witness—has been a fountainhead of creative spirituality and courageous peacemaking. This will be a rich resource for those who come after her.—Richard Deats, Editor of Fellowship magazine, Author of Martin Luther King, Junior, Spirit-led Prophet (Faithworks, 1999).

Available through Friends Bulletin for $16.95. Send check to 3223 Danaha St, Torrance CA 90505. For more information, contact the editor at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . All rights are reserved and copyrighted by Friends Bulletin. Use with permission of editor.

Preface
Table of Contents

Biographical Introduction: Life of Gene Hoffman summarized

Testimonials:

“How fine that a collection of Gene Hoffman’s writings will be published! I loved reading the introductory essay…. I want to commend you for that careful and lively piece of work. You let so much of Gene shine through, capturing her vitality, versatility, and passion, and include so many other voices as well. This book will be an invaluable resource…”—Joanna Macy, Buddhist peace activist, author of Widening Circles: A Memoir (New Society Publishers, 2000) and World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax Press, 1991).

“If you are looking for lay wisdom that pierces deep into what psychotherapy is all about you will be gripped and lifted by this autobiographical classic that is written in blood and tears out of her own life by Gene Hoffman, a gifted Santa Barbara Friend.”—Douglas Steere, Quaker theologian, writing about From Inside the Glass Doors (reprinted in this collection).

“I consider Gene one of my most treasured mentors. In fact, I consider her one of our national treasures.”—Leah Green, Director of Mideast Citizen Diplomacy and the Compassionate Listening Project.

“I endorse the program for Compassionate Listening… It’s very important to begin efforts to try to heal the world, and we need to know that we have the potential and the power to do that.”—Dennis Kucinich, progressive Congressman from Ohio’s 10th district.

Editor’s Preface

I planned to write a short biography of Gene Hoffman as part of a study of peace activists who also consider themselves mystics.[1] I had spent all summer gathering material about Gene’s life and work, and was looking forward to spending a nice, quiet day at my word processor writing up my observations.

But God or the Universe had other plans. When I called up Richard Deats, editor of Fellowship magazine,[2] to ask him some questions about Gene, he said that “things were kind of hectic” and asked if I had seen the news on television yet. I told him that I was too busy writing, but since he insisted, I turned on the TV.

What I saw filled me with horror and dread. The images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the fiery explosions, the clear blue skies suddenly darkened with smoke, repeated over and over again, obsessively, like a nightmare, didn’t seem real, yet I knew that it wasn’t a movie. I knew that the world, and my life, would never be the same.

I also knew that Gene Hoffman’s insights were more crucial than ever before. After spending much of her life trying to understand the root causes of violence, she had concluded:

Some time ago, I recognized that terrorists were people who had grievances, who thought their grievances would never be heard and certainly never addressed. Later, I saw that all parties to every conflict were wounded, and that at the heart of every act of violence was an unhealed wound. I began to search for ways we peace people might help to heal these violence-causing wounds.[3]

During the two years that I have spent collecting and editing this remarkable anthology of Gene’s writings, our country has tried to fight terrorism through preemptive violence. Our leaders have authorized the invasion and occupations of two countries, killed thousands of people, curtailed civil rights, escalated the military budget beyond all reason, and alienated most of the world. Terrorist acts have increased worldwide, and US citizens feel less secure than ever before. It will undoubtedly take a generation, perhaps longer, to undo the damage caused by our misguided response to the terrorism.

Deeply versed in psychology and spirituality as well as social activism, Gene provides an alternative to our nation’s compulsive cult of violence. She insists that the key to overcoming terrorism is through deep listening to another’s pain and inner conflict.  “An enemy is someone whose story we have not ye heard,” is one of her favorite sayings. But Gene is not naively optimistic about this approach. She knows how hard it is to listen deeply and to transform an enemy into a friend. She recognizes that to become peacemakers, we must face up to our inner conflicts and be willing to be transformed by the Spirit.

Gene has been active in the struggle for peace and social justice for over fifty years—since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy and loyalty oaths. At age eighty she continued to give workshops and write articles for the alternative press. Her writings are filled not only with spiritual and psychological insights, but also with vivid portraits of people that bring to life the peace and justice movement during the past half century. As we prepare ourselves for the long struggle ahead to restore sanity to our nation and the world, Gene’s example can help us remember that peacemaking is a lifelong commitment—one that is full of joy and adventure as well as hard work.

How to Read This Book

You can read this book from cover to cover as a spiritual autobiography. You can also dip into different sections dealing with themes that interest you or “speak to your condition.” At the end of each section of this book is a series of “queries,” or questions, for you to contemplate. “Queries” are a practice developed by Quakers to provide practical and spiritual guidance. Some of the queries have been taken from Quaker sources; others have sprung from the readings.

A blank page has been included after each section since, like Isak Dinesen, who originated this idea, Gene Hoffman believes that it is important to leave “blank pages” in one’s writings for the reader to fill in with his or her own experience and insight.

This book could not have been completed without considerable help from Friends. First, I want to thank the Bogert Fund for Christian Mysticism, which provided seed money to conduct research on “activist mystics.” Publication of this book was made possible through generous donations from Frances McAllister and Helen Bross (in the memory of her beloved husband John) as well as other donors who contributed to the Friends Bulletin Special Publications Fund. Finally, I am grateful to all who have read the manuscript, shared stories about Gene, and provided encouragement and constructive criticism.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Preface

Editor’s Introduction and Biography

Part I: Witnessing Against McCarthyism

“The Oath and I”

Queries on a “single standard of truth”….

Part II: Building Bridges Between Races

“Trapped by Thomas Jefferson”

“Let the Rage Uncoil”

Queries on race relations….

Part III: Breakdown and Breakthroughs

From Inside the Glass Doors….

“Divorce: What Might Friends Do?”

“Our Children Are Guests in Our Lives”

Queries on mutual and self care….

Part IV: Peacemaking From the Inside Out

“A Peace Pilgrim’s Progress To Inner Healing”

“No Conflict, No Reconciliation”

“A New Approach to Peace”

“Speaking Truth to Power”…

“Reflections on Meeting With Richard Nixon”

“Disarming the Heart”

“Hope from Hiroshima”…

“Discovering Your Vocation in the Nuclear Age”….

“Thich Nhat Hanh, The ‘Nam Retreat”….

Queries on peacemaking…

Part V: Soviet-American Citizen Diplomacy…100

“Planting Seeds of Hope”

“To Live Without Enemies”

“Creation Continues”…

Queries on reconciliation….

Part VI: Reflections on the Spirit

"Jesus, the Christ, Quakers and I”…

“God and Horror”

“Listening for Truth”

“Lester and Gandhi: A Special Friendship”

Selected Poems from All Possible Surprises…

“Holy Fools”

Queries on spiritual nurture…

VII: Compassionate Listening in the Middle East.

“Listening to the Libyans”…

“Israelis and Palestinians: Two Traumatized Peoples”….131

“Crevices in the Rock”…135

“After the Peace Accords—What?”….140

“An Enemy is One Whose Story We Have Not Heard”….142

“Compassionate Listening—First Step to Reconciliation?”….146

Queries on listening….

VIII: Listening for the Future….

“Compassionate Listening in Alaska” by Gene Hoffman…. 9

“Compassionate Listening and Makah Whaling” by Jonis Davis….

“Compassionate Listening and the Israelis and Palestinians” by Kari Thorene

“How Can We Respond to Terrorism as Friends?” Interview with Gene Hoffman by Bob Banner….

“Report on Compassionate Listening Training” by Leah Green

“Why There is Hope for Humanity” by Gene Hoffman….

“Aging: A Time of New Possibilities” by Gene Hoffman…

Concluding queries…

Biographical Introduction

As the shadow of terrorism and war looms large in the consciousness of America and the world, Gene Hoffman’s message of healing and hope seems more relevant than ever before:

Some time ago, I recognized that terrorists were people who had grievances, who thought their grievances would never be heard and certainly never addressed. Later, I saw that all parties to every conflict were wounded, and that at the heart of every act of violence was an unhealed wound. I began to search for ways we peace people might help to heal these violence-causing wounds. [4]

For the past twenty years, Gene Hoffman has been engaged in efforts to seek out the deep, psychological causes of violence and to help bring about healing and reconciliation through a process she calls “Compassionate Listening.”

