Mt. Airy's Krishna Temple

Mt. Airy's Krishna Temple explored in powerful new book

The Hare Krishna Temple at 41 W. Allens Lane in West Mt. Airy is one of the subjects examined in a new book, “From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia” (Arcadia Publishing), by former Germantown resident, journalist and author of many books, Thom Nickels.

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Posted Thursday, March 25, 2021 9:30 am

by Len Lear

Several years ago, a nephew of mine, Gabriel, was a student at the Hare Krishna Temple, 41 W. Allens Lane in West Mt. Airy. Previously home to the Cresheim Arms Hotel, the building was purchased in 1977 by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. (Radha Krishna is a Hindu deity, considered to be the most powerful of several that are worshipped at the temple, whose congregation numbers about 600 families, according to its website.)

Gabriel, whose head was shaved except for a tiny pony tail in the back, dressed in the colorful clothing characteristic of Krishna devotees, who used to be seen occasionally on the streets of Mt. Airy chanting the Hare Krishna mantra, whose purpose is to “find God-realization,” and banging cymbals. Since I was curious, we attended one of the temple's free Sunday vegetarian dinners, which would attract upwards of 200 people from all over the area. The food was delicious, and the devotees could not have been more welcoming.

For those who are curious about the temple, I highly recommend a just-published book, “From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia” (Arcadia Publishing), by Thom Nickles. Nickels is a 65-ish local author of 15 literary works, a columnist for newspapers and magazines, a former Germantown resident and recipient of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Architecture Journalism Award. (“I once applied for an editor's job at the Chestnut Hill Local,” he said last week, “but could not accept the position when it was offered because I didn't have a car at the time.”)

Nickels said in our interview, “Hare Krishna, generally, has scaled back their public appearances (probably because of COVID-19). One would see them chant and walk down Chestnut Street or in airports, for instance, and to me seeing them was always a benign, uplifting sight, at least superficially. Hare Krishna followers adhere to strict moral guidelines — celibacy before marriage, marriage is forever (no divorce), no birth control, homosexuality is a sin: in a way it mirrors traditional Catholicism. In the 1960s and '70s many men (and some women) passed through Hare Krishna almost as a rite of passage. A permanent 'stay' was rare.”

Nickels' extremely well researched book examines in fascinating detail local avatars of Hare Krishna, Scientology, “Pop-up Messiahs,” Theosophy, the Amish, Father and Mother Divine, “cults that have become mainstream,” people who claim to be psychic, etc. Some readers might quarrel with whether or not one or more of the above really qualifies as a “cult,” but that judgment is subjective.

For example, Nickels writes about the Rev. Melvin Floyd, a former Philadelphia policeman who in the 1970s established Neighborhood Crusades, Inc., with headquarters on West Queen Street in Germantown. Floyd won several awards for turning around inner-city gang members with his ultra-conservative Christian message, but “he was often referred to as a bigot and homophobe by gay activists.”

When I asked Nickels for his view of Floyd today, he said, “I've actually 'forgiven' him … he meant well … he did a lot of good! Then again I was much more of an activist then. All of my identity is no longer tied up in 'being gay.'"

What got Nickels so interested in the subject of religious cults in Philly? “Probably as a result of my lifelong interest in religion. There was a Mormon family on my block when I was in high school, and when I got to know them, I wanted to learn all about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. My research as a boy was another way of checking into the 'accuracy' of my family's Roman Catholicism. (I am now Russian Orthodox.) It has been a lifelong interest, almost a passion.

“Originally I wanted to do a book based solely on Mother and Father Divine and Father Divine's adopted son, Tommy Garcia, as well as the connection to Jim Jones, but my publisher suggested a wider range of interest. That's when we agreed on religious cults that have taken root or that were or are now prominent in Philadelphia.”

