d magazine : tolly’s way

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D Magazine : TOLLY’S WAY http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/1991/12/01/TOLLYS_WAY.aspx

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Robert V. Camuto (http://67.192.170.23/search?btnG=Search&entqr=0&output=xml_no_dtd&client=default_frontend&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&site=Magazines&search_type=sw&N=22&name=Robert+V.+Camuto&q=Robert+V.+Camuto&x=14&y=20&scope=sc-magazine)Published 12.01.1991 From D Magazine DEC 1991 (http://domain.com/Issues/D_Magazine_DEC_1991.aspx)

TOLLY’S WAYHe teaches reincarnation and out-of-body travel. His followers range from ParkCities matrons to Willie Nelson. His message: Everything- including Cadillacs andsummers in Carmel-is part of a glorious cosmic plan.

IT’S WEDNESDAY MORNING ON TURTLE Creek, time for these wives, widows and divorcees ofDallas gentry to gather in a lushly decorated Tudor and discuss the Big Questions.Bigger, of course, than who is cheating on whom, or planning the upcoming charity ball. Muchbigger, you see, than any of their lives. The day and the hour dictate a deeper agenda: Cosmicconsciousness. Life. Death. Reincarnation. Out-of-body travel. Karma.Their teacher, an octogenarian with a comb of white hair, a benign smirk and priestly hands,takes his place in front of them in an antique cane chair."Everything is great and wonderful." he once proclaimed in this room. "It always was great andwonderful. It always will be great and wonderful. So if we say something is not great andwonderful, it’s not because it’s not great and wonderful. It’s because that’s the way we think."From this vantage, everything this morning is looking great and wonderful indeed: the Chineseantiques and Italian mosaics, the Chagall in the sun room, the smile on the face of the youngstewardess getting her "fix" of mysticism.For the next 90 minutes, these two dozen or so women will ask him questions and he will tellthem things their old ministers would not: that their bodies are only temporary dwellings thatcan be left at will. that reincarnation is a fact and that they can change the world by visualizinggoodness three times a day.Perhaps best of all, he will tell them that everything-the husband’s indiscretions, the child’saddictions, the terror on the evening news, even their Highland Park addresses-is all part of adivine lesson plan.Many of the listeners, as they bask in the stream of words, wear the expressions of a cat beingstroked between the ears. Some close their eyes, placing their hands flat on the legs ofwell-tailored pant suits.Albert Achilles Taliaferro (pronounced "Tolliver"), has been their guide for decades. Yes, beforethe Beatles knew a swami from a synthesizer. Tolly, as his disciples call him, had some of these-ladies , chanting "Ohhmmmmmmm" in their Donna Reed dresses. Over the years, he’s beencalled a wise man and a great teacher, a heretic and a crackpot. To the women in this room he is agreat source of light. Tolly is Guru. Indeed, the guru of Highland Park.He also is a deposed Episcopal priest, the man who built one of Dallas’ wealthiest churches, onlyto be toppled and then resurrected with the help and good karma of the late Ann Cox and thepower of her family oil fortune. That was 26 years ago. Since then, his connections have allowedhim to overcome the protests of other clergymen and go on preaching to hundreds every Sundayat Southern Methodist University.Business execs, real estate yups, computer whizzes, entertainers and generations of the spirituallypromiscuous all have been drawn into his orbit. 8.0 restaurant owner Shannon Wynne consultshim for advice. Political activist Roy Williams, whose lawsuit forced Dallas to change the way itelected its city council, defers to him as a mentor. And when country superstar Willie Nelson, alongtime disciple, tied the knot for the fourth time this past September. Tolly conducted theprivate service in his office.Tolly calls himself a Christian, but his teachings are nothing like what you heard in Sundayschool. His main philosophical influence is Rosicrucianism, a four-century old mystical order that

