An interview by the Rev. Georgia DuBose

SEARCHING FOR REALITY: Roberta Chromey Writes a Memoir of Life in a Fourth Way School

An interview by the Rev. Georgia DuBose

She always knew she was on a search. It wasn’t for “the meaning of Life,” nor was it to understand “why there is life on earth.” Roberta Chromey was seeking genuine interactions with “real people.”

“I remember there was a woman at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Bethesda, Maryland” (where Roberta attended church with her parents). “She was unaffected. She just talked to you—not at you, or down to you. It was a real connection.” That woman was one of the people who let Roberta know that it was possible to have the kinds of interactions she hungered for. “I thought that when I met such people, we would recognize each other. There would be a certain something that would resonate. A descriptive phrase swam into mind at the time: the core of my search was to find real people.”

The search for authenticity led Roberta in unpredictable directions, given a fairly conventional upbringing in a suburb of Washington, D. C. “I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a child,” she said. “When I went to college at the University of Maryland, I heard some people discussing Livingston College at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It was a place where you could design your own programs.” It was timely information: the Flather family was about to move from Bethesda, Maryland to New Jersey because Roberta’s father had a new job. Roberta transferred from UM to Livingston College, which was on a new campus, had co-ed dorms, and allowed independent study. That was to prove very useful.

Life in New Jersey brought other changes. Roberta met a man named Jack Chromey on her first day at Livingston, and was drawn to the thin person with long hair. “It was the classic seeing someone across a crowded room. My eyes kept being drawn to him.” In retrospect, she thinks that it was the action of the magnetic center that drew her both to Livingston College, and to Jack: “magnetic center,” a Gurdjieffian term, refers to an inner formation that helps orient us in the direction of what can serve our individual evolution and inner development. She believes that inner orientation was what led her on the search for real people.

Jack Chromey introduced Roberta Joyce Flather (then known as “Bobby Jo”) to ideas that also attracted her full attention. The ideas of G.I. Gurdjieff, and his student, John G. Bennett, served as the foundational curriculum for a school Bennett had founded. The International Academy for Continuous Education drew people from all over North America, South America, Europe and the British Isles to Sherborne House, a stately home in Gloucestershire, since 1522 the family seat of the aristocratic Dutton family. Roberta and Jack were to spend 10 months there, learning about the natural world, the thought and action systems that Gurdjieff and Bennett had developed, and the opportunities and challenges of living with 100 other people almost continuously over that period from September of 1972 until August of 1973.

“It’s important to share this now,” Roberta said 48 years later, talking to an old friend who, nonetheless, had not heard all of the story of her year at Sherborne, and what led up to it. “I kept journals, but after Christmas, found prose did not capture the dimension of the experience, which stopped me writing in my journal. I want to get these memories down, because my intent is to bring the experience we shared alive for my children and grandchildren. It was such a little window of time, and I was there…Bennett shifted our relationship with nature, ourselves, and our understanding of higher worlds. In his discussions of the future, he foretold the future–what we are living at the present moment. So many things he spoke of in the 1970’s are happening now.”

Roberta thinks that John G. Bennett was aiming his ideas and teachings at a paradigm shift that could save the future of mankind. “And ultimately, [it was a manifestation] of caring for others,” she said. She acknowledges that others, including Allen Roth and Barbara June Appelgren, have written about the experience of participating in the 10 month periods known as Basic Courses at Sherborne. “My focus is different,” she explains. “I’m giving the whole trajectory [of that period] and taking people on that ride—seen through my eyes.”

The intensively structured introductions to Gurdjieff’s ideas, Bennett’s amplifications of them and his connections with other spiritual traditions, the practices of disciplines as different as Gurdjieff’s sacred dances and inner exercises, carpentry, pottery and organic gardening took place in the demanding framework of a daily schedule that kept participants active from 6 a.m until 9 or 10 p.m. “It seemed to me that I was among a group of people who were meant to be at Sherborne. I asked myself: how did I get so lucky as to be among them. I thought, ‘I’m just an ordinary person,’ but I was granted a window to the extraordinary. Why me?”

The demands of daily life at Sherborne House took place in surroundings that Roberta refers to as “Hogwarts-esque.” The old manor house had its roots in the 13^th century, with possible remainders from an earlier monastery, or perhaps even a Roman villa. Tall windows, high ceilings, sweeping staircases and a library, ballroom, great hall and “horse parlor” (a room full of paintings of horses and equine sports) not usually found in “normal” homes gave the students the sense that they were in another world. Bennett himself was a giant of a man, physically and spiritually. Roberta found herself in awe of him. “It was not a matter of like or dislike,” she said. “He was my teacher. I probably should have gone to speak with him more than I did, but he seemed so far beyond me. That was my fault, not his.”

The apex of Roberta’s time at Sherborne came in the spring of 1973, when she entered what she described as “…a disassociated state. I had become confused about shedding the false personality. I got that mixed up with shedding personality all together. I came into a state where I couldn’t function in the ordinary world. I guess you could say I got lost in the Enchanted Forest. Jack took care of me.”

She turned a corner when the Jungian analyst, Dr. Edith Wallace, came to visit at Sherborne. “Mr. Bennett seemed inaccessible to me, but Edith was different. I could tell her what was going on.” Dr. Wallace didn’t say that what Roberta was experiencing was wrong, but rather that it was only part of the picture of life as a conscious human being. Roberta said, “She told me, ‘What we are striving for is to build a bridge between both worlds, not to be stuck in one or the other.'” (Dr. Wallace referred to the ordinary world in which we need to function, and the world of higher perceptions.) Roberta said of her conversations with Dr. Wallace, “She gave me a reason to cross over that bridge and return to ordinary reality where I needed personality to function. I had been thinking that people in asylums were the ones who understood what was real. I began to understand that there was a balance that needed to be maintained.”

The plan Roberta had worked out with Livingston College, to use her time at Sherborne as a “year abroad,” and to keep a journal that would document the living and learning experience, became a part of her undergraduate degree. “The time at Sherborne shaped my life. I had known since fifth grade that I was going to write a book someday. I think that this is the book that I was put on earth to write, to pay the debt of my existence. Something about it wants to be out there.”

Roberta and Jack married two years after the course at Sherborne ended, and raised their two children at Claymont Court in West Virginia, where Mr. Bennett had laid out plans for a school and community modeled on the Sherborne experience. “When I look back at the way things came together, it seems to me that our time at Sherborne was ordained,” she said. “We came on the course after a time of chaos in the United States, with assassinations, the riot at the Republican convention in Chicago, the shootings at Kent State, Vietnam protests, and Watergate. But I didn’t go to Sherborne to make sense out of all that. I went thinking I would come home an enlightened being, with all my faults ‘fixed.’ By the end of the course, I knew something in me had changed, but I also knew there was a long road ahead. The real take-away wasn’t at all about visiting the ‘Enchanted Forest’ of mystical states, but of doing the day-to-day inner work to build consciousness and a connection with conscience.”