the man who became a moonie

The story he told later was that he later noticed a newspaper advert for a job of croupier. It may have been the address that intrigued him. By coincidence, it was a casino in Royal Terrace. Ostensibly he was looking for a job to save money for a trip he was planning. But is there a suspicion there was a degree of self-manipulation in what followed? He says that he had set up an interview at the casino, but decided in advance to check it out on this particular Saturday night.

So, there he was on Royal Terrace, heading for the casino, but the Moonie house also came into view and exerted its own pull. He describes himself enacting a kind of existentialist drama of his own life: ''I went backwards and forwards between these two places for maybe 20 minutes, until I stopped, and it struck me in a way I couldn't understand that somehow this was significant, and I was making a very important decision.''

His own account is that his studies at Stirling University had left him ''deflated''. He had achieved the necessary grades, but he was ''absolutely desperate to get some significance'' in his life. He was searching for something beyond rats in cages and the statistics of his psychology classes, or the lit crit approach of English Studies. Philosophy brought him an early disillusionment. At the first lecture the professor had warned the subject would not provide students with the ''answers to life''.

George was also increasingly dissatisfied with other areas of his existence. A precocious boy who excelled at sports and appeared to have acquired a wisdom beyond his years, he experimented in drugs and explored the sexual freedoms of sixties Edinburgh before he left the Royal High School. His English teacher, David Campbell, became something of a mentor. He recalls: ''At an early age George had done all these things like pot and acid. It was a bit like watching someone on a dangerous journey. Yet he seemed conscious that life was an inner journey and these were all things from which you'd learn. Even his sexual experiences seemed to be like that - ways of finding something more profound.''

Since adolescence he had been caught up with an ''infatuation with Oriental teaching''. He dabbled with Zen Buddhism. He regularly attended the Sam Y Ling Buddhist retreat near Dumfries. The plan forming in the summer of 1972 was to visit a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, Japan. He had written and received an invitation. There had been arguments with his parents in Edinburgh. They feared he was in danger of throwing away his university opportunity. He admits he was already in a ''crisis of uncertainty''.

This background throws more light on the apparent dilemma he confronted on Royal Terrace, or had he deliberately engineered a loaded choice between God and Mammon? The address had a further significance, since it was in this same street that some of his high school overspill classrooms had been situated, and therefore it was a location that seemed to contain his past, present and future. Was this fate, or was this the perfect stage to create a self-induced ''experience''? Had George's road to Damascus found him, or had he searched for it?

He made his decision, finally, to ring on the door of the group from the Unified Family. In conversion terms he agrees he was in a state that made him a real ''gimme''. He describes the emotions he felt at that moment: ''My heart was on fire. It was like a volcano. My spiritual heart was beating painfully. Tears of joy were coming to my eyes. The feeling I had then was, 'I have come home'.''

This invites some obvious questions which, 26 years later, George is prepared to answer. Was it not clear he was in personal crisis and this had made him vulnerable? He responds: ''Can you be vulnerable to God? You can be open to God, and I think I was open.''

Was it not more like a crack-up of a young man undergoing a period of indecision and crisis? ''Well, it was a delightful crack-up. I'd like to have more of them. If you talk to Christian people, among those who wear their testimonies on their sleeves are some who tell you how they found Jesus, and they describe tearful experiences, conversion experiences. That's what I had, a conversion experience.''

The door opened. George was invited in. He explained the experience he had felt, and ''somehow they could understand it''. After staying overnight, the next morning he took the bus to London, heading towards the Berkshire farmhouse which the Moonies rented as its British base. He says his feeling was that one part of his life's journey was over. Another was about to begin.

By arrangement he was picked up by jeep at Reading and taken to Rowlene Farmhouse. The next three or four days completed an induction. He was introduced to the teachings of Sun Myung Moon, founder and spiritual father of the Unification Church, through his reinterpretation of the bible in his book, The Divine Principle. It preaches a post-Christian ideal of universal love and peace through God and spreading through the unit of the family. It seeks to unite all peoples, all races, all faiths, all creeds. Demands are made on strict sexual morality, and marriages of individual members are arranged and blessed personally by Moon. Codes of discipline and obedience are demanded.

They told George it was time for him to learn about Chapter 13. He followed them upstairs. He returned with a ''GI haircut''. He was invited to hand over his green, flared trousers, blue denim jacket and sandals. They led him to a rail of sports jackets. He inherited a pair of brogue shoes. It was explained it would be better if he looked more ''respectable'', ''less threatening to the public''. He was about to gain his first missionary experience.