An active Quaker and member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) for over fifty years, she traveled dozens of times to the Middle East and the former Soviet Union during the 1980s and 1990s to do reconciliation work. In 1989, after American planes downed two Libyan planes, she went to Libya with an FOR delegation to meet with Libyan leaders. She has met with and listened to Palestinians and Israelis, and published articles, books, and pamphlets about her experiences, including Pieces of the Mideast Puzzle (1991) and No Royal Road to Reconciliation (1995). Most recently she helped to arrange Compassionate Listening sessions between Alaskan hunters and fishers and indigenous people through the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). She has published over a hundred articles as well as books, poems and pamphlets and given innumerable workshops and talks about peacemaking. Her work has inspired numerous others, including Cynthia Monroe, AFSC staff person in Alaska, and Leah Green, founder of Mideast Citizen Diplomacy’s Compassionate Listening project. Gene has been rightly called a “pioneer” in the Compassionate Listening movement, and has worked with such other notables as Adam Curle, Herb Walters, Virginia Baron, and Richard Deats.

“Gene is a real prophet,” said Judith Kolokoff, former AFSC regional director in the Pacific Northwest. “And she’s a remarkable facilitator. She has the capacity to bring out the very best of the truth in each individual.”

Gene’s approach to compassionate listening is rooted in both psychological and mystical perspectives. A founder of the Santa Barbara Night Counseling Center in the 1960s, she earned her Masters in pastoral counseling from Goddard College and worked with Ben Weininger, a “Zen-Hasidic” Rogerian psychiatrist. With her background in counseling, Gene came to see all parties in a conflict as “wounded,” as having suffered psychological traumas that need healing.

But Gene’s work also has a spiritual dimension, as Dennis Rivers, a communication skills instructor from Santa Barbara, observes: “Gene is a Quaker mystic. Her calling was to carry pastoral counseling out of the pastor’s study into public life. What has energized her work over the years is the Quaker teaching that ‘there is that of God in every person.’”

As Gene herself puts it: “The call, as I see it, is for us to see that within all life is the mystery: God. It is within the contra, the Nazi, the Africaaner, the Israeli, [the Palestinian], and the American. By compassionate listening we may awaken it and thus learn the partial truth the other is carrying, for another aspect of being human is that we each carry some portion of the truth. To reconcile, we must listen for, discern, and acknowledge this partial truth in everyone.” [5]

To appreciate fully Gene’s approach to peacemaking and conflict resolution, we need to understand something about her intense inner struggles. To do so, we need to follow her along a spiritual journey that she aptly calls “a peace pilgrim’s progress to inner healing.” [6]

From Fairytale Childhood to Stormy Adolescence

Probably no peace activist has been more honest in sharing her life story, even the painful and problematic parts, than Gene Hoffman.

Gene’s life was not supposed to be painful; it was supposed to be a fairytale or the American Dream come true. That’s how Gene’s parents saw their own lives and that’s what they sought for their only daughter. But Gene has had the courage and faith to explore the dark as well the enlightened part of herself in her two autobiographical works—her unpublished Masters thesis called Toward Turning (1976) and an account of her stay in a mental institution, From Inside the Glass Doors (1977).

According to Gene, her father’s story was a “typical Horatio Alger one.” Thorkild (“Tom”) Knudsen, emigrated from Denmark in 1909. He arrived penniless and slept on a park bench his first night in New York. He then went west, founded the Knudsen Creamery in Pasadena, and became rich and powerful. According to Gene, “this one-time impoverished farm boy rose to such distinction that he was knighted by the King of Denmark and became confidant of royalty and presidents,” including the Quaker-turned-Cold-Warrior, Richard Nixon, who was treated like a member of the family. [7]

Gene’s mother, Valley Mary Filtzer, was (in her daughter’s words) a “beautiful, vital, vivid, and ambitious woman” who dreamed of becoming an actress. When her father died, the family’s fortunes declined and Valley had to quit school to work in her mother’s small restaurant. Valley attended night school and became secretary to the president of the Arden Diary, where she met and fell in love with Gene’s father. Their parents at first did not approve of the marriage. Valley’s parents disapproved because Thorkild was a foreigner. Thorkild’s family disapproved because Valley’s family background was reputedly Jewish. Gene has always been proud of her Jewish connection, even though it was denied by her parents:

I was twenty two when my grandmother [Anna Stalp Filtzer] told me my grandfather [Samuel] was a Bohemian Jew. That knowledge had been hidden from me by my parents. Perhaps she thought it was time. I was thrilled and returned home great excitement to tell my parents how glad I was to be a Jew. They denied it. But I continued to cherish this awareness of the Hebrew seed in me, the seed of prophets and seers.[8]

On January 3, 1919, Elinor Gene Knudsen was born in Los Angeles, California, to a family whose fortunes were on the rise. From an early age Gene was encouraged to believe that she had been singled out for an extraordinary destiny, that she would become a great stage actress, and that she would marry a Prince Charming and have a perfect life. Her childhood was in many ways idyllic—full of “camping, traveling, holidaying, huge family gatherings, many Danish traditions, and celebrations of every kind.”[9]

Gene’s religious education was shaped by the contradictory attitudes of her parents. Skeptical of organized religion, her father idolized Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the atheist Robert Ingersoll. He encouraged Gene to be a freethinker and question everything intellectually. Gene’s mother, on the other hand, had what Gene called “a simple faith in God” based on feeling, not intellect. Valley conveyed to her daughter the consoling sense of a personal and loving God. She exposed Gene to a smorgasbord of religious practices—from Unitarianism to Aimee Semple McPherson. To ground her daughter in a particular faith, Valley had Gene baptized in a Presbyterian church at age four, apparently against the wishes of her husband, who didn’t attend the ceremony.  As a child, Gene loved the church and all its rituals, particularly the hymn singing, but she found some teachings of the Bible hard to accept. In this respect she may have been influenced by her father, who didn’t want his wife to give Gene a Bible, saying, “Don’t give her one; she might believe it.” [10]

Gene had a rich imaginative life nourished by the idealism of poetry and religion. As a child, she prayed to Jesus from time to time and experienced a quasi-mystical experience when she attended a mass at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome at age nine.

According to Gene, one of the most memorable religious moments of her childhood was reciting Edgar Guest’s “Let Me Live in a House by the Side of the Road” during a family gathering at age twelve. When Gene finished her recitation, she noticed her father in tears. She says that this poem was to become a  moral “compass” that influenced her to make her various homes into gathering places for those in need of sustenance, and for peace activists.[11]

Another religious attitude that her parents strongly conveyed can be summed up in the biblical phrase: “From those to whom much has been given, much will be required” (Luke 12: 48). The Knudsens had high standards and expected a great deal from their only daughter. They believed in and practiced the biblical injunction: “Those who spare the rod hate their children” (Proverbs13: 24). Gene was frequently disciplined with “spankings” and other punishments when her behavior was not up to the family standard.[12] A high spirited, impulsive, and creative child, Gene suffered from bouts of depression, insomnia, and various physical ailments. As an adult, Gene went through intensive therapy and came to believe that these problems were mostly psychosomatic, stemming from her parents’ unrealistically high expectations and their punitive behavior.[13]

Valley, Gene’s mother, was a woman who demanded much from her herself, as well as from her daughter. A tireless organizer, she was involved in numerous charitable and humanitarian efforts, including a tree-planting beautification program called Los Angeles Beautiful. Gene calls her “a liberated woman,” whose influence on many people (including her daughter) was compelling.

Gene was a born to be an artist, as far as her parents were concerned. As soon as Gene was old enough to talk, her mother took her to have acting lessons. The acting coach told them to come back when Gene could read. Gene’s parents encouraged her artistic talents in every way possible, and she did the same for her children (she often says, “I raised my children to be artists: writers, painters, musicians,” and their art works line the walls of her home)[14]. In junior high and high school, Gene was constantly involved in plays and recitations. Instead of college she went to the Pasadena Playhouse where she spent four years studying drama (she later received a B.A. in acting when the Playhouse became a degree-granting institution). In 1939, she traveled to Stratford, England, to study Shakespeare and was the first American invited to study at the Royal Theater School in Copenhagen. Arriving in Denmark just as Hitler began attacking Scandinavia,  she abruptly had to return home.