In 1976 Nickels moved from West Chester to Germantown. He recalls the pros and cons of living there. “It took forever to get into Center City. The regional rail line seemed so slow and ran infrequently. My first week there was not good. I was white in a majority Black neighborhood, but once people got to know me, I began to love the neighborhood ... The Nickels side of the family used to run a huge funeral home on Chelten Avenue, and my great-aunt used to take me into Germantown as a boy to give me 'on the spot' history lessons. She revered Chestnut Hill and always said that its 'quality and status came before the Main Line.'"

To get “From Mother Divine...,” visit arcadiapublishing.com. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com

 

Mother Divine and the Corner Swami: Book Review

 

From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami – Religious Cults in Philadelphia by Thom Nickels

• Review by Richard Lord Contributing writer
 
• Mar 17, 2021
 
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From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami is a bustling buffet of a book. Like your typical buffet, it offers a wide range of items. The average reader is sure to find any number of offerings to enjoy in the book, along with other items they’ll take a quick look at before turning away to sample some more appealing tidbits. 

        It should be noted right here that the book’s subtitle –Religious Cults in Philadelphia – is … oh, let’s be generous and say a trifle misleading. Many, maybe even most of the groups and individuals who grace these pages do not qualify as cults, or even as  “religious’. Some of the groups that do see themselves as religions would be mortified to find themselves described as ‘cults’. Would the Mormons like to see themselves characterized as “a cult that has become mainstream”. Would Christian Scientists appreciate being called “the respectable cult”? How about the millions of Roman Catholics in just this country who attend the Novus Ordo mass every week? To say nothing of the millions of men and women who regularly practice yoga solely for health reasons and not to slip past the gateway into devout Hinduism. Come to think of it, would Hindus like to be known as members of a cult? And can we consider people who think they might have seen UFOs as belonging to a cult? Or those who consult psychics, or who explore the possibilities of revisiting past lives?

          To be fair, Thom Nickels himself allows that not all of the sections in this volume actually deal with anything like a religious cult. Indeed, the clearly non-cult sections include some of the best things in this buffet. Nonetheless, there are a number of bona fide cultish figures and groups given the spotlight in these pages, and their tales can be quite interesting. For instance, I myself was surprised to learn that the notorious Reverend Jim Jones (he of the Jonestown massacre) actually travelled to the Divines’ Peace Mission Woodmont estate in suburban Gladwyne, intent on usurping control of the Peace Mission movement. Luckily for all those associated with Peace Mission, Jones’ takeover bid failed rather miserably.

            Whether or not the “cult” pedigree actually fits them, we do meet a cavalcade of Philly eccentrics in these pages, including  headliners such as Ira Einhorn; Michael Grant (a.k.a. Philly Jesus); the founders of MOVE; Swami Nostradamus Virato; and Amma Sri Karunamayi. Even Madame Blavatsky, the renowned co-founder of Theosophy, finds her way into these pages, as she was a Philly resident for a time, when Theosophy was just starting to peak in popularity. (Another surprise I’m grateful to Thom Nickels for providing here.)

           Nickels shifts his focus throughout the book. At times, he dons the robes of the objective reporter, rendering a straightforward account of events and personalities, citing sources more connected to the actual events or individuals involved. At other times, he steps into the role of active participant in the stories he’s sharing with us. These latter provide some of the more engaging sections of From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami.

           He tells us about some eye-opening experiences with respected Philadelphia-area psychics as well as the disturbing experience he had when, under hypnosis, he seemingly explored his past lives. Certainly, the discussion of Amma Sri Karunamayi’s Philly sojourn would be so much thinner and pale if it wasn’t part of the story where Nickels himself attended a mass gathering of Amma’s devotees at the First Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street. Further on, the account of his near seduction by Scientology serves as a neat cautionary tale, though, regrettably, he doesn’t share how he evaded the seduction.

           While he often takes an objective stance in his reporting here, Thom Nickels makes no secrets of things he dislikes. These include Modernist church architecture, modernist liturgy embellishments in Catholic services, and pit bulls. He also lets us know about the things he likes. These include psychics who exhibit humility and deep gratitude for the powers they believe provided their psychic gifts; traditional church architecture and liturgies; religious leaders who don’t devote their energies to enriching themselves; and the down-and-outs in our society who are doing their best to survive and even perhaps pull themselves out of the morass they find themselves trapped in.  

