Ed Pilkington: Seek and Ye Shall Find
By Yozette Collins
From the Archives: Summer 2018
Though baptized and saved as a 14-year-old in his Baptist church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Ed Pilkington of Boone spent years searching for something he felt was missing, a spiritual connection he hadn’t felt yet and, frankly, wasn’t sure where to find it.
“I believed I was a Christian,” Ed explains. “I was saved, but I proceeded to live a life of liberty, doing things young Christian men weren’t supposed to do. But nobody knew about that. I hid it very well,” he grins. “I’m a good actor.”
He was a good actor, so much so that the high school drama teacher saw potential despite Ed’s tough-guy behavior that would have likely landed him in jail someday. He recalled, “Clifton Britton grabbed me by my long hair and slammed my head up against the wall and said, ‘You think you’re so tough? If you’re so tough, come and read for this play tonight. If you can read, that is.’ He really pushed the boundaries which, back then, teachers could do and students couldn’t fight back.”
So that night, Ed went to prove to Mr. Britton that he could read by auditioning for the Christmas play. “I got up to read for the part of a shepherd boy who is lost. I read one line and I knew that’s where I’d be the rest of my life. When I finished reading the part, all 250 drama students stood up clapping, Cliff grabbed me and hugged me, I’m crying, he’s crying, people were crying and clapping. My life changed from that time on.”
At the same time Ed was falling in love with the theater, he was singing in his church choir. But when his church music leader asked him to drop out of drama because theater wasn’t “very Christian”, Ed decided to leave the church choir and focus on acting, a choice that after high school would take him to New York with his wife-to-be, Pat, and allow him to study and work with the likes of Helen Hayes, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Jose Quintero.
Meanwhile, Ed continued to search for the missing spiritual piece he couldn’t put his finger on. “I knew I was saved, but there was something missing. I guess I kept looking for it. I saw in the New York Times an ad for a book, How to be a Warlock,” Ed recalls. “So I ordered it and began doing things it said to do.”
His experiences with the occult, however, scared him, so he conveniently became a Unitarian since the Unitarian Church was the only church in the 1950s that would marry he and Pat, who was expecting at the time.
Eventually, however, Ed also tried Zen Buddhism. “I don’t know how I got into that but I was still searching, you know? And I was reading a lot of books, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Ed explains.
By the time Pat and Ed finally moved to Boone for Ed to work in the Theater Department at Appalachian State University, choosing a church became more a way to fit in than a way to fill the hole he felt. “I became a Methodist when I took the job at ASU because my chairman was a Methodist. It was political,” Ed admits.
The search was becoming exhausting. “At that point, I was Director of Theater at Appalachian, president of the North Carolina Theater Conference which I helped form, and I had started the three-county arts council here that later blossomed into the Watauga, Avery, and Ashe Arts Councils. I have all these roles and I was excited, yet I was really miserable,” Ed shares. “I didn’t know quite how to love Pat, I didn’t know how to love my kids, I was directing Horn in the West and had been for 10 to 15 years, and I was really struggling. But no one knew it because I’m a good actor.”
And though no one knew it, Ed had reached a breaking point. “On April 16, 1976 at 4:15 in the evening, I was on my way home to get my pistol and take my life because I didn’t really know what else to do. I was miserable and empty, but nobody knew that, not even Pat.”
He was 36 years old.
“On the way home, I stopped at Horn in the West just to talk to God. I told Him it’s either You or the gun. And I had a vision, I think. Admittedly, I’m very dramatic,” he laughs, “so I think I had the vision. I saw myself as a little red balloon that got bigger and bigger and bigger. And you know when red balloons get bigger they get whiter. It got so big and I was terrified this balloon was going to pop. And I saw this little gold pin come out of somewhere and hit the balloon. But, instead of exploding, the balloon imploded and out of the hole came this green, brassy, yucky looking stuff that I could smell. It was repulsive, just vile, and the balloon got smaller and smaller until it was gone. When I woke up from this thing, this vision, I was in a little ball at Horn in the West, crying, but also laughing. Then I drove home and told Pat what had happened and that night we went to Bible study and they praised God and prayed for me.”
Ed had grown up with resentment towards his father because his dad hadn’t spent time with him. “He loved me; I knew that. But he was a pharmacist at the time when they started at 7 p.m. and ended the next morning at 7. He left before I went to school, I saw him maybe a little while at dinner, then he was back on call all night long. We’d go to the beach one time a year– one week a year, that’s all I had with my father. So there was a sense of bitterness, but at the age of 36 I found I have a Heavenly Father who never slumbers, never sleeps, and who sticks closer than a brother.”
At that point, a lot of things happened quickly. Still attending the Methodist Church, Ed learned about the Holy Spirit during a Bible study and it triggered changes in his life and heart. When the pastor later preached on the passage in Luke that says, ‘Go back to your home and tell all that God has done for you’, Ed listened and heard. “Immediately after that sermon, I went home and apologized to my mom for being so selfish all my life,” he says with tear-filled eyes. “The next day I washed the dishes, I mowed the lawn. And I made it a point to come back to help her. So, those kinds of things began to happen.”
Ed began to love his wife and kids in a way he hadn’t known and in a way that has brought them all to where they are now. “Together, Pat and I have watched Jesus heal her through three cancers now: melanoma, ovarian, and breast. The first one, melanoma, doctors told her to go home and prepare to die. I have two daughters—Jennifer and Piper—who have married pastors, and a son, Brent, who is in real estate and is very passionate.”
And Ed saw the Holy Spirit working in his professional realm as well. “I realized while teaching my Intro to Theater class that all plays are written as a search for God. Almost every attempt–poetry, any kind of art–is an effort to reach God, to understand and to find Him. Theater, art, music, all of it, is God’s soul. He is the Great Creator,” Ed says excitedly. With that realization, he was able to share with his students how God had impacted his life. “I was not proselytizing but students—20, 30, 50, 100—came to Christ in my office. I discipled a whole bunch of them.”
Ed, who retired from teaching at ASU in 2001, now works full time in the professional theater on stage and in movies and has the same passion for acting as that which he discovered in high school. “My life is a mission field no matter where I am,” Ed beams, grateful.
He sought and he found, all to God’s glory and purpose.