During her teenage years Gene fell in love with a brilliant and talented young musician named David Nater,  who was seven years her senior. After a passionate affair that lasted several years but was not “consummated,” Gene broke off their relationship. David committed suicide soon afterwards, and the story became front-page news. His parents blamed Gene, who was devastated. As she explained in her spiritual autobiography, Toward Turning,  “I wondered where God was—if God was—how could He let this happen? I prayed for understanding. None came.”[15]

After a time of soul-searching Gene decided to go back to the theater and study acting seriously. She played her first starring role under the direction of a famous and extremely demanding Hungarian director named Barbara Vajda. Gene’s performance was stellar, and she felt overjoyed.[16]

In the flush of success, feeling that she was “in love with the world” and “the whole world was in love with” her, Gene found a new lover named Werner Klemperer (1920-2000), who was the son of a famous composer and later became a well-known actor (his most famous role was that of Colonel Klink in the TV comedy “Hogan’s Heroes). Of Catholic-Jewish background (his father fled Germany to escape the Nazis), Werner opened Gene up to new religious as well as artistic vistas. Through Werner and his family connections Gene met some of the world’s great musicians: Bruno Walter, Igor Stravinksy, Ernst Toch, and Arnold Schoenberg. [17]

In 1940, she also met a New York playwright and director named Noel Langley who aroused in her the same passionate feelings as her former lover David. Noel wanted her to move to New York, star in his play, and help him to usher in a “new age of theater.” Werner also wanted to move to New York, so they went together and rented apartments in the same building. Even though Gene continued to be involved with Werner, she longed for Noel. The only problem was that he was married and had five children.

After four months in New York, Gene’s relationship with Werner fell apart, and Noel wanted Gene to become his mistress. Her Puritan conscience rebelled, so she begged her mother to come to New York.

Her mother reacted with shock and despair when Gene called and explained her predicament. But she also helped her daughter by buying her new clothes and setting her up in a safe haven, “The Barbizon Hotel for Women.” Gene’s emotional turmoil reached the point where she sought psychiatric help for the first time. Her psychiatrist was a woman, a student of Freud’s, who told Gene that she cried too much, and that men don’t like women who cry too much, and dismissed her. Gene did not return.[18]

Gene continued to see Noel from time to time on a friendly basis, but these encounters were fraught with anxiety. Torn between her powerful desire and equally powerful conscience, Gene was at a loss about what to do with her life.

Seeking Normalcy: Her First Marriage

In 1941, she met Raymond Chamberlin Boshco, whom she describes as “ambitious and fun-loving, well-to-do, and the ideal hunting and fishing companion for my father.” He soon fell in love with her and asked her to marry him. Seeking “normalcy,” she accepted and they were married on Valentine’s Day, 1942. Gene regretted the decision almost immediately, but decided to be a dutiful wife as well as she could. The couple moved to Boston where they “lived in a doll’s house.” While her husband worked for his father’s woodworking company, Gene juggled the duties of housewife and career woman. Gene’s father arranged for her to write a newspaper column which was published in all the Los Angeles papers and was seen as good PR for the family business. She also produced and performed in a children’s radio program, “Stories Children Love.” She even sold war bonds.[19]

At the same time, she was haunted by memories of her former lovers and turned for consolation and inspiration to literature—particularly the writings of D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Phyllip Wylie, and Joan Grant, whose book, Winged Pharoah, opened up for the first time “the possibility of a non-violent life.” She dreamed that she was destined for some Great Mission, though she wasn’t sure what it would be.[20]

Then, she became pregnant. After an extremely hard labor lasting 37 hours, she gave birth to her first child, a boy called Nikolas, on May 30, 1944, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She was overjoyed. Soon afterwards, the family moved to the west coast, her husband was drafted into the navy, and Gene became pregnant again. When her husband was sent overseas, Gene returned to live with her parents in Glendale and felt peaceful and safe for the first time in many years. On August 12, 1945, her daughter Valley was born, much to Gene’s delight.

But she soon became restless once again and returned to her creative endeavors. Her mother hired someone to care for the children while Gene plunged into a frenzy of work writing columns, producing radio programs, and acting in plays. Her absent husband was not missed.

When he returned in 1947, they set up housekeeping in Pasadena. A Danish au pair who was hired to take care of the children and domestic chores girl became Gene’s best friend. As Gene pursued her demanding career as a writer and performer, her life seemed successful and happy. But inwardly she felt “lost, isolated, detached.” She called her life a “prison of perfection.”[21]

Divorce, Re-marriage and Discovery of Quakerism

In 1947, her life took another abrupt turn. Needing to have some of her children’s radio programs recorded, she went to a recording studio run by a man named Hallock Hoffman. Their business relationship blossomed into a friendship, and he invited Gene and her husband to dinner. As the guests socialized, Gene and Hallock found themselves alone in the library where they spoke of “God and the Spirit and Ultimate Reality and Emerson and Gibran and the many worlds of the Spirit and making peace in the world.”[22]

Gene immediately felt that she had found her soul mate and that her marriage to Ray had ended. She told her husband of her feelings, and he suggested that she have an affair (as long as it didn’t disrupt their family life). But Gene’s conscience wouldn’t allow for a marriage of convenience.

Gene’s parents were dismayed by and strongly opposed her decision to file for divorce. But Gene was adamant: “I knew I had found true love, because I could write poems again—poems of ecstasy and joy and pain and anguish, and of seeking and finding God again. And I searched the scriptures and the poets I loved. They all seemed to affirm my direction.”[23]

With this inner confirmation, Gene left her husband and her home, went to Nevada with her two children, filed for a divorce, and married Hallock on July 20, 1948—all within the space of four months. Their son Paul Craig was born on June 8, 1949.

In 1950, Hallock gave up a lucrative business career to serve as associate regional director of the AFSC in Pasadena. He also resigned his commission as a captain in the air force and became a conscientious objector. This was a major step since Hallock’s father, Paul Hoffman (1891-1974), was a major political figure in Washington, DC, circles, as well as president of the Studebaker automobile corporation. Paul Hoffman headed the Marshall plan, was president of the Ford Foundation, and nominated Dwight Eisenhower for President during the 1952 Republican Convention. Hoffman used to say to his liberal son and daughter-in-law that if Eisenhower lost by two votes, he’d know whom to blame.

Soon after the birth of their son Erik Thorkild on September 10, 1950, Gene and Hallock discovered Orange Grove Quaker Meeting in Pasadena. Gene immediately felt she was among kindred spirits. When she and her husband were accepted into membership the following year, she remembers “dancing down the street, feeling exultant that I had joined so great a company of seekers, people of God. I felt that together Hallock and I would perform miracles”[24]

Hallock and Gene set out to become “perfect Quakers.” Gene and Hallock found a modest home in Pasadena and happily settled into a life of Quaker simplicity. Gene’s creative energies were at their peak. Over the next decade, she was involved in numerous projects and wrote many articles. For many years she hosted a children’s radio program called “Stories Children Love” and acted in many plays (her acting career continued until the late 1960s.)

She also bore three more children: Kristian Robert, Nina Kiriki and Kaj Kathrop. Gene feels that bearing children was “one of the most creative experiences of her life.”

A major change in Gene’s life began in 1957 when Hallock was invited by Robert Maynard Hutchins to join the Fund for the Republic. Hutchins, a former Chancellor of the University of Chicago, started this Fund in order to “restore democracy to America” during the McCarthy era. This bold project was originally funded, and then disowned, by the Ford Foundation because of its controversial nature.[25]

During the years in which Hallock worked for the Fund (and later for its west coast branch), Gene’s lifestyle underwent a dramatic change. In 1957, five months after their son Kaj was born, the Hoffmans moved to New York, bought a 20-room house, mingled with the rich and famous, and were even invited to a state dinner at the White House. Along with her radio and writing work, Gene became involved in teaching Great Books courses (a project initiated by Hutchins and Mortimer Adler to make the seminal ideas of western civilization more widely available). [26]

Espousing her own brand of feminism, Gene advocated letting women develop and express their full potential as human beings. When she noticed that no women were given leadership roles at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (the West Coast branch of the Fund for the Republic), Gene asked Hutchins when women would be included. He replied, “When they are able to think.”[27]

Gene demonstrated in many ways her ability to think independently. She wrote a column favoring the United Nations, and was “fired” from the columnist job that her father had secured for her. Gene also took a controversial stand against the loyalty oath. In 1954, she became involved with a suit against the city of Pasadena because it used a form requiring property owners to swear a “non-disloyalty oath.”[28] Partly because of her family connections, her case attracted media attention, and Gene received hate mail from anti-communists.

“I responded politely to every single letter,” Gene recalls. “And sometimes people were so surprised that they wrote letters apologizing for their rudeness.”

Taking a strong stand on civil rights, Gene insisted that her children attend an integrated school in Pasadena—something that was not common for families of her background in the 1950s.[29] When she published an article on her family’s experiences with integration, she was invited to become the first white columnist for the African-American newspaper, the Amsterdam News. During this period she wrote articles on racial topics with such topics as “Black Is Beautiful” (in which she talks about the importance of acknowledging and celebrating one’s ethnic/cultural identity).[30] Gene also wrote many articles for publications such as Fellowship and Friends Journal and became widely known in peace and justice circles.