          One complaint I have with Nickels’ arrangement is that in seeking to cover a wide array of topics that take us outside of the straight and narrow path, he gives too short a coverage to some interesting matters. For instance, we learn here that the political guru/vicious murderer Ira Einhorn taught for a while at Temple and held night classes on the Penn campus. What courses was he teaching? How’d he even acquire these gigs?

          Also, in his chapter on MOVE, Nickels gives a very brief – truncated actually – account of the bombing of the MOVE residence on Osage Avenue in West Philly. As I was living in Europe at that time, I would like to know more about the circumstances involved in that attempt to drive the MOVE people out that went horribly awry. (The images of the bombing itself and the conflagration that followed were given full view on European news programs as well as here.)

         An account of the provocations, the planning and the miscalculations involved in this tragedy would have made good reading in the MOVE chapter. Perhaps Nickels could have sacrificed his protracted account of the opening of the new Mormon Temple in Philly and discussion of other Mormon Temples around the world and given more attention to the Osage Avenue incident as well as intriguing details left untold in other sections. 

          Some of my misgivings about From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami were things beyond Thom Nickels' control. For instance, the book lacks an index, which would be invaluable in a volume such as this.

          Moreover, the book could have used a more hawk-eyed editor. There are numerous typos throughout the book. For instance, we learn that Pope Francis delivered – or is scheduled to deliver – a homily in Philly in 2915, and on page 87, the author assures us that “It’s not that I put sock in faith healers.” It’s even better not to put stock in those faith healers, and a diligent copy editor would have seen to that.  

          The book closes out with author Nickels describing his encounters with the homeless in his section of Philly. It’s a good piece for a wrap, as it is one of the best sections in the book. Here, Nickels appears as a committed reporter andconcerned witness to the waste of lives that many of us choose to ignore as much as we can. No one would say that the flocks of the city’s homeless are members of any cult, religious or secular, but the sympathetic look into the lives of these forlorn folks is a compelling one that earns a sad nod of appreciation as the book closes out.

Deborah Sampson

 

  I headed down to the Museum of the American Revolution recently to catch a “live” press preview for a new exhibit, When Women Lost The Vote, A Revolutionary Story, 1776-1807 (through April 25, 2021). This was the second “live” press event in the city since covid shuttered the city’s arts and cultural scene back in March.

     The first museum to host a non-virtual event for the press was The Barnes Foundation, when it presented a memorable breakfast and viewing of (the extraordinary) Elijah Pierce’s America (till January, 2021), less than ten days before.

   At both events there was a high turnout although an official at the Barnes informed me that a portion of press did not RSVP because of continued covid fears. Congratulations to both museums for taking a much needed bold leap forward. I think I speak on behalf of many Philadelphians who say that they have had enough of virtual reality.

     At the Museum of the American Revolution I was struck by an exhibit honoring Revolutionary War hero, Deborah Sampson. I had never heard of Sampson before but reading the highlights of her story caused me to want to learn more about her.

  In short order, Sampson dressed as a man in order to enlist in Washington’s Continental Army. After one failed attempt to do so, she finally succeeded and served as a male soldier for 17 months before she was found out.

   Sampson was one of 7 children born (December 17, 1760) in Plympton, Massachusetts to Jonathan and Deborah Sampson, both descendents of noteworthy Pilgrims. Deborah’s mother was the granddaughter of MA Governor William Bradford. When she was five years old, Deborah’s father left the family to marry another woman and start a new family, so her mother, financially overwhelmed, farmed out her children to different households. At age 10, Deborah began work as an indentured servant for Deacon Benjamin Thomas, a farmer in Middleborough, where she would work until she turned 18.

     Single women in that era had some autonomy but marriage placed women under the authority of their husband.

    The few sketches of Deborah that exist show a woman with a long and narrow androgynous face. Looking at the sketch of Deborah in the museum I was reminded of the face of novelist George Sand: not especially pretty in the traditional feminine sense, but handsome enough to appear, with the right costuming, as a somewhat attractive slender dark haired young man.