''I found myself on the streets of Reading, bearing testimony to something I hardly understood, convinced I was going to change the world,'' he laughs. ''I would say: 'Excuse me, I wonder if you have a few minutes. I'd like to tell you about a new set of ideas, a new revelation from God.' People would say: 'Oh, push off, mate.' I thought: 'This is not so easy.' I could see it was going to take a little beyond next Tuesday.''

Neither was it just strangers who were unimpressed. George's own family were hostile to the news their son had found a new one. His student friends were bemused, then incredulous. The Unification Church was a new phenomenon in 1972. When George joined, there were no more than 20 members in Britain, as Moon was striving to spread his movement from Korea into the United states and Europe. Don Byron, who had been a close friend of George at Stirling, decided to go and see what it was all about for himself. He had received a letter from George which opened: ''I am enlightened.''

''I had no idea what to expect,'' says Byron. ''It turned out to be Fortress Moonie and it was not a gratifying experience trying to say 'Hello in there' to the once George. The moustache had gone. He was wearing what looked like charity shop gear. He had minders with him, and they all looked bloody miserable. I was trying to get close enough to him to tell him I had enough money to get train tickets for both of us. George was not receptive.

''I retain a weird image that sums up the cult for me. The weather was bad and I was wearing a pair of disintegrating tennis shoes. George offered to take me down to the basement to find me another pair of shoes. He opened a door and there were shoes there to a depth of four feet. There was another heap of shaving foam. I asked George who had left this stuff. He just said: 'Americans - they leave their baggage when they go back'. I tried again to get him to leave with me, but he gave me this superior smile, as though he had just seen me falling past the fifteenth-floor window.''

Don Byron compares it to the experience he had, later, of losing another friend to a heroin overdose. He describes it in terms of wrestling for the soul of George Robertson, and losing. ''I was sad about it,'' he says. ''But I realised I had tried everything short of kidnapping the guy. It was a terrible thing, I regret that it ever happened. Whoever George was, I think he would have led a more useful and fulfilling life if he had left with me that day. I cared about him, but he was someone who no longer existed.''

The subsequent life of George Robertson over the next 26 years may have to be measured against that statement. The Unification Church does not receive the hysterical media attention it did from the late 1970s, although its appeal against what it regards as the pejorative term of ''Moonies'' has not been widely accepted. There remains a wide scepticism towards it. Perhaps the story of George Robertson may offer a fresh perspective.

In November 1972 he found himself on a plane flying south over the Mediterranean. He carried a banjo, a suitcase and #30. These represented his entire resources with which to establish the Unification Church's first mission in Cyprus. He had no contacts and

no back-up. He found accommodation in Nicosia, bluffed his way into a part-time job teaching English and took his banjo into clubs where he started performing. With a small income beginning to trickle in, boosted by private English lessons, he had some leaflets made in Greek translations.

It was not proving any easier than on the streets of Reading. His attempts to convert an English girl over a period of several months ended with her concluding he was from the devil, and the Rev Moon was Satan. He had to wait longer for a breakthrough with the son of a chemical engineer. His name was Richard Edwards, and he became George's first convert. The Unification Church uses the term ''spiritual child''. George phoned back to the leaders in Britain with his news. He felt proud.

However, this was only an isolated success. By the 1974 Turkish invasion of North Cyprus the political situation became delicate and George, who had developed language pupils and contacts in the American and Soviet embassies, found himself the fly in several surveillance webs. In an escalating farce, he was interrogated for three days before being thrown out of the country. He arrived back in Britain to report to the church leaders. His achievement: four members in Cyprus. ''It's not untypical,'' is his rueful reflection.

A much bigger problem was that he had begun to develop his own ideas about how

the Unification Church should broaden its cultural base. He presented a proposal to set up a touring theatre company to attract new members. The response was not encouraging. He thought the church leadership was regimented and dictatorial, running a conservative style of evangelism that had increased British membership to only 150 by 1975. They, in turn, told him he lacked humility. This led to a split and a period of disaffection with the organisation of the church.