The Sixties: Breakdown and Breakthrough

In 1959, having reached the age of forty (what Dante called “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”)[31], Gene left New York and moved with her family to Montecito, a beach community near Santa Barbara. Hallock had been assigned to help develop a West Coast branch of the Fund for the Republic, called the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The move to New York with seven children and the intense pace of East Coast life had been quite stressful, so Gene looked forward to the idyllic charms of Montecito. When Hallock invited Gene to go for a walk along the beach, Gene was anticipating a romantic moment. Instead, Hallock announced that he was having an affair with his secretary; he even wanted her to move in with the family! Although Gene knew that their marriage was having problems, the news came as a severe shock. Suffering a nervous collapse, she was hospitalized with a diagnosis of “suicidal schizophrenic episode.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, this setback, she was determined to overcome her emotional distress, win back her husband, and save her marriage.[32] She sought out the best therapist she could find. Gene was fortunate in finding an extraordinary therapist who also became her guru: Dr. Benjamin Weininger. Gene describes him a “beloved mentor, friend, Zaddick,[33] and psychiatrist” who played a crucial role in her spiritual as well as psychological development. She writes:

Day after day he sat with me, listening to me as I poured out my anguish and pain and self-hatred. Day after day he would seek to help me loosen the bonds of my absolutist view of life and the universe. Day after day—year after year he was there, encouraging me, reminding me that there was a whole life before me, filled with riches, that this was but a moment in time, a learning-how-to-live moment.[34]

Weininger had had a profound mystical experience in his early twenties, and in later life was influenced by the teachings of Zen Buddhism, Hasidism, and Carl Rogers’ interpersonal psychology.[35] One of Weininger’s goals as a therapist was to help his clients overcome “dis-equilibrium” and become “unified instead of divided” persons.

Thanks to Weininger’s ministrations, Gene managed to weather her crisis and keep her marriage together, albeit precariously, for another twelve years.

During the tumultuous 1960s, Gene’s children became adolescents and her home in Montecito became a hangout for young people rebelling against social conventions. With her flair for the theatrical and colorful, Gene loved—and was loved by—the “flower power” generation.

After several years in Montecito, Gene decided to build her “dream house” in the mountains above Santa Barbara (Gene loved designing homes, though she has had no architectural training). When the family moved to their mountain retreat in 1963, Gene felt extremely isolated and missed their big, friendly old home near the beach.

On September 9, 1964, a tremendous fire started in Coyote Canyon and raged through the Santa Barbara mountains. Gene’s “dream house” burned to ashes, along with most of her papers. The family moved back to Montecito where they stayed for the rest of the decade.

In 1965 Gene’s father Thorkild (“Tom”) Knudsen died of a heart attack while hunting—one of his favorite activities. Thorkild was a member of the Order of the Elephant and killed tigers, elephants and other wild animals that he stuffed and proudly displayed on the walls of his den. Gene called it the “room of dead heads.”

Thorkild Knudsen’s funeral took place at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California. So many people attended that they couldn’t fit in the service area; a massive PA system was set up so that everyone outside could hear.  Valley recalls that there was “a HUGE wreath....maybe 20 feet in diameter ... with the word ‘DAD’ emblazoned in the center.  He was a father figure to many.”

The ‘60s were an incredibly busy time for Gene.  She and her husband were both active in the anti-war as well as civil rights movement. Returning to the theater, she acted in and directed plays. Under Weininger’s guidance, she became a counselor and helped start the Night Counseling Center in Santa Barbara. As its director, she at one point supervised 35 lay counselors. [36]

Then, in 1969, another crash came. By now Gene had five teenage children, all in various stages of adolescent rebellion. When one of her sons was arrested on a drug charge, Gene flew to Denver to bail him out. That same week Hallock lost his job at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and Gene’s mother was taken seriously ill with Parkinson’s disease.

It all proved too much for Gene. During lunch with a friend, she broke down and wept uncontrollably. When she was taken home, she began screaming, and it became clear to her friend that more than just a vacation was needed. She advised Gene to check into a small private psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles as a voluntary patient. Feeling overwhelmed and out of control, Gene made the fateful decision to commit herself.[37]

This experience proved to be another turning point in her life—one that she equated with Dante’s Divine Comedy. Describing her experiences in a mental asylum, Gene refers to her doctor as  “my Virgil”—an explicit allusion to Dante. Virgil was Dante’s wise and compassionate guide through hell and purgatory; he also helped Dante to see his mid-life crisis from a literary perspective. In a perhaps unconscious reference to Dante’s “selva oscura” or dark forest, Gene gives her therapist the pseudonym Dr. Forester. It is Dr. Forester (“the one who takes care of the forest”) who allows Gene to enter the selva oscura of her past and re-live old childhood hurts:

In Dr. Forester’s office I had hallucinatory visions of myself as a small golden-haired child in a circle of golden light, at the bottom of a black well….Suddenly the vision blacked out, and I heard my voice, small and piteous, telling him, ‘They’ve taken away the trust…’ Then began my journey through a Dante-esque hell which I continued to describe to him while tears flooded the words. Old angers and fears I thought were long since exorcised by my ‘reason’ rushed out through the feelings into words.”[38]

It is significant that Gene’s teacher, Ben Weininger, interpreted Dante in psychological terms:  “The Inferno is a poetic account of the sensations of a schizophrenic episode.”[39] According to Weininger, Dante’s feelings of isolation and exile allowed him to identify with the torments of the damned.

In a similar way, Gene’s keen sense of her psychological disturbance allowed her to empathize with the suffering of her fellow patients. She writes with shrewd and compassionate insight about patients and staff, describing each one vividly in a manner reminiscent of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Many of her fellow patients were young people around the same age as her children. Most had drug-related problems and difficult family situations.

The walls of the institution were covered with psychedelic posters on which patients had scrawled quotations from Bob Dylan (“I shall be released” being the most popular) and peace signs. Gene wondered if the problems of these young people were related to our society’s obsession with violence and war:

Most, if not all, the teen-agers were peaceniks. I have since wondered about the relationship between their political radicalism and the fact they were there. As I reflect, mine made [my ideas] unacceptable to my parents, [particularly my father] and [his] deep disapproval was certainly a factor in my uncertain self-esteem.[40]

During her month at the hospital, Gene came to appreciate keenly the importance of listening to patients—listening beyond words to the deeper truths that patients were trying to express with their art work and their sometimes bizarre behavior. She recognized that listening is one of the most important elements of therapy.

“Whenever I was listened to respectfully,” she wrote, “I came to my own understanding and could often communicate more fully to my therapist.” She also came to realize that each person has a unique perspective, a unique “truth,” that must be respected. “Another need that became obvious to me is that the therapist must recognize the validity of the patient’s truth, of his/her knowledge about him/herself.” This is often difficult for a professional therapist to do. As she herself acknowledges, “As a counselor, I was often quick to diagnose for my client and then try to fit his/her unique situation into my diagnosis. I now know I was wrong.”[41]

Sometimes patients could listen better, and therefore be more helpful, than trained therapists. This insight drew her into a practice called Re-evaluation Counseling, which was very popular with Quakers at the time.[42]

As so often has been the case in Gene’s life, she turned a personal crisis into an opportunity for psychological growth and spiritual renewal. After her stay in the hospital, Gene enrolled in Goddard College’s extension program and earned her Masters in pastoral counseling. She converted her autobiographical writing into Masters thesis (Towards Turning) as well as fascinating book called From Inside the Glass Doors. Of this book Carl Rogers wrote: “I found… I couldn’t put it down. It is a deeply moving document.” Her teacher/therapist Ben Weininger gave it his highest praise: “Gene Hoffman makes a significant contribution towards understanding of human needs—a remarkable transformation of a disturbed and confused soul to an actively involved healing presence.”

What makes From Inside The Glass Doors both moving and significant is its frank depiction of the journey from border-line insanity to psychological health—or as Dante would say, from the depths of the Inferno to the ineffable heights of the Paradiso. Gene does not conclude with a beatific vision, however, but with a simple and down-to-earth truth:

I needed to place my trust—not in a particular person, a particular relationship, a particular situation—but in life (which is synonymous for me with God). I needed to trust the process—to welcome whatever happened to me as though I’d prayed for it. [43]

This powerful aphorism—“Accepting whatever happened as though I’d prayed for it”—is one that Gene continues to use. It may be rooted in an Hasidic story.[44] Among other things, it means accepting and embracing the totality of life—the pain and joy, the inner demons and the beatific visions—both in oneself, and in others. Gene’s book ends with poem expressive of her hard-won wisdom:

“In the midst of darkness

Light persists.”—

Mr. Gandhi said—

I’m beginning to

See the pinpoint

Of light after

Sometime in darkness—

And it all comes clear—

I don’t have to be a

sun

or a moon

or a planet

Not even a star—

Not even a flashlight!