    Deborah developed significant skills as a weaver. Many weavers in the colonial era worked in taverns, and many taverns had looms that were rented by weavers for a period of time. Looms generally were expensive and too large to cart around. Wealthy women might take to weaving but for a poor woman like Deborah, the only recourse was to work in a tavern. For a time Deborah worked a loom in a tavern while living upstairs with another woman.

     General George Washington’s call for troops was Deborah’s chance to escape a life of tavern weaving and to earn some real money. Because many young men in Massachusetts were not heeding Washington’s call—they had already done their time in their local militia—few were signing up despite the offer of 20 pounds of silver if they signed a contract promising to serve 3 years.

   Deborah sprung into action, pulling her hair behind a man’s cap and making sure that her breasts were adequately hidden beneath a bulky top coat. She adopted the first name of Timothy, signed the service contract on the dotted line, received her silver and went home to wait the call to action. This was thwarted when an especially acute snitch happened to notice the scar on Deborah’s left forefinger (caused by a loom accident) as the latter signed the document. Deborah could not properly bend the injured finger in question so this was additional proof for the snitch. The authorities were alerted and Deborah was forced to return the silver.  

   Women who impersonated the opposite gender were either arrested, flogged, fined or paraded through the town as harlots. Deborah quickly left town although the local Baptist church where she had been a member branded her a loose woman, the perception being that she wanted to be a soldier so she could work the Revolutionary War circuit as a prostitute.  

   Her church excommunicated her but by this time Deborah was long gone, traveling all over MA in search of other sign-up opportunities. She found a lucrative deal—60 pounds of silver for a 3 year contract—at 22 years old and was quickly mixed in with a band of almost 40 recruits, the Fourth MA Regiment. Together the Regiment walked all the way to West Point, about 150 miles, and when they arrived they were trained in strenuous exercise and war maneuvers.

     Deborah chose the enlisted name of Robert Shurtleff. As Shurtleff, she was selected as a member of the Light Infantry, an elite corps of warriors comparable to today’s Navy Seals.  At 5’7” she was taller than the average man at the time (5’5”).  She also had good teeth, another Light Infantry requirement because soldiers had to hold a musket while ripping apart gun powder packets with their mouths. 

   In 1782, she led 30 men in battle. She was shelled at Yorktown (where she dug trenches), injured twice in combat, once with a sword wound to the head. When a bullet from a musket went into her thigh she removed it herself, fearful that if a doctor did it he would discover her biological gender. She avoided detection by avoiding heavy drinking and carousing with her soldier mates and by always volunteering for single person missions involving riding a horse as a scout looking for British advances.

   Alex Myers, author of the novel ‘Revolutionary,’ about the life of Deborah Sampson, grew up hearing his grandmother tell him stories about their famous family ancestor. Alex Myers was born a girl but, perhaps finding strength and inspiration in his famous family member’s story, he became a transgender male. At a talk at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Alex avoids hagiography when talking about his ancestor but admits, “Deborah lied a lot.”

   He explains that Sampson lived for 3 months in a tiny cabin in New Windsor, Massachusetts with 16 men in the dead of winter. Myers is convinced that this experience solidified Sampson’s belief that she really was a man, biology aside.

   While on a mission to subdue a mutiny outside Philadelphia, Sampson came down with a high fever during an epidemic and the physician treating her opened her jacket and discovered the truth. He did not turn her over to the authorities but offered to write a letter on her behalf that she could keep on her person until her apprehension. Soon after this Sampson was found out and given an honorable discharge. 

  Walk Boston History describes Sampson’s discharge:  “George Washington did not like any women in the camp do to the impact they had on discipline and the necessary extra support, food and baggage.  He instructed his generals to remove all women from service to improve discipline. He handed Deborah her honorable discharge in writing but did not utter a word of thanks. “

   After the war, Deborah married Benjamin Gannett in 1795 and they had 3 children. The family lived on a small farm in Sharon, Massachusetts . She applied for a military pension but Congress denied it but when Paul Revere became a champion of her cause, she was finally able to obtain a pension.