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Tolly joined more than 50 years ago. The order, whose scholarship is widely considered dubious,claims roots ot ancient wisdom stretching back to Egypt in the reign of the Pharaoh Akhnaton.Based in San Jose, California, the group claims 250,000 members worldwide who subscribe to asecret. 17-year mailorder course that promises to uncover the truths of life and the universe from"development of personal magnetism" to "thought transmission."According to Rosicru-cianism, a group of advanced beings from Earth and beyond are dwelling inour midst, invisibly guiding human events-the writing of Shakespeare’s plays (by Francis Bacon,Tolly believes), the design of the dollar bill, the uniting of Europe. But Tolly’s spiritual influenceshave few bounds.In his cosmic blender, Tolly combines selective scoops of mysticism, Hinduism, Buddhism,astrology, Jungian psychology, alchemy, physics and free-enterprise economics. He throws outthe contradictions and flips the switch. Christ equals Krishna equals Buddha. All religions areone, and science is in no way incompatible with belief in (he spirit world. "The scientist is thegreat high priest of the religion of the future." he likes to say, and, ’"The Holy Spirit is akin to thespeed of light squared."Dallas, in Tolly’s cosmic scheme, is a fertile crescent for new thought that will help transform theplanet. "Where new approaches to religion are concerned, Dallas is on its way, in the next 25 to50 years, to becoming a center," he says."I think the type of person who is attracted is the person questioning things," says JimmyLawrence, the woman who has hosted Tolly’s twice-a-week classes in her home for a decade.Long ago, she says, her ex-husband, former Braniff International Chairman Harding Lawrence,warned her against Tolly. "This is a dangerous man," he said. She didn’t believe it then, and shedoesn’t now. "I think," she says, "the people in this class are irritated if someone says ’You’re notsupposed to know that"’Tolly has two audiences-an inner circle and an outer. For the wider audiences in his churchservices at SMU, he discusses his belief system in vague, general terms. He’ll talk about rebirth ordeliver an inspirational message on the power of the soul. But it is for the inner circle, those whofaithfully attend classes in Lawrence’s home, that Tolly saves prophecies that would make theneck hairs of the uninitiated stand up. He tells them, for example, that one day Christ will pass offadministration of the earth to an assistant-in-training, and that for a great period of time, theplanet’s less-advanced souls will not be permitted to reincarnate, and that "the day will comewhen we will all transfer to a higher planet." Yet, no matter how far out Tolly’s ideas do get, hecan’t be dismissed as just another celestial snake oil salesman. He’s not a rank outsider or a mereappendage to Dallas society. He’s part of its very fabric.He considers himself first a teacher, and as such he helped found some of North Texas’ firstschools for retarded children and children with Down’s syndrome. He also founded one of thecity’s toniest private schools-Dallas’ first Mon-tessori- where parents (who generally knownothing of his theology) pay college-level tuition for their young to imbibe knowledge with thepower lineage of Hunts, Crows and Dedmans.Last spring. 28 years after he broke with organized religion. Tolly ended another acrimoniousstruggle when an expanded board of directors of the St. Alcuin Montes-sori ousted him in a fightover control. Tolly had refused to yield authority to a committee system and be phased out."There is no in-between with him," says retired North Dallas accountant C. Lee Con-nell, theformer treasurer of Tolly’s church. Their friendship of more than 50 years was wrecked in thefight at St. Alcuin. "You either love him or you hate him."SMU’S SELECMAN HALL. MOTHER’S Day. Everything is as it should be.Light filters though the tall plantation shutters, falling on the women in their puffy-shoulderedprint dresses and the men in sensible suits. Tolly, in his priest’s collar and vestments, plays thebaby grand, leading the congregation in "Amazing Grace." Tolly reads from the Gospel. Theparishioners of St. Alcuin’s Community Church, about 150 of them genuflect on cue.Then comes the sermon: "Oh wonderful, beautiful kingdom of light. Shed down upon thesehumble souls thy beam of cosmic consciousness . .." No one here is surprised by the words, andTolly, after rambling a bit about organized religion, man’s psyche and the sun, launches into avivid explanation of his ideas on rebirth."The soul creates the body. It chooses the parents," he explains, sounding like a professortrodding familiar ground, "It chooses the place the parents are. It chooses the environment, thepeople involved in the family as well as in the community-the possibilities of coming in contactwith persons and groups of persons in which the various aspects of the development of theincarnation can take place."On Mothers Day it is very important for us to see this," he goes on. "The reason for Mother’sDay, from a spiritual standpoint, is that we are reminded of the fact that there is a divine planbehind every birth of a soul in a physical body."On the karmic balance sheet, this impresario of the occult has come out ahead in this life. Rearedin East Dallas, the eldest son of a postal worker, he now lives in a spacious Highland Park home,drives a Sedan de Ville Cadillac with vanity plates ("Tolly"), carries a country club membership