Just can be—

That’s enough

And being—perhaps

I can shine enough

To light my own way

And perhaps—

For a moment—

Yours

The phrase—”To light my own way, and perhaps—for a moment—yours”—suggests another important influences in Gene’s work, namely, the Jewish philosopher/theologian Martin Buber. The title of Gene’s Masters thesis is taken from a passage in Martin Buber’s The Way of Man:

“Turning,” according to Martin Buber, means man’s turning from his aberrations to the ‘way of God.’ “This is the fundamental act by which man contributes to his redemption.” By taking the turning, the human being unifies the soul. “Soul,” in Martin Buber’s terms means: “The whole (person), body and spirit together.”

“Only with a united soul” will our work and our life be “all of a piece.”[45]

This process of unification is “never final,” according to Buber. It is an ongoing work that grows more “relaxed” and “steady” as the soul becomes more unified.

For Gene, as for Martin Buber, the divine reality is revealed not in a sudden satori or a final beatific vision, but in ongoing relationships that gradually bring the soul into balance. Gene is fond of telling the story of the time when Martin Buber was meditating in his office, and a young man knocked on the door. Deep in meditation, Buber replied, “Come back later.” Buber was horrified to learn that the young man had come to his office in desperate need, and had committed suicide.  From that point, Buber decided that God can best be experienced not as an “it”—an object of contemplation or cognition—but as an I-thou—an ongoing relationship. Perhaps because Gene had a similar experience with a suicidal young man when she was a young woman, this story moved her deeply and “spoke to her condition.”

In 1971, Gene suffered another emotional shock, though it was by now far from unexpected. Her husband Hallock finally left her for good. Soon afterwards, he married a young woman who was the age of their daughter.

Gene went through the usual anguish of divorce, but managed to cope with remarkable success thanks to her spiritual support network. Returning to Quaker meeting, she found a community as well as a spiritual practice that enabled her to express her feelings and visions in a creative and healing manner. Fundamental to her recovery was the practice of daily prayer:

My emergence [from the “dark wood” of despair] began about five years ago when I consciously began to worship each morning. It was so restless and tentative at first! I could hardly sit the five minutes I had allotted myself: was always secretly peering at my watch to see if it was up….

These days I find my worship periods vary….Sometimes I linger over something that is troubling me. Sometimes I am in pain and I watch myself quietly being in my pain. Sometimes I feel only the presence of timeless love, timeless peace.[46]

In the summer of 1973 she attended the annual gathering of Pacific Yearly Meeting, shared with Friends some of her personal struggles, and was asked to write a paper on divorce for the following year. She “blithely” agreed.[47]

In the fall of 1973, she went to Pendle Hill, the Quaker retreat center near Philadelphia, which was founded in 1929 to foster “study and contemplation.” Adults going through crises in their lives often find in Pendle Hill a safe haven in which to heal as well as to explore spiritual frontiers.

In the midst of a blustery Pennsylvania winter, Gene sat down and wrote about what led to her divorce. What emerged was an autobiography very much in the spirit of George Fox, who described with powerful emotions the “ocean of darkness” he had to pass through before he could see “the ocean of light.”[48] In a similar vein, Gene writes:

I do not know why I had to go through so much anguish and pain. I don’t know how much I have yet to experience. But I no longer care why. I know now, somewhat [as] James Nayler[49] did “fellowship with them who live in dens and desolate places in the earth.” And I would not trade this fellowship for anything else. I am blessed.[50]

During her stay at Pendle Hill Gene increasingly felt a deep and joyous connection to a “blessed community” of “wounded healers” and fellow seekers, many of whom were not much older than her children. In the Pendle Hill world of freedom and openness Gene’s creativity returned with an intensity that she had not experienced for many years, if ever. She had mystical visions and psychedelic experiences of unusual intensity (although she refrained from the use of drugs—she clearly didn’t need them). For her final paper, Gene wrote a “Vision of Pendle Hill” in language reminiscent of Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence:

Pendle Hill is a seed bed—germinating giants

And the plants (we people here) are cracking through our shells. And we are trembling before our songs. And we dare to speak of the Spirit. And we dare to brood darkly. And we dare to shine, sometime.

And we joy (sometime) in our existence; and we joy in the existence of one another. And that we are various. And that we are come together at this moment.

And we are come together to liberate one another, to redeem for one another our divinities. I have come to redeem the divinity in you; you have come to redeem the divinity in me. And we are all redeeming that golden-dark-and-purple-flaming-out-divinity-in-each-other.

(And I don’t want to go home; I just want to stay here and expand and be intoxicated by the Spirit and I don’t want to go home and I don’t want to go back to dryness—and I don’t want to go out in the world and I don’t ever want to be in an unhallowed place again and I don’t want to be told I’m too much and

I WILL FLAME OUT…. And you WILL NOT COME BEHIND ME WITH A FIRE EXTINGUISHER.

With passion and joy and wry humor, Gene goes on for a dozen more pages describing the “divine sparks” she senses in her fellow Pendle Hillers (“here is Pat, the coming crescendo, who will pour forth in torrent of song…and here is Bethy—shy spirit, wood nymph. And here is Dan of the red patriarchal beard and the shy child in his green eyes…”) Then, in a remarkable display of verbal pyrotechnics, she depicts her final encounters and her final meeting for worship on her last day at Pendle Hill:

Like a Bach Fugue—swelling and welling to its glorious crescendo. Through me, through Scott, through Bob, through others…the Meeting where I learned so great a learning—how various we are and how right it is that we are various….

She concludes with her homecoming to Santa Barbara. Bathing in the afterglow of the Pendle Hill experience, in a room full of light and rainbow colors and peace, she feels the presence of her children and friends, transfigured and transformed by the mystery of love….

If Gene’s story were to end here, it would be remarkable enough. She has plunged into the inferno of her childhood traumas and mental illness, trekked through the purgatory of an unhappy marriage, and at last tasted paradise (“the garden of love and delight”) among sympathetic Friends.

Her new sense of life’s possibilities—and the possibilities of Quakerism—are enthusiastically expressed in an article she wrote for Friends Journal in 1975:

I believe we Friends have the possibility of being among the most creative people on earth—for we know and have proven that all things are possible through the Spirit. And we know and we have proven that the Spirit is within us. By attending to it faithfully and following its leadings, miracles can and have happened.

And I believe they will happen as we move more into worship together and apart. We will have available to us any talent we need. We will once again walk and talk with princes and with kings, or with wayfarers and with strangers. We will understand everything and speak in love to everything—to flowers and animals and plants and stones.[51]

Compassionate Listening: A New Approach to Peacemaking

But where Dante’s story ends, Gene’s is just beginning. Not content with ecstatic visions and a renewed commitment to Quakerism, she began to seek a new approach to peacemaking. In 1971, she quit the Night Counseling Center. As she explained in an interview,  “I want to devote the last quarter of my life doing everything I can to educate people for peace.”[52] During this period she completed her Masters degree in pastoral counseling and wrote articles on the subjects ranging from interpersonal psychology to logotherapy. But peace activism was definitely her primary concern. With Nixon in office and the Vietnam War still raging, Gene attended disarmament conferences, participated in rallies, and turned her home on Sola Street into “The Gathering Place,” where activists of all ages hung out.

Allan Solomonow, Middle East program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee,   recalls this period: “Gene had an open house where everyone could come, and she made very good cookies….She was quite different from most older persons and was considered a little unconventional. She was passionately interested in the Cold War. And she also meditated and was intrigued with all the healing and listening movements that were considered cutting edge or ‘weird’ back then….”

As Gene sought to integrate her spiritual and psychological practices with her peace activism, she came to believe that the traditional methods of peacemakers were not working. Rallies, conferences, and confrontation (“speaking truth to power”) did not address the underlying causes of violence. Nor did peace activists confront the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) internalized violence caused by unresolved psychological issues.

During my lifetime I have worked with many peace people and peace groups. Rarely were the people I worked with peaceful. Perhaps I was the least.