Over the next four years his position was highly ambivalent. He no longer worked actively for the church, yet he remained in loose contact as a member or as an individual plotting a return to challenge the British leadership. At no point had he renounced the spiritual message of Moon's teachings. He took a job with the Tourism and Recreation Research Unit of Edinburgh University, covering the Highlands and Islands. With a Scottish Arts Council grant he next ran a theatre-in-education company, Tie-Up Theatre, in Inverness. He began freelance broadcasting for the BBC, becoming a researcher in religious broadcasting. He brought members of the Unification Church onto programmes

During this time his lifestyle underwent several paradoxical transformations. In Inverness he began living with a girl, Ann McMurdo, and appears to have been strongly influential in her joining the Unification Church. The contradiction was that the Church forbade relationships outside arranged marriage, and this was the factor that lay behind their agreeing to break up, not without acrimony, in 1978. Despite being unable to make a reconciliation with the Church as an active member in the same year, he adopted a self-imposed asceticism during which he devoted himself to prayer, meditation and agonised soul-searching.

''I had left the world I had established,'' he attempts to explain. ''I believed that to receive the sermon of the blessing was of a different magnitude to the attraction to a woman. But I couldn't fit back into the Church community. This began one of the most terrible phases of my life. I couldn't go back to Inverness. Ann had chosen her own path. I touched the basement before I fought my way back to sanity and joy and spiritual recovery.''

In 1979 George declined the offer of a renewed contract with the BBC in order to rejoin the Unification Church. He had been persuaded the cult had changed its style of operation enough to offer him an alternative to selling flowers on the street, making candles or sending him out as an isolated missionary.

From bases he established in Cramond and then Liberton, both in Edinburgh, he began work as manager of the Go World Brass Band, a group formed by members to perform a pastiche of the already unfashionable Chicago and Santana bands. There was moderate success and a lot of touring, until the failure to secure a recording deal led to the break-up of the band. By this time, George had made his greatest commitment within the movement. He underwent an arranged marriage.

The formal preparations, mass ceremonies and the subsequent period of probation before consummation of a Unification Church ''blessing'' - a series of rites taking up to seven years to complete - are the most difficult areas for outsiders to accept. It is one of the areas of the Church's practice that attracts the greatest ridicule and can lead to the greatest conflict between members and their natural families. George was no exception, at least initially.

Followers of Moon believe he is invested with clairvoyant powers. They trust he can bring them together in marriages sworn for ''eternity'', even though one of the principles adopted in selection of couples is to resolve old historical, political and racial antagonisms. Unlike other religions and cultures which practise arranged marriage, Moon appears to regard incompatibility as a recommendation. Blacks are matched with whites, Koreans with Japanese, occidentals with orientals. To the Unificationist, this might seem like a demonstration of universal reconciliation and love through model marriages. To the sceptic, it looks like perverse experiments in the engineering of obedient souls.

George Robertson submitted himself to a formal matching ceremony in December, 1980. It was held in the Church-owned New Yorker Hotel over several days, with Moon presiding. The ritual would demand an extraordinary faith among the individual Church members who had come forward for Moon's selection, but in George's case this was tested even further. Incredibly, he looked across a crowded room and met the eyes of his former lover, Ann McMurdo, the woman he had lived with in Inverness for two years.

He claims her turning up at the ceremony was a devastating coincidence. When he saw her in the New Yorker function room it was ''like an electric shock''. As Church members, theirs had been a renegade and doomed affair. Their split had caused them both pain. Ann had joined the movement's crusade in the US. They had lost contact. Now they had come forward, separately, to be chosen for marriage.

Was it possible Moon, the spiritual father, might give them his blessing? ''The thought came across my mind,'' admits George. ''I struggled with the idea for some time. I had to leave the room on the first day. I wanted to go and speak to her.'' Yet he repressed it. He insists he wanted to prepare himself in a ''pristine state of grace''. Later, he would learn Ann went through a similar crisis before reaching a ''state of calm''. The ceremony proceeded.

Ann McMurdo was matched by Moon with a German photographer called Hans. George Robertson was later beckoned forward. Moon gave him a bow and a smile. The gesture

was ''paternal, joyful, mischievous, maybe challenging''. George was handed a photograph of a woman wearing a red cardigan and a kilted skirt. It was his future wife.

He had never seen her before in his life. On the back of the photograph were a few details. Her name was Anna-Maria Pilz. She was 28, the same age as George. Her nationality was Austrian. Visa problems had made it impossible for her to attend the New York ceremony in person. Her address was given as a Unification Church commune in Newport, Gwent, South Wales. George studied her photograph.

''What can I say?'' searches George. ''It was a feeling of mystery and excitement. Also, in a simple human sense, I thought that, apart from everything else, she had a nice face. You can't help noticing these things. I saw she had breasts. I was pleased about that.''

He took his photograph with him when he went to congratulate Ann McMurdo and her newly-selected fiance. The three went for coffee. They chatted and took snaps to record the occasion. A photograph was taken of George clutching the photograph of his future wife, while his former lover looked on and smiled. The compound ironies of the situation must have reverberated even in New York, where the bizarre is already heavily subscribed.