   The amount of Sampson’s pension was $4.00 a month ($104.00 today). She spent her remaining years lecturing about her time in Washington’s Continental Army, sometime appearing in uniform and acting out various scenes behind the podium.

  In 2019, Congress passed The Deborah Sampson Act “to improve the benefits and services provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs to women veterans, and for other purposes.” 

 

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

The Strange Disappearance of WRTI's Gregg Whiteside

        He was the consummate radio announcer with a voice as soothing as Philadelphia’s legendary news anchorman, John Facenda. His fan base covered the world and included Woody Allen, Gloria Vanderbilt and Joanne Woodward. For years he was the voice of London’s Royal Opera, the KIROV Ballet, the New York Philharmonic and Opera from St. Petersburg, Russia. His classical music broadcasts covered 25 years at WQXR-FM, the radio station of The New York Times. His 5:30 to 10 AM show, ‘Bright and Early With Gregg Whiteside,’ garnered a larger audience than either Howard Stern or Don Imus.

    Gregg Whiteside was a living legend but his New York days ended when

 The New York Times fell from grace. The New York Post described it this way in an August 2003 front page headline:

     Times Radio Fires Station’s Voice Over Off-Are Remark.

     WQXR-FM told The Post that Whiteside was fired for “inappropriate comments which he admitted making.”   

    Fighting off scores of press and listener inquiries for more information, WQXR stayed mum, leaving everyone to guess what Whiteside may or may not have said. The secrecy surrounding the termination suggested that Whitside’s “offense” was largely subjective, its “terribleness” open to interpretation. Had the announcer murdered two people in Times Square the offense would have been billboard news. “They’ve destroyed an innocent man. I gave my life to that place. This wasn’t a job for me – it was a way of life,” Whiteside told The Post.

     The Times’ firing of Whiteside may have been one of the Cancel Culture’s earliest attacks on an individual. It triggered a storm of protest with listeners condemning The Times for making political correctness more important than talent and loyalty. Whiteside’s firing inspired petition drives and street protests outside the newspaper’s headquarters on West 43^rd Street; some outraged listeners even took to scrawling protest graffiti on the sidewalk in front of the building. Throughout the protests, The Times maintained its silence.

   Whiteside told The Post:

    “I believed I was having a private and confidential conversation with Sam Hall, who’s even more like my brother than my own brother . . . and that conversation might have leaked out into the newsroom…. I was speaking privately to a dear friend and it was not something that was on the air. I am in a state of utter depression and I’m devastated by this….To be fired with no severance? Are you kidding me?” 

   In 2012, Gregg Whiteside found his way to Temple University’s mostly jazz radio station, WRTI, where he hosted the classical music slot from 6 to 10 AM. At WRTI he became “the Alex Trebek of radio,” as one listener noted, where his smooth voice guided and consoled listeners through personal and national tragedies like 9/11 as well as the early days of the COVID pandemic. Whiteside was as solid an institution as WHYY’s Terry Gross or Marty Moss-Coane, especially because his classical music time slot was all Philadelphia had to offer after the collapse of WFLN when it came to The Great Composers. It was a small miracle in itself that WRTI was even able to find a niche for the one brand of music that transcends time and space, unlike Johnny-come-lately jazz which people to this day still do not call “music” and which in 1917 was often spelled ‘jass’ or ‘jas,’ words, according to many music historians, with roots its in the word ‘semen.’    

         There’s no question that Whiteside’s Philadelphia WRTI classical music audience was bigger than its homegrown jazz audience. Once news of Whiteside’s “retirement” broke, the WRTI Facebook page exploded with perplexed and outraged listener comments: Why had Whiteside left so suddenly? Why no on air verbal good-byes?  After all, wouldn’t somebody of Whiteside’s caliber want to talk on-air about his retirement rather than issue a written statement after the fact? Most of the Whiteside fans who commented on WRTI Facebook book were not buying the station’s official explanation that Whiteside felt that he had to retire—immediately. That was tantamount to believing that Whiteside had received a revelation from heaven that he needed to get off the air before the next sunrise. 

