When I moved to San Francisco in 1962, I soon ran into Bernie Mayes, founder of the first suicide prevention center in California. He made his living by broadcasting on the local NPR station. Later he helped found The Parsonage, an Episcopal ministry for and with the homosexual community of which he was a part. He was a worker-priest, ordained to the Anglican ministry in Great Britain, where he was born and raised. He is a delightful, humorous, thoughtful man with a passion for justice and freedom for all.

The book is a fine autobiography of a man growing up in England during and after World War II, a stint in the army, teaching, odd jobs, theological education and ordination into the Anglo-Catholic branch of Anglicanism. He is candid about his coming out as a gay man. Bernie shows us the world of inventive and creative radio broadcasting as he earns his living in that field of endeavor. His story, about the world from his birth in 1929 to the present, is fascinating, entertaining and enlightening.

Running through the book is Mayes' passion for the homosexual rights movement in state and church. The book is also an important theological discussion of Christian thought. He leaves the priesthood and the church on intellectual and moral grounds. He says he cannot give religious answers that toe the party line. He finds the basic doctrines of the church oppressive and intellectually untenable.

However, Mayes seems stuck in an intellectual process. He calls his wrap-up theological chapter The Soup. I find the soup missing many basic ingredients of the Christian life. The mythological and emotional dimensions of Christianity are missing. The intuition, imagination, and sense of awe that comes with great music, liturgy and intimate social relations and ministering to the sick and dying are missing from Mayes' book. The sense of community found in many parish churches (not all) is not a part of his thinking.

I wish Bernie had hung in there with the rest of us trying to make the church live up to its potential and its own teaching of love, forgiveness, compassion and justice. However, the book is a marvelous picture of the life of a delightful human being, thinking carefully through the complex values of our time.

(The Rev.) Robert Warren Cromey

San Francisco, Calif.