''If I give the impression I still have a maudlin sense of the loss of the relationship with Ann, it would be wrong,'' says George. ''I had prayed that one day Ann would have a good husband. I have had this dream in which I am holding hands with Ann McMurdo on one side and my wife on the other. We are walking along in the deepest love and respect for each other. They are two sisters and through them I have a window into the soul of femininity.''

But first he had to find his wife and claim her. Anna-Maria Pilz remembers the day George arrived in Newport. He had ''nice curly hair'' and he brought sweets for everyone. With a borrowed guitar he played Anna-Maria a serenade. It was a full two-and-a-half years before they were ''blessed'' by Moon in a mass ceremony in Seoul. They were one of 5837 couples wed that day in the Jam Shil Gymnasium.

In the Our Family magazine of the Unification Church, Mr George Robertson senior gave his son his own blessing. He sounded as though he was parodying the quotes style of the tabloids which had been vilifying the movement: ''Anna's a lovely girl - I give Rev Moon 10 out of 10 for selection. In fact, if I was young again, I'd join myself.'' Mr Robertson added that he had ''resented'' the Unification Church at first. George had seemed to have a ''bright future'' until he joined the church. George's mother, Mrs Jean Robertson, agreed: ''Maybe I am mellowing in my old age, but I seem to find it easier to accept the whole thing now.''

George and Anna-Maria went through a registry office wedding in Britain, in what their Church calls a legal wedding. There was no honeymoon. George continued to work for the Church in Britain. Anna-Maria moved to Germany. It was not until May 1985 they lived together. They had agreed to develop the ''spiritual side'' before starting sexual relations.

This abstinence has its tragic side. Following a miscarriage in 1987, Anna-Maria had a successful labour in October 1988 when their son, Gilchrist Matthias, was born. By then George had been two years diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By 1990, when they moved to their present council home in Wimbledon, George was confined to a wheelchair. They would never be able to have any more children.

The progression of the illness has placed an inevitable strain on their life together, but they cope. George, who has begun to lose some of the strength and flexibility of his arms, is still able to drive an automatic car to his work as head of the UK media relations department of the Unification Church at its headquarters in Lancaster Gate, London. Anna-Maria trained in reflexology after the onset of George's illness. They attend their local Unification church and pay a 10% tithe on George's monthly salary of #1200. Gilchrist has recently turned nine, and is being raised as a Unificationist.

''I'm amazed by George's attitude to his illness,'' says Tim Read, UK president of the Unification Church, spiritual and administrative head of an active following which numbers less than 800 members. ''He is brave, outward going, always socialising and has his own band of followers because of the way he sees things. As long as he can still use his mind we'll try to help him remain active and involved. We don't see this as a challenge. Anyway, we like him.''

It is the caring, loyal and supportive side of the Unification Church, with values reflected in George's marriage with Anna-Maria, that has consolidated the approval of his parents.

Mrs Robertson, a sprightly woman who has entered her eighties, says: ''He has what you would call a large family, a very large family. Anyone else would have walked out on him. His illness could have been an even bigger heartbreak than it already is. His attitude is amazing. It's his faith. We are not members, and there are aspects of the Unification Church we, as his parents, can't accept. But they have been marvellous to him. Without the Unification Church, we don't know what would have happened. They have kept with George, they have kept him going and they have given him a wife who has stuck by him.''

George's former university friend, Don Byron, remains estranged and unforgiving. He says: ''Despite his mystical spiritualism, I'm a little cynical about George. I think he was unable to tame his own ego and it finally ate him up and spewed him out into a completely pointless and spurious universe. He wanted power and he went into a smaller and smaller pool to find it. Maybe George would have always joined some crazy set-up, but I wish he had joined the Buddhists. At least they would have presented him with more of an intellectual challenge.''

His former teacher, David Campbell, has kept in touch over the years. He says: ''People ask why has he not written a great novel. Why has he wasted his life only talking to people? I think there are inner temples and inner testimonies that are not measurable by riches and fame. When I see George and Gilchrist and Anna, and see the fortitude and creativity that he has, I don't see that as a waste.

''I don't think George was ever sucked into anything. He went looking for things and found them. He always had an intense curiosity. I don't think he's one of those people who throw themselves witlessly upon the waves. You could call him a spiritual researcher, and he always was. The outside, the body, may be crumbling, but inside he

is laughing, joking, singing and making poetry of living.''