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and cools off by summering a month every year in Carmel.Albert was a brooding and sensitive boy who felt trapped in an ultrareligious family thatworshiped in the Church of Christ. He spent much of his youth alone, contemplating his parents’jealous, punitive God-’One of the most cruel concepts I heard of."Lucky for him, he was spared a mundane life by his uncanny ability to play the piano and byDallas society’s willingness to embrace and nourish him. As a youth in the 1920s, Albert playedorgan at downtown churches and piano for WFAA radio’s The Early Birds orchestra. Music gavehim his first glimpse inside Dallas’ worlds of business and art. and those contacts wouldultimately propel him to Ivy League schools and to music studies that would take him to NewYork. San Francisco and Paris."When the soul works," he explained to his congregation as he approached his 80th birthday lastFebruary, "it works by making contacts psychically. . contacts will be brought into your zone ofinfluence and awareness."Albert and his soul began making esoteric contacts early in life. He first left his body, he says, atthe age of 9. Bedridden with pneumonia, he heard the doctor tell his mother that he would notlive through the night. Suddenly, Taliaferro says, he felt himself rise up, hovering above thedoctor, above his weeping mother and father and finally, above the earth, wafting in space."It was not a dream," he said recently in his office overlooking Turtle Creek and downtown. "Itwas a wonderful sense of By the time the Rev. C.V. Westapher arrived as an assistant at St.Michael in 1960, word of Taliaferro’s Rosicrucian connections had leaked out, and the church wasat war with itself. A group of parishioners appealed to the bishop for Taliaferro to be removed.But before the year was over, Taliaferro resigned to work as a professional psychologist. "If hetaught Rosicrucianism, he was teaching something below the sub-Christian level, and thatoffended many members of the congregation,’" says Westapher. "He is a superb man for God-hejust didn’t quite fulfill Episcopalian expectations."Betty Cone, one of those who followed Tolly into the Rosicrucians, describes the reaction thatTaliaferro’s beliefs provoked in blunter terms. "The fit hit the shan," she says. ’They started awitch hunt."Taliaferro spent the next few years counseling federal prisoners in Seagoville By the time the Rev.C.V. Westapher arrived as an assistant at St. Michael in 1960, word of Taliaferro’s Rosicrucianconnections had leaked out, and the church was at war with itself. A group of parishionersappealed to the bishop for Taliaferro to be removed. But before the year was over, Taliaferroresigned to work as a professional psychologist. "If he taught Rosicrucianism, he was teachingsomething below the sub-Christian level, and that offended many members of the congregation,’"says Westapher. "He is a superb man for God-he just didn’t quite fulfill Episcopalianexpectations."Betty Cone, one of those who followed Tolly into the Rosicrucians, describes the reaction thatTaliaferro’s beliefs provoked in blunter terms. "The fit hit the shan," she says. ’They started awitch hunt."Taliaferro spent the next few years counseling federal prisoners in Seagoville and looking in vainfor an Episcopal church that would have him, He divorced his first wife and married EthelWilliamson, a divorcee in his St. Michael’s choir and the daughter of a wealthy Shreveport family.In 1965, Tolly seemed bom again. Ann Cox helped him launch the Montessori school, and shearranged through her husband, oilman Edwin L. Cox, for Tolly to have a place to preach at SMU.Unrepentant, Taliaferro wrote to the bishop explaining his ambitious plans for a new church atwhich he would once again preach his unorthodox views. An unimpressed committee of his peersadvised the bishop to defrock him. Obviously, the Age of Aquarius had yet to dawn on theEpiscopal hierarchy.ST. ALCUIN COMMUNITY CHURCH, named after Charlemagne’s court teacher (Alcuin wasnever canonized by anyone except Taliaferro) will continue at least until Taliaferro dies. Or, as hewould put it, until he moves into his next "transition." But the arrangement with SMU, which haslasted almost eight years since Ann Cox’s death, has left some of the SMU clergy wincing. SMUchaplain William M. Finnin suggested that the Perkins School of Theology discontinueTaliaferro’s $650-a-month lease on Selec-man Hall, but to no avail. This fall, Tolly’s group waspermitted to move across campus to the Hughes-Trigg Student Center. The lease amount wasunchanged."I think they have worn out their welcome," Finnin argues. "First of all, he’s getting a very cheapride. They pay an obscenely minimal amount, and as far as I can tell he is very well funded."Tolly’s lifestyle indeed surpasses that of the average priest. St. Alcuin’s budget is simple. Thedraw from the weekly offering (usually around $500) goes toward rent of the hall and otherchurch expenses, such as Tolly’s Cadillac and the church rectory, his house on Belclaire Avenue.What’s left over is for Tolly’s discretionary use, along with the money he makes from the classesand psychological counseling."It’s sort of a play church," Finnan says in a tone resembling a pastoral sneer. Finnin insists hisopposition is mainly for business reasons and principle, but he has little regard for Taliaferro’s