 

  WRTI general manager William Johnson did the polite thing when he wrote that Whiteside’s “service and leadership in making our mornings and Sunday afternoons some of the best in radio [and] have earned him this retirement and our thanks.”  One cannot help but think, however, that verbiage like this comes close to sounding like something you get when you mix Orwell’s 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: the marriage of doublethink and doubletalk in order to hide another reality. After issuing the station’s formal announcement, Johnson then went mum, just like The New York Times did in 2003.    

   A further exploration of WRTI’s Facebook page regarding Whiteside reveals some interesting posts stating that just before the announcer’s “retirement,” an employee complaint (regarding Whiteside) was being investigated. Could this be another case of Whiteside saying something off mic while talking to a friend?   

   “More puzzling, though, than the precipitous departure of a pillar of the radio community without warning or explanation is the way the station handled it,” writes Meg Ryan of The Broad Street Review, “There was no party, no end-of-year planning. No press release about Whiteside’s departure, by either the station or Temple University, WRTI’s parent organization…”

    Ryan reported that the news that WRTI had cut ties with Whiteside came to the station’s staff in the form of an internal email from Johnson on Monday, January 18. That memo read: “Effective immediately, Gregg Whiteside no longer works for WRTI or Temple University.” Ryan then added that Johnson’s email came after an employee complaint was being investigated.  

   There’s nothing joyous sounding in the statement, “Effective immediately…”  Rather, it sounds like what a swinging smarui sword might say if it could be made to talk.

   What to make of all this?

     One Philadelphia Whiteside fan wrote me of her shock at learning about his departure:

 

   

   “A few days back, I had started getting a bad feeling about GW's whereabouts since he had already taken his holiday vacation around Christmas time, and eventually returned for the New Year, and while I had started oversleeping as soon as the cold weather came around, I didn't hear him at the end of his shift. Erudite about classical music yet able to make it accessible in his authoritative baritone voice, Whiteside was a master at pronouncing those andantes and arpeggios, yet also informed about pro sports scores which he might share with his listeners in between a rousing morning Sousa march,”

     Whiteside, she said, was down-to-earth yet cultured in a way that made you proud to be a Philadelphian.

   It occurred to me if Whiteside’s termination or “retirement” had anything to do with the status of western classical music in today’s PC Cancel Culture climate which has already begun to attack western classical music.  Given that WRTI is mostly African American, was the mostly Caucasian music format of Whiteside’s show ever an issue for some?   

  

 

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

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Jim Forest, Peace Activist

 

       Jim Forest, a longtime Catholic peace activist, is the author of many books, including Praying with Icons and biographies of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Dan Berrigan. 

    At age 27, he got himself arrested as part of the Milwaukee Fourteen, when in September of 1968 a group of peace activists raided a consortium of nine draft boards all located in one downtown office building. Among the activists were five Catholic priests, one of them a Benedictine monk. Included in the mix was also a minister from the Church of Scientology.  

 

   “My knees shook every inch of the way,” Forest confesses in his recently released Orbis Books memoir, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines. “The nine doors were opened, the many burlap sacks we had brought with us were filled to bursting with 1-A files---10,000 of them, it was estimated during the trial---and dragged out to the park across the street. Napalm, made ourselves according to a recipe found in the Us Army Special Forces Handbook, was poured on the files and a match struck.” Once the fire was raging, the group prayed the “Our Father” and sang “We Shall Overcome.”  

   In his memoir, Forest admits having second thoughts about his involvement in the Milwaukee Fourteen. A single father of a young son at the time, Forest writes, “…It troubles me that I put work for social change ahead of my responsibilities for him [Ben], much as my father had done to me during my own childhood.”