In the peace movement I found wondrous people, people who sacrificed themselves, who often turned the other cheek, who could write eloquently of compassion, forgiveness, love of the enemy…

I found, too, that the seeds of all society’s ills were also in us, often hidden or disguised. Few of us recognized or admitted this to ourselves. We felt exempt. But the anger, the anxieties, the jealousies were still in place, camouflaged. Peace people, I found, weren’t all that different from non-peace people except that we had found a humane goal to work toward.[53]

Because many peace activists suffered from unresolved inner conflicts, Gene felt that they often failed to reach out to those most in need of their message. She diagnosed the problem by saying “we were trying to heal ourselves from the outside…. We didn’t understand that inner healing had to take place first.”[54]

In articles and workshops she shared techniques for inner healing that she found effective, ranging from Al-Anon to Zen meditation. She enthusiastically embraced the practice of “engaged Buddhism” taught by a kindred spirit, the Vietnamese monk/peace activist/poet Thich Nhat Hanh. From Hanh she learned the important lesson that we must “be peace” by practicing and exemplifying peacefulness/mindfulness in our daily lives. She was so impressed by Hanh’s approach that she helped to fund the publication of his first book, Being Peace.

During the 1970’s the Parkinson’s disease of Gene’s mother Valley progressively worsened. For many years Valley lived more or less in a coma and was on life support. She finally died in 1976. Her funeral was attended by many who remembered this remarkable woman’s many public philanthropies. What her granddaughter Valley recalled was her grandparents’ kindness: “When I was very young, before we went to New York, my grandparents were basically my ‘salvation.’  I visited them maybe once or twice a year and I remember they let me come into their bed and they would hug me.... something my parents NEVER allowed.”

By the end of the 1970s, all of Gene’s children had left home and were on their own. In 1980, at age sixty-one, Gene went on a pilgrimage around the world, visiting peace centers and peace activists in distressed areas. It was a personal journey, unaffiliated with any peace organization, that led to a turning point occurred in Gene’s life:

I was walking in London when I saw a huge sign which read: “Meeting for Worship for the Tortured and the Torturers.” It was sponsored by the London Quakers. I was astonished. As a Quaker Pacifist, I believed that I should have no enemy and should care for the wounded on all sides of every battle—but—put the torturers on the same level as the tortured? I’d never thought of that.

A whole new chapter of my life opened. I wondered why people tortured others, and thought that if I could know that answer, there might be new possibilities for peacemaking and reconciliation.[55]

Soon after this breakthrough moment, Gene revisited Middle East, interviewing Palestinians and Israelis, hoping to find ways to bring about reconciliation.

Gene’s first visit to Israel took place in 1960, when she went with her husband and Robert Hutchins on an official tour sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. During that visit she met Golda Meir and was deeply impressed by the idealism of the Israelis. But by 1980, the scene in Israel had changed dramatically. “Israel was heavily armed, frightened, defensive, and persecuting the Palestinians,” wrote Gene. “What had happened to this promising nation and its people to cause it to become so bellicose?”[56]

Gene came to believe that many Israeli leaders were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS), caused by their experience with the Nazis. Gene consulted with numerous psychologists specializing in this problem and wrote articles and papers showing how PTSS was influencing the behavior of both Jews and Palestinians. This was a very controversial idea at the time.

“Gene was doing pioneering work,” recalls Solomonow. “The AFSC published a couple of her papers on post-traumatic stress.”

Using techniques she had learned in counseling, Gene listened deeply to the Israeli and Palestinian point of view. She found that the practice of listening non-judgmentally helped to create a climate of understanding (if not agreement). Her interviews and reflections appeared in articles and in pamphlets called Pieces of the Mideast Puzzle (1991) and  No Royal Road to Reconciliation (1995). In Gene’s view, traditional advocacy work tended to focus on one side of the conflict and led to polarization. What was needed, Gene felt, was a new approach. She called it “compassionate listening.”

Gene became a very skillful and sensitive interviewer. One of her most unlikely subjects was Richard Nixon, whom she contacted in 1983 when she was working for FOR in Nyack, New York. “I just called Nixon up and told him that I was Valley Knudsen’s daughter,” recalls Gene. “He sent a driver to pick me up.” (Nixon was willing to meet with her because of family associations: she had attended Pat’s 47^th birthday party at the White House in 1959 and had been present when her father had given the Nixon Chair of Political Science to Whittier College.)

To interview Nixon and to hear the truth that he had to express, Gene had to struggle against her own mixed feelings and those of the peace community.

“Nixon was the son my father never had, and his name was a holy word in the house where I grew up,” recalls Gene.

During the Cold War and Vietnam War Gene’s views was diametrically opposed to those of Nixon, much to the chagrin of her parents. Furthermore, despite his Quaker background, Nixon had refused to meet with Quakers during his presidency. Gene’s interview with Nixon was therefore an historic occasion.

During the first interview, which took place in Nixon’s New York office in December 1985, Gene asked: “What can be done about terrorists? It is they who might easily spark World War III.”

“We must be more honest about it,” Nixon replied. “We are against terrorists only when terrorists are against the things we like.”

“I feel people become terrorists when they feel they aren’t heard, will never be heard, and their grievances will not be addressed,” was Gene’s response.

“I agree,” replied Nixon. “But the real problem is there must be a whole change….War is evil. The idea of unconditional surrender, which we insisted on in 1945, was totally wrong, catastrophic.”

During her second meeting with Nixon in San Clemente, California, he surprised Gene by coming out strongly in favor of the nuclear test ban treaty and affirmed that “the military option is out…we must seek peace without victory.”

After these surprising encounters, Gene concluded: “It is more important than ever to listen to those we consider to be our adversaries…. I found wisdom in much of what Richard Nixon said. There was much I disagreed with—and more I did not understand—but there were areas to build upon, corners where small trusts might be established. This, I believe, is the attitude we should carry to all people.”[57]

“Many people were outraged that I could condone him,” added Gene. “But I didn’t condone him, I interviewed him. If I’d stuck with only the part of me that opposed him, I never would have found out the truths that he held.”

According to Gregg Levoy, Gene demonstrates that “it takes tremendous energy and hard work not to take sides when we experience conflict but to stretch the soul wide enough to encompass both sides, stretch the imagination almost to the bursting point and understand that two utterly contrary stories can coexist even within the same person.” [58] This was certainly true of Nixon, as well as of many others that Gene painstakingly interviewed. She was able to embrace the paradoxical in others because she had learned to accept the paradoxes within herself.

In the early 1980s Gene met Richard Deats, who was director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). “There was a chemistry between us as soon as we met,” recalls Deats. In 1983, Gene moved to Nyack, New York, to work as a volunteer at the FOR office.

There she helped create the US/USSR Reconciliation Program. She organized delegations and peace tours to the Soviet Union during a period when Ronald Reagan was stirring up fears about the “Evil Empire” and nuclear war seemed imminent. In 1983 she went on her first delegation to the Soviet Union and met with the Soviet Peace Committee for a discussion of “human rights, threats to global ecology, terrorism, and an exploration of various freedoms from religious to ethnic self-expression.” Gene chose to participate in the task force on terrorism “because that seemed… the one most closely related to nonviolent alternatives.” Discussions were frank and lively, and Gene came to believe that glasnost and perestroika were real, though at a still fragile stage. She hoped that out of gatherings such as these would come “the new consciousness we need to create a society that is worthy of human beings, one that will include peace and good will to all.”[59]

One of the important steps that ordinary Americans took to demonstrate “peace and good will to all” was to become “citizen diplomats.” Gene organized several peace tours that helped Americans and Russians to appreciate one another as people after decades of separation and suspicion. Gene paints a vivid picture of how citizen diplomats were greeted by the Russians:

Some 60,000 Americans went to the Soviet Union in 1983. Many of us brought home stories of our warm welcome by people who had been strangers to us, stories that were never published in the newspaper or shown on TV. Many of the stories were like mine: of visiting the early morning open market in Yerevan, Armenia, and leaving laden with gifts of fruit and vegetables in exchange for Fellowship buttons that said peace in English and Russian. Stories of meeting strangers who, with few words between us, led me where I wanted to go; of a fifteen-year-old girl who guided through of us through the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, and would not let us pay on the cable car up the mountain or for rides on the Ferris wheel at the top; of taxi drivers who refused fares, strangers who invited us home for dinner and would not let us leave without gifts of remembrance; of the gold shower of creativity in the Children’s Art Museum in Yerevan and the generosity of the director and his wife, who took us through museums and described their delight at discovering talent among youngsters in remote villages.[60]

Gene’s group met with Soviet peace committee people and had interesting exchanges of views. Although the atmosphere of these meetings was cordial, challenging questions were also posed, like: “Why are Soviets afraid to be seen with Americans? Why don’t they correspond with American friends?”

Gene also connected with non-governmental peace groups like the Independent Group to Establish Trust between the US and USSR. Given the complexities of Cold War politics, she wondered: Were these dissident groups truly sincere? Or were they pawns of the Pentagon?