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theology. "What the group has put together is an eclectic New Age philosophy that has very littleresemblance to biblical Christianity and that allows them to be very complacent with the wealththey’ve accumulated, earned or inherited."Taliaferro’s intensely protective disciples scoff at any such criticism and shun publicity. "You cannot sum up in one did-dly-wa article what impact this man has had on the city," says PaulaDennard, the widow of a Dallas investment banker."People are different after they are around him," she says. "They are saying, ’What is the meaningof life? What is its purpose? How can we link up hearts and souls for building peace?’ But if youput some of this in a magazine, people will think we’re crazy."Wanda Shannon, self-made stockbroker, real estate agent and former president of the Children’sArts and Ideas Foundation, is one of the few working women among Tolly’s longtime femalefollowers in the Wednesday class. She acknowledges that many of Tolly’s followers rely on him asa "crutch." But she adds, "What he has said many times is that the very rich have the sameproblems as the very poor and having money doesn’t make you any better than anyone else."He has taught them to be unselfish," she says. "He has taught them even if they have servants tohelp the servants."Most of us, Taliaferro preaches, are running around like so many disconnected transistors,squandering our energies. The purpose of life is to learn, he teaches, and most of us are flunkingthe test. Those who don’t learn do it over in life after life. Meanwhile, he instructs those withmoney to use it for good purposes or risk losing it all like the Hunt brothers. Karma, he says, is asort of Robin Hood."It always comes back to an individual having a purpose, whether you’re a capitalist or whateveryou’re doing," explains Jim Reid, president of Dallas’ Southern Dallas Development Corporation,who frequently attends Tolly’s church in blue jeans, leather sandals and a necklace made fromantique Chinese stones.The recurring villains in Tolly’s sermons are all organized religions, particularly fundamentalists,right-wingers and whatever Republican administration happens to be in power. "The primarycause of mental illness is religion," he proclaimed in a feistier moment. Another time, Tollydeclared modern abortion "a very great contribution to the human race... It doesn’t make anydifference to the soul because the soul that needs an incarnation is going to find another bodyanyway."But there is one point on which Tolly agrees with some of the strictest fundamentalists: His Godis a capitalist-an enlightened capitalist, of course. At the top of Taliaferro’s spiritual hierarchy arephilanthropists and businessmen, not Mother Teresa. Asked if he’s known anyone who has comeclose to karmic perfection, Taliaferro shakes his head "no." But then he goes on to praise theRockefellers as some of the most advanced beings."The capitalistic system is just a system of psychic consciousness brought down to the materialplane," Taliaferro once said. "And it was revealed to the Rothschilds by the masters... Thecapitalist system is a system of creativeness. It’s not the profit system."As for those of his flock who don’t have millions, Taliaferro insists that they can influence thecourse of history by sending out thoughts of love and peace. It’s a fairly effortless salvation, someof Tolly’s critics point out. "In Christianity," says Finnin of SMU, "we call that cheap grace-theidea that you don’t have to get your hands dirty."

ROY WILLIAMS IS DISCUSSING THE divine order of all things and his agenda for "socialaction" over pasta salad and coffee at Massimo da Milano. Here, in the heart of North Dallas’boutique belt on Lovers Lane, about 20 Tolly-ites assemble as they do every Tuesday afterTaliaferro’s evening class. Williams, holding court at one table, describes his spiritual journey. Afollower of Taliaferro for more than a decade and an initiated Rosicrucian, Williams filed thelawsuit that eliminated at-large representation at Dallas City Hall and essentially forced the 14-1council plan."The belief system we operate out of in dealing with Father Taliaferro is that you’re drawn toplaces and to people that you’re supposed to be with and I think through my search forself-realization I came across the most powerful vehicle in my environment, which was FatherTaliaferro," Williams explains. That’s the long way of saying that he was introduced toTaliaferro’s church through a woman he was having a conversation with at La Madeleine, hisunofficial office near SMU.In this lifetime, Williams has forsaken steady employment so that he could fulfill his mission-whether that meant berating the City Council, calling news conferences or taking the city tofederal court. "It is my belief this is something I set out to do in another lifetime and I’m justfinishing up what I left off," he explains.Taliaferro is quick to distance himself from Williams. For that matter, he doesn’t endorse all theextracurricular ideas of most of his followers, many of whom have run the mystical gamut fromfortune telling to fire walking to peyote rituals. He calls them novices, or simply, "the littlechildren."