 

   Forest finds it ironic that the judge who arraigned the group after their arrest was named Christ Seraphim. Six months later, the jury—eight of whom were Catholic-- found the group guilty. Forest writes that he “then spent the better part of a year under lock and key,” where he led a mostly monastic life despite his wide band of supporters which included New Yorker staff writer Francine du Plessix Gary, who sent him books and an Olivetti portable typewriter.   

   The names of Forest’s associates and the people he interacted with during his long career as an editor and peace activist would fill a substantially thick Who’s Who volume.     

  The book includes fascinating stories about Dan and Phil Berrigan, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Henri Nouwen, Ed Sanders, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A.J. Muste, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gary Synder, Pete Seeger, and many others.   

    Jim Forest was born in a Latter Day Saint hospital in Salt Lake City in 1941 to American Communist parents. ”Mother was, I gradually realized, a Methodist atheist and Dad was a Catholic atheist,” Forest writes, adding, “As a child I once asked Mother, ‘Is there a God?’ She paused and then replied, ‘I don’t think so.’ What struck me more than her words was the sorrow in her voice.”

 

     The family moved to Chicago and after that Denver where they would picnic in the Rocky Mountains. A younger brother, Dick, “grew from a bothersome infant into a cheerful companion,” although life was really terrible at home. In June 1944, Forest’s Dad, up to his neck in an extramarital affair, filed for a divorce. Forest recalls the excoriating scene of his father leaving the house, suitcase in hand: “I can still feel the tears on my face and hear myself pleading: Dad, please take me with you.”

   Dad’s exodus was the catalyst for Mrs. Forest’s rebirth, as she went on to receive her master’s degree in social work from the University of Denver, afterwards taking her small family to New York where they rented an apartment Red Bank, New Jersey.

    A little boy with a wide Cheshire cat grin, Forest was already doing little acts of civil disobedience. In the school cafeteria one day he decided that the green peas on his plate “tasted rotten” so he refused to eat them despite threats from the kitchen manager. “I sat alone at the table in silence the rest of the day, ignoring a series of demands from several people, including the school principal,” Forest writes. In the end, the adult pea-advocates gave up; they were no match for Forest’s obstinacy.

 

   Driven by a wanderlust from an early age, Forest convinced his Mother he was mature enough to travel alone at 12 from New Jersey to visit Dad in Saint Louis. One year later, at 13, he took a transcontinental Greyhound bus trip to Los Angeles where his father was then living. The 3,500-mile bus trip included traveling through a tornado in the Texas panhandle and a near death experience in Arizona’s Grand Canyon when he opted to hike into the canyon while waiting for a connecting bus.

    

   In Los Angeles, he lived with his father and attended a local high school. A LIFE Magazine article on The Beat generation caused him to travel to Santa Monica to visit the Beat Café featured in the piece. But instead of finding Allen Ginsberg reading his poem Howl and interesting people in black turtlenecks, he found the same mundane conversations he’d heard in roadside diners.  “No poetry was being read, nor was anyone discussing existentialism,” he writes. 

 

    At age seventeen, in 1959, after returning to Red Bank, he dropped out of school and joined the Navy.

  It was in the Navy that his religious sensibility began to take shape. The catalyst was Audrey Hepburn in “The Nun’s Story,” a movie Forest saw one Saturday night at the base. While expressing embarrassment at having a mystical experience while watching a movie, he concludes: “The old question ‘Is there a God?’ evaporated. I would never again begin a prayer, ‘Oh God, if there is a God...’”       

        The next day he attended Mass at the base chapel. He was now thinking of becoming a monk so on the advice of a friend he took a Greyhound bus to Holy Cross monastery, an Episcopal congregation of monks near West Point on the Hudson. On the way to the retreat he bought a copy of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain in a roadside drugstore. 

 

     On his second visit to Holy Cross in 1960, one of the monks asked to see him in the community room. “Once the door was shut,” Forest recalls, “he embraced and kissed me with sexual passion, his stubbly unshaven face pressed against mine. I struggled free of his grasp, exited the room, and soon afterward left the monastery in a state of great confusion.”     