In her encounters with Russians, she sensed dread of nuclear holocaust and the same ambivalence about peace that Americans felt. She perceived that Russians had much in common with their American counterparts:

They are not a ‘peace nation,’ any more than we are. They are an anti-war nation, and there is a difference. They have a huge nuclear arsenal, just like ours. They play power politics, practice espionage, seek to keep countries on their borders “friendly” through military occupation, and are terrified of strange plane flying over their territory, and function from fear, just like us.[61]

After a year working at the FOR office in New York, Gene returned to Santa Barbara to continue her work there. She wrote two booklets for FOR’s peace program. Her first project involved researching all the Soviet-American peace and reconciliation projects in the USA. She discovered so many that she produced a booklet called Directory of Initiatives. In its introduction she wrote: “American initiatives for the US and USSR are springing up like wildflowers all over our nation. Everywhere, it seem, individuals, congregations, classes, and organizations are reaching out, seeking to build trust and understanding between our two countries.

“We need to know the Soviet people,” she continued, “to understand their history, to begin to care about them—to begin to think about saving their lives.”

The idea of saving Soviet (and American) lives was new and exciting to her. It inspired her second booklet called Loving the Stranger. This was a discussion guide to help readers increase their understanding of Russians, explore their feelings toward them, and examine the possibilities for change. Gene focused on non-violent ways to alleviate the fear and hatred of the Russians that many felt at this time.

To counter the culture of fear, Gene worked on projects to develop and increase trust and understanding. She went to the Soviet Union many times during her six years of involvement with the US/USSR Reconciliation Project. One of them was called “Seeds of Hope.” Americans were encouraged to send seed packets of marigolds to the Soviet Embassy and the White House as well as to Soviet and American people. The packet bore this legend in Russian and English: “To our friends, the Soviet People, let us plant a garden together; flowers, not fear. Marigolds, not missiles. Together let us choose life so that we and our children can live.”

Senator Mark Hatfield’s office agreed to tabulate the number of seed packets sent to the White House. The idea became so popular that when Gene went to the Soviet Union, she was surprised to see numerous marigold gardens in the Soviet Union.

An art project was developed called “The World At Peace.” Children were encouraged to paint pictures of peace in their countries. Different schools in the United States exchanged paintings with Russian children. “We had some remarkable exhibits of the Russian children’s paintings in Santa Barbara and other places,” recalls Gene.

One of Gene’s most successful projects was called “Forbidden Faces” (a title derived from Daniel Berrigan). These were slides of Russian people of all ages, which Gene presented on speaking tours throughout the United States.

Another project was called “Window on the USSR,” which took place in 1985. The Santa Barbara chapter of FOR created a week of music, dance, songs, films, exhibits of Russian crafts, and public occasions where Russian culture and people were celebrated.  John Iwerks created a huge street drawing of Santa Barbara’s sister city, Yalta, and people were invited to paint portions of it. Later Iwerks was sent to Yalta where he helped create a similar painting of Santa Barbara for the Russian people to paint. Events like these took place throughout the United States.

For Gene, the highlight of this project was bringing four Russian women to Santa Barbara for a retreat at the Casa de Maria. The leader of the group in the Soviet Union was a woman that Gene had met in the Soviet Union. Gene invited fifteen interfaith religious peacemakers from the USA to attend, and the Casa de Maria offered their beautiful House of Prayer and full hospitality for the entire group.

“It was an astonishing experience,” recalls Gene, who led the retreat. “It turned out to be a time of discovery for both sides. The Soviet women could speak very little English and the Americans were unable to speak Russian, but we had superb volunteer translators and were able to understand one another fully.”

Gene asked all the participants to share the story of their lives, beginning in childhood through adulthood. “The common humanity became obvious, as did the differences in political lives,” recalls Gene. “The Russian women spoke approval for everything in their society. Some of the American women became upset about this because there was absolutely no criticism of anything in the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the problems were worked through and the retreat ended on notes of caring, understanding, and wishing each other well…. Many of the Americans had never seen a Russian person before….”

This exchange was not without its difficult moments. The Soviet plane was not allowed to land in the USA, so it had to land instead in Canada. FOR members had to cross the border in the dead of winter, pick up the Russian women, and take them to an airport in the USA. There were also protests at the airport when they left.

Modest though these trust-building efforts may have seemed at the time, they played an important role in creating the atmosphere that ended the Cold War, as John Tierman has pointed out. The combined efforts of citizen diplomats and antiwar protesters sent politicians an “unmistakable message” that the Cold War no longer enjoyed popular support.[62]

The Cold War ended, but serious world conflicts still remained, particularly in the Middle East, where Gene decided to focus her energies and talents as a peacemaker. “Gene is so creative with her ideas and so daring,” remarked Deats in a recent interview. “She is always willing to do the unexpected.”

One of the unexpected things that Gene did was to write to “terrorists” such as Muammar Qaddafi and Yasser Arafat. In 1986, when American planes bombed Libyan civilians and Qadaffi’s home and family in Tripoli, Gene wrote a letter telling him that she “grieved for the suffering that we caused him his people, urged him to explore a nonviolent response, and said I hope one day to listen to his grievances.” He thanked her for her concern.[63]

Three years later, when American planes downed two Libyan planes, Gene and Virginia Baron, editor of Fellowship Magazine, went together to Libya with an FOR delegation. They spent a week meeting with various officials and members of the “Libyan Arab Solidarity and Peace Committee.” Most were highly educated professionals who had studied in the West. All but one spoke warmly of the United States (the exception was the former ambassador, who had been deported in 1980). All the Libyans expressed dismay with Reagan policies. Gene and the group listened to and took note of the Libyans’ grievances:

The Libyans’ main concern was our attempted assassination of Qadaffi and the killing and wounding of his family, as well as many other civilians, in 1986. Next on the list were the economic sanctions against Libya, the embargo on all trade, the freezing of Libyan assets in the US, the banning of all Libyans from the United States, the ban on the travel of US citizens to Libya, our efforts to dismantle Qadaffi’s regime, and the campaign of disinformation about Libya in the US.[64]

Along with serious discussions, there were opportunities for fellowship and entertainment. Gene paints vivid portraits of various Libyans she met and befriended. She and her delegation gathered a wealth of information about the Libyan people and their views, but when they returned to the United States, they discovered that the government was not interested in hearing about their experiences:

We were not permitted to speak to any member of our government in Washington for we had gone to Libya illegally and it was against the law for anyone to listen to us. So we wrote our articles and spoke on radio and TV, but could not follow up on our Libyan visit because there was a ban on Libyans coming to the United States and we were considered—and were—law breakers.[65]

Because of her interest in the Middle East, and particularly the question of terrorism, Gene was invited to join a delegation from the American Friends Service Committee to meet Yasser Arafat in 1992. Gene proved that she was not only a good listener, she was also willing to speak out. According to Richard Deats, when Arafat was lecturing the delegation on the grievances of the Palestinians, Gene suddenly interrupted and said, “You ought to learn about non-violence, and you ought to meet with Richard Deats.”

Much to everyone’s amazement, Arafat expressed interest and agreed. Gene followed up with a letter, and was invited to return for second meeting and bring along Richard Deats. In October,  1992, Gene, Richard Deats, Scott Kennedy, and Karim Alkahdi (FOR’s first Muslim national chairman) went to Tunisia to meet Arafat. They were met by Zudhi Terzi, former PLO representative to the United Nations. He uttered prophetic words:

The more nonviolence is unfruitfully pursued, the more room there is for fanatics who will oppose the peace process out of desperation. There is the danger of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Fundamentalists reject any political settlement and consider the peace negotiations treason. The hope Hamass (the Islamic fundamentalists) offer are arms, money, and the belief that the Palestinian-Israeli deadlock will be broken with ‘the help of God.’[66]

During their meeting, Arafat greeted the delegation warmly and described the Palestinians’ grievances at length. Deats spoke of his experiences teaching nonviolence in the former Soviet Union, particularly Lithuania. This country, Deats felt, could be a model for the Palestinians in their struggles to become a state independent of Israel since Lithuana was a small, poor country with no allies, yet it mounted effective to Soviet rule and won its independence. Arafat was so impressed that he suggested that FOR form a nonviolent center in Jerusalem because, he said, “You cannot be arrested, tortured, or shot—you can only be deported.”[67]

FOR was unable to fund this project, but did lend its support to peace groups in Israel and progress was made. Soon after the Oslo Accords, Gene wrote optimistically, “Since then, both [Arafat] and Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin made nonviolent initiatives to each other that were beyond my wildest dreams.” The course of Palestinian-Israeli relations have undergone continual “mood swings,” reaching a nadir during the latest bloody intifada. As current events demonstrate all too clearly, the key to world peace may lie in resolving the conflicts between Israelis, Palestinians, and the various Islamic states in the region. These conflicts will never be solved, Gene insists, until we learn to listen to all parties, including terrorists, with compassion.