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As the night wears on, these aspiring mystics get weary of mysticism, and the talk drifts to othersubjects: to Mexican vacations and Chinese food, to movies and automobiles.Gary Blackburn, a thirtyish real estate broker from Irving, explains to a visitor the power of themind over not only matter, but over the Mercedes-Benz. Five years ago, before he began hismystical quest, Blackburn, who was driving a Camaro, promised a friend he would soon bedriving a Mercedes. The next day, he walked into a dealership, climbed into a sedan and breathedin the scent of factory leather. A year later, he was driving a midnight blue 190E."Visualization is the way you make things happen," he said, quick to add that his first concern iswith making the world a better place-not acquiring luxury sedans. "I visualize peace on earthbefore I visualize anything of a personal nature," says Blackburn. "I don’t think my purpose withFather Taliaferro is to go out and make a million dollars-even though I know I will."FOR A MAN WHO PROCLAIMS THE WON-der in everything, Taliaferro is remarkablydiscontent about the state of the world. While most of the country was celebrating a decisivevictory in the Persian Gulf war, Taliaferro lamented, "We haven’t progressed one iota sinceRoman times." Such statements have helped Taliaferro gather up many of those estranged fromtraditional churches.Shannon Wynne, who runs a temple of Dallas’ art-money-fashion set in the Quadrangle’s 8.0restaurant, turned to Tolly’s teachings in the mid-1980s after indulging his curiosities in UFOsand "spirit forms.""I did channeling and everything else-a lot of it was bullshit." says Wynne. "Father Taliaferro isvery hip when it comes to reality. You don’t feel like you’re sitting with your old-time typepriest-he’s cynical, and political.. . Some of what he says I accept, some of it I’m not intellectualenough to accept or I don’t want to accept."Even for the open-minded, some of Talia-ferro’s ideas can be difficult to fathom. He professeswith certainty that the souls of those on earth will travel to another planet, for example, and thatone day another "great master" by the name of Koot Hoomi will. assume divine stewardship ofthe earth’s affairs."He [Koot Hoomi] is slated to be the person who will tunction in the ottice of the Christ," Tollytold one of his evening classes. "Just as when the Queen of England dies her son will take herplace, so when the Christ goes to another position, there will be one who will take his place as ahuman being."Later, asked where he gets these ideas, Taliaferro says that it would not be appropriate for thegeneral public to judge him out of context. But when pressed, he explains that such principles arebased on "esoteric Buddhism."Yes, but does he really believe it?"I don’t believe anything," he answers obliquely. Then he chuckles. "I don’t close my mind toanything either."Even at their most absurd, Taliaferro’s ideas seem pretty harmless-with one exception . The mosttroubling part of his creed has nothing to do with interplanetary travel. It is his notion thatkarmic law can account for the most brutal of human acts."The Holocaust was done to the Jews because they, when they were not Jews, did it to others,"Tolly explained last spring, not for the first time, to a group in Jimmie Lawrence’s living room.Strangely, even the Jews who follow Tolly don’t take offense. Rabbi Jack Bemporad, who ledDallas’ Temple Emanu-EI for more than a decade ending in 1983. is a longtime friend and pupilwho calls Taliaferro a "great teacher1’ and says such statements are not anti-Semitic."He’s a very complicated person," says Bemporad. "You can’t take it in a literal sense. You have totake it in a psychological sense. In the way that the things you condemn in others are what youhave to work on yourself."Taliaferro makes no apologies, no matter how cruel his laws of the universe seem- -no matterhow close to the heart of his life those laws strike.One morning last May, Taliaferro’s 10-day-old granddaughter, bom months prematurely, died ofan unexplained tumor. A few hours later, he sat in his office. He was distracted, but there were notears. He was on and off the phone to his wife, trying to make arrangements for a family funeral.Surely, if anyone were an innocent victim, this premature child would be one, a visitor offers. Andwhat of other victims? Rape? Child abuse? Incest?"People are not victims," Taliaferro says, his voice almost a whisper. "And people are notinnocent."Tolly, of course, is expected to have an answer for almost everything.The wise man went on musing about the small life and the death, trying to fit the tragedy into thecosmic order he has preached for decades. Perhaps its meaning was to instruct the family. Maybeit would help to educate the medical community. It was even possible, he said, that somethinggreat and wonderful could come from it.

Robert V. Camuto is a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.


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