    But Forest was more troubled by the wide disparity of belief among Episcopalians—some high, some low—and soon opted to receive instructions in the Catholic faith. A priest assigned him the German catechism, Life in Christ at about the same time that he became aware of The Catholic Worker newspaper. Forest liked the emphasis the Catholic Worker movement placed on the poor, The Beatitudes and on the Corporeal Works of Mercy. He liked it so much that he was then inspired to hitchhike to Manhattan to the Catholic Worker headquarters in the Lower East Side. 

   Dorothy Day assisted him in obtaining conscientious objector status when she introduced him to a Catholic priest who had been a CO himself. With the support of his Navy commander, John Marabito, Forest attainted the reclassification, enabling him to leave the Navy with dignity and work full time for the Catholic Worker cause, and later for the Catholic Peace Fellowship.

    One evening Dorothy Day insisted that he accompany her to an ecumenical meeting of Christians who were interested in Orthodox Christianity. Among those present was the poet W.H. Auden and  Orthodox theologian Alexandar Schmemann. “Day had a longing for the healing of the centuries-old schism dividing Eastern and Western Christianity,” Forest writes. Later, he would accompany Day when she frequently attended Orthodox Vespers at the Russian Orthodox cathedral on East 97^th Street in Manhattan. 

 

    For several years, Forest lived in a special albeit ramshackle apartment owned by the Catholic Worker, sharing living space with one or two roommates, accompanying Day on her trips downtown while periodically having arguments with her. After Dorothy assigned him the task of answering letters from Thomas Merton, Forest soon began writing his own letters to Merton. 

     “From that point on, Merton and I began a frequent correspondence that lasted until his death in 1968, averaging a letter per month from Merton,” Forest writes.

   When Merton suggested that Forest come visit him at the monastery, he and a CW friend hitchhiked to Kentucky.

     “As we stood on the roadside with our frozen thumbs in the air, armies of dashboard statues of Jesus of the Sacred Heart, his plastic arms spread wide, blurred by us,” Forest says.

     After arriving at the monastery and being given their respective room, Forest heard laughter coming from his traveling companion’s room. The laughter, it turns out, was coming from “a black and white robed monk lying on the floor, knees in the air, face bright red, hands clutching his belly.” Forest adds that the monk on the floor was “more like Robin Hood’s well-fed Friar Tuck than the fast-chastened Trappist monk I had imagined….” 

 

     A romantic involvement with a fellow CW worker named Jean resulted in a surprise pregnancy. Forest, naively assuming he could shack up with Jean in the CW apartment, was told by Day to get married or find living accommodations elsewhere. Forest complied but the marriage was not a happy one. 

     His romantic relationship with Jean ended, as did his relationship with another woman. Thomas Merton, on the receiving end of Forest’s troubled letters, advised him not to burn out and to be careful:

   “The trouble with movements is that they sweep you off your feet and carry you away with the tide of activism and then you become another kind of mass man…” 

   The early days of the Catholic Worker movement in New York attracted a number of famous faces like Allen Ginsberg (who read sections of his poem Kaddish before the staff.) Forest also had “peace work dealings” with social critic and author Paul Goodman and writes how Goodman once chased him around a sofa, so taken was the author of “Growing Up Absurd” to taste the young man’s charms.  

    With his current and long standing (permanent) wife, Nancy, Forest makes his home in the Netherlands. 

 

   In the late 1980s Forest and Nancy entered the Orthodox Church but Forest doesn’t regard the switch as a ”conversion” but simply “a change of address in the same neighborhood I had been living in since  I was eighteen..” In explaining his switch to Orthodoxy to the Dutch Catholic priest and author, Henri Nouwen, Forest wrote:

     “The impressive thing is that Orthodoxy makes no attempt at producing an updated ‘relevant’ liturgy. Far from keeping with the times, the Orthodox liturgy has hardly changed from ancient times. The Orthodox seem to realize that liturgy itself is the touchstone of relevance.”    

   Forest added:

    “You expressed the hope that we would be bridge builders. I share that hope. I have brought with me everything that was dear to me in Catholicism.”

  

 

   Thom Nickels

    Contributing Editor