Passing on the Legacy of Compassionate Listening

During the past decade, Gene’s expertise as a teacher of compassionate listening has been increasingly in demand. In 1996, Gene received a phone call from young woman named Leah Green who was Director of the Middle East Program for Earthstewards Network.[68] Leah explained that she was becoming frustrated because the encounters she was setting up between Jews and Palestinians were leading to polarization, not understanding. “Participants came with their minds made up,” explained Leah. “I felt we weren’t making a contribution.”

When Gene agreed to help teach Compassionate Listening skills, Leah was delighted.  “We did a pilot project together in November, 1996, and it made a phenomenal difference,” recalls Leah. “We trained our participants in compassionate listening and it really pushed the project forward. We’ve brought hundreds of Americans over and we listen to everybody, on the right and the left. We’ve listened to thousands of Israelis and Palestinians with the intention of discovering the human being behind the stereotype. No one has declined a listening session with us. We’ve sat with people in homes, offices, streets, refugee camps, the Israeli prime minister’s office, the Palestinian president’s office, and on military bases. We’ve listened to settlers, sheikhs, mayors, rabbis, students, Bedouin, peace activists, and terrorists. We’ve learned that it is easy to listen to people with whom we agree. It’s when we listen to those with whom we disagree, those we hold as our “enemies,” that listening becomes a challenge. We listen with the intention of putting ourselves in their shoes, and it’s made a huge difference. Gene was the inspiration for this model.”

Two of Gene’s most important works during this period were Pieces of the Mideast Puzzle (1991) and No Royal Road to Reconciliation (1995). The first consists mainly of interviews with Palestinians and Israelis. Some of them are troubling, others heartening—all reveal deep pain and a deep desire for peace and reconciliation.

Gene led creative writing as well as compassionate listening workshops, and published a book of poems called All Possible Surprises (1995). In her introduction to this book, she says that ever since she was a young girl, phrases would flash into her mind, and she would write them down, and they would become the seeds of poems. “It was years later I learned I was writing instructions to myself on how to live my life,” Gene notes. After becoming a Quaker, Gene realized that these phrases came from her “inner voice” and were directing her to areas where she needed growth. For Gene, the act of creation is also an act of listening, and responding, to one’s inner voice.

One of her poem’s is a response to a phrase by Muriel Lester, one of Gene’s role models:

“The job of the peacemaker is”

to know there is no enemy

what we fear are fear-masks

worn by ourselves

and the ‘other side.’

And behind each mask

—the hooded Klansman

—the complacent housewife

—the rich who seek more riches

Is something trembling

to be born:

something pure in eclipse

some love waiting to be released

a person deserving

reverence and faith.

Helping people to remove their “fear masks” and discover the “inner person deserving of reverence and faith” is the primary goal of compassionate listening.  Its techniques have been applied in a variety of situations and settings, as Gene points out:

“Adam Curle supported the Compassionate Listening project when I presented it to the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. So did Herb Walters. Both came to Holland to be with me.”

Curle is the senior Quaker mediator from England. Walters developed his unique Listening Program in North Carolina. “He did great work in the South,” notes Gene. “He now listens to people all over the world.”

Gene has recently led compassionate listening training sessions in Alaska and the state of Washington, where conflicts have arisen between indigenous people and professional and recreational hunters and fishers. Gene went to Alaska twice in 1999 at the request of Cynthia Monroe, an AFSC staff person, to train people in compassionate listening.  Jeff Smith, an AFSC staff person in Washington, used Gene’s approach when the resumption of whaling by the Makah tribe caused some non-native people to respond with racism and anger. In both instances, everyone had strong opinions, and no one was listening to the other side.  “This issue is tearing the town apart,” said a frustrated activist in Port Angeles, Washington. Compassionate listening sessions helped to defuse some of the tensions and enabled people to have a better understanding of each other’s viewpoints.[69]

During the past decade, Gene has found numerous ways to teach the techniques and principles of compassionate listening. She has led workshops, given talks, written articles, and even become an “Internet Presence” (although she doesn’t herself own a computer, preferring instead the telephone and typewriter). Thanks to Dennis Rivers, two of her booklets—a collection of essays entitled An Enemy is Someone Whose Story We Haven’t Yet Heard and A Compassionate Listening Handbook: An Evolutionary Sourcebook—are available for free in PDF format at www.coopcomm.org. Leah Green has produced a compelling 34-minute video based on compassionate listening called Children of Abraham which is available at http://www.mideastdiplomacy.org/video.html. Another video called Alaskans Listening to Alaskans is in the works.

Although compassionate listening skills can to some extent be conveyed through books and exercises, the presence of a sensitive and experienced teacher is extremely important in the learning process. A teacher must model compassionate listening in his/her own life and encourage his/her students to do so likewise.

“We say very clearly in our guidebook that Compassionate Listening is a spiritual practice,” says Leah Green. “I couldn’t adopt compassionate listening in any aspect of my life until I realized that it’s a way of life, a religion. Before I rush to dehumanize anyone, I use a mirror. When we have a strong reaction to people, it’s because we have traits in common.”

Gene’s capacity to listen deeply has enabled her to become an extraordinary teacher whose influence continues to grow. As Leah Green observed, “I consider Gene one of my most treasured mentors. In fact, I consider her one of our national treasures.” This sentiment is widely shared by Gene’s friends, colleagues, and students.

Did I Love Enough?

Given her dynamic personality and turbulent emotional life, it is not surprising that Gene’s relations with her family were not always easy or peaceful. During much of their marriage Gene and Hallock were so caught up in their careers and personal issues that their children often had to fend for themselves. The family placed a great deal of emphasis on learning, but not upon formal education or degrees. All of the children attended college, but only three have degrees. It took her children many years—and (in some cases) lots of therapy—to find their own way in life. Artistic self-expression played an important role in the lives of her children. Valley became an independent production manager for film companies such as ABC and Disney. Kristian works as a musician and composer. Nina Kiriki became an award-winning novelist and short story writer (one of her recent fantasy novels, A Fistful of Sky, describes a large family of magical people that has an uncanny resemblance to the Hoffman clan). Nikolas works as a musician and owns a recording studio; he has five children. Erik teaches dance and singing to children; he has a son. Kaj teaches yoga.

The family gathers periodically for reunions. In January 1994, when the family met in Santa Barabara to celebrate Gene’s 75^th birthday, Gene was given some very disturbing news.  Her son Paul told her in private that she should say good-bye to him. He had been HIV-positive for about thirteen years at that point, and the AIDS was finally progressing.  He made a first suicide attempt in February, but his partner, Kenneth Coleman, found him and called the hospital.  His second attempt succeeded. He died on March 9. Paul was not only a gifted musician and artist, but very close his mother and to his siblings. His death deeply affected the family.

Gene and her husband Hallock continue to see each other from time and have an amicable relationship. “I don’t believe in holding grudges,” says Gene. (Hallock, married for the fourth time, lives near Palm Desert, California; Raymond Boshco also re-married and lives on the East Coast.)

Now that Gene is 84 years old and in declining health, she can no longer can travel on peace missions, but she still see her future as full of “possibilities” (the title of a column she writes for the alternative magazine HopeDance). Reflecting on the meaning of old age and being an elder, Gene writes:

[According to Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist teacher] at the end of your life the only question worth asking is, “Did I love enough?” My internal answer was, “Of course I haven’t, and perhaps never will. But I can begin trying—whatever happens, it will keep me well-occupied for the rest of my life.”

It is typical of Gene that even though she is an octogenarian, she still sees herself as a beginner, with new and exciting possibilities for self-discovery ahead. She concludes:

Life is full of not-knowing-how-to-love and finding new ways to act, to be, to respond, to live. Since I think this may take several lifetimes, I can’t waste any more time. The assignment is before me. I’m here to focus on being a warm, loving human being, just like my sons and daughters are already. Maybe I’ll be able to listen more compassionately to them and to my grandchildren—and I’m sure never to be bored. [70]

In the summer of 2003, Nina Kiriki wrote the following poem that sums up how many of her children feel about their mother:

You are a peace pioneer, a passionate listener,

The one who says yes to life

With colors, flowers, open arms.

You find friends everywhere.

Thank you for your fiery spirit,

Your ardent desire to help, to heal,

To find ways to connect.

Thank you for acknowledging mistakes and making amends.

Thank you for listening to the Spirit, for finding wisdom

In the words of sages now and before.

Thank you for your bright and seeking Spirit,

Your love, your kindness and hospitality,

Thanks for sharing your gifts.

Thank you for always, always

Being willing to shine.