By Thom Nickels• Wed, Jun 12, 2019

I headed on out to Villanova University this past Sunday to hear writer and author Jim Forest talk about his new book, At Play in the Lions’ Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan.

When I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, the brothers Berrigan, Dan and Phil, both Jesuit priests, were heroes of mine. Never mind that in those days every Catholic I knew, including family members, were all “just war” types. Hardly any Catholic in my personal world then questioned authority. The concept of reading the gospels in an antiwar context was really foreign to the average Catholic parishioner. Good Catholic Irish boys did as they were told. If your country wanted you to serve in Vietnam, you went, you didn’t ask questions. When your draft notice arrived in the mail, you didn’t question the process but did as you were told, signed on the dotted line, and then willingly let yourself be shipped out to a war zone.

At age 19, I became a conscientious objector but not as a Catholic pacifist because at the time I was agnostic although in time I walked away from agnosticism and reentered the world of belief.

Jim Forest, born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1941, is the author of numerous books. At age 12 he became an Episcopalian. When he was in the US Navy he became a Roman Catholic and began working for the Catholic Worker Movement. He applied (and got) conscientious objector status while in the US Navy. He was arrested for burning draft cards at a Vietnam War protest. His Catholic Worker connections enabled him to get to meet and know Dan Berrigan, Dorothy Day and the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.

The Catholic Worker Movement in New York was the central nerve of the Catholic peace and justice movement. As managing editor of the newspaper, The Catholic Worker, Forest had amazing access to all kinds of people.

In his book about Dan Berrigan, there are his photographs of Thomas Merton in his hermitage at Gethsemane, Kentucky.

In the 1980s, Forest spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union and became acquainted with the Orthodox Church. He became an Orthodox Christian in 1988, something that he says slightly confused Dan Berrigan but which Berrigan supported nevertheless. Berrigan’s Catholicism had Irish (family) cultural roots and could not be reconfigured. In my brief talk with Forest after the lecture, we both exchanged stories of our discontent with post Vatican II Catholicism and our switch to Orthodoxy) especially in liturgical matters. Forest continues his peace and justice work as secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.

At Villanova, Forest appeared with noted novelist and author, James Carroll, author of the award-winning book, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us. Carroll, a Bostonian, was once a Paulist priest in Boston and part of the Boston Paulist Center, a place where I sometimes attended Catholic Mass when revisiting my old adopted city when staying with a friend there. My friend, a Catholic radical and a truly prophetic spiritual voice, saw the cutting-edge Paulist liturgy with its slide shows, rock music and heavily non-traditional features as a thoroughly fitting worship venue in the modern era. During our friendly debates, he would often call me a liturgical reactionary, a label that at first struck me as having ‘intellectually challenged’ roots but which I later came to embrace.

Forest began his talk with a warning to the audience that they might hear a tug or two of Parkinson ’s disease. In 2007, Forest had a kidney transplant donated by his wife. He lives in Amsterdam and is the father of six children. In a funny way, as I watched him speak and later sign books, in the great hall of Villanova’s nursing school, I could see that his face and general demeanor still retained much of its decades earlier twenty-something vigor.

James Carroll is currently in the throes of controversy thanks to a piece he wrote for The Atlantic in which he calls for the abolition of the Catholic priesthood. The former Paulist priest now lives with his writer wife in Boston.

“For the first time in my life,” he writes, “and without making a conscious decision, I simply stopped going to Mass. I embarked on an unwilled version of the Catholic tradition of ‘fast and abstinence’—in this case, fasting from the Eucharist and abstaining from the overt practice of my faith. I am not deluding myself that this response of mine has significance for anyone else—Who cares? It’s about time! —but for me the moment is a life marker. I have not been to Mass in months. I carry an ocean of grief in my heart.”

“Every sentence of James Carroll’s recent article in The Atlantic, “Abolish the Priesthood,” is theologically inept, historically anachronistic, self-referential, or all three. None of it is a surprise,” The National Catholic Reporter stated in response.

Carroll, an elegant speaker, has a captivating patrician air, especially when he looks at the audience over the rim of his reading glasses. His Catholic critics are many, however. Carroll is Swiss theologian Hans Kung on steroids.

Forest recounted many things about the life of Dan Berrigan, especially how Berrigan wanted to shape his life around The Beatitudes, advising Catholics “to get out of the tomb and make some gestures…a little act of civil disobedience.” Berrigan, Forest, said, “had powerful convictions but he was not self righteous.”

Forest recounted how Berrigan once handed him a check for $10,000 when the house that Forest was living in was in dire need of insulation.

He talked about Berrigan’s view of the ‘micro-gods’ that people have in society: obsessions related to gyms, work, sports or politics. According to Berrigan, “If you’re going to have a god, it might as well be God.”

He recounted how at one lecture somebody asked Berrigan how he deals with priestly celibacy. “I am so sorry I forgot to bring my celibacy slide show with me,” Bergiian responded.

Forest did not say much about Dorothy Day, although in one of his columns about her, he remembered her ‘Mass encounter’ with a radical priest.

“Pleased as she was when home Masses were allowed and the liturgy translated into English, she didn’t take kindly to smudging the border between the sacred and mundane. When a radical priest used a coffee cup for a chalice at a Mass celebrated in the soup kitchen on First Street, she afterward took the cup, kissed it, and buried it in the backyard. It was no longer suited for coffee-it had held the Blood of Christ. I learned more about the Eucharist that day than I had from any book or sermon. “

Note the emphasis on ‘a radical priest.’ Many of the radical priests in the 1970s and 80s went on to leave the priesthood. Certainly, at Philadelphia’s Saint Peter Claver Catholic Worker House (now defunct) where I used to often visit, there were many radical Masses, some celebrated by lay people, some celebrated by women, some celebrated by real priests although the liturgy was often a patchwork of put together contemporary songs, verses, though occasionally a traditional text was thrown in for tradition’s sake.

The Villanova event was organized by Sabina Clarke, Katharine Gilbert and Orbis Books of New York. Unfortunately, time constraints prevented a follow up Q and A although the event itself was quite spectacular and deserved a full auditorium. As a friend of mine noted, “If this event had taken place in New York City, every seat in the auditorium would have been filled but this is Philadelphia, where, after all, people just don’t seem to care.

Review: Philadelphia Mansions by Richard Lord

“Philadelphia Mansions”: Probing the Edifice Complex
By Richard Lord
Contributing writer, The Philadelphia Free Press

Did you know that the infamous Reverend Jim Jones, instigator of the Jonestown Massacre, was once a resident of this area? That he came with 200 members of his West Coast-based People’s Temple and tried to assume control of the mission run by Father and Mother Divine? 


Did you know that the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes once visited a home in Lansdowne, ostensibly to negotiate sale of a track of land to the Philadelphia Archdiocese for the construction of Nazareth Hospital, but wound up giving the land to the Archdiocese free of charge? Or that Mount Pleasant mansion was purchased by Benedict Arnold as a wedding present for his wife? Or that men in the late 19^th century wore disposable paper collars on their dress shirts, and one fortune spawned by those items financed one of the region’s most impressive mansions and surrounding estates?

I myself was unware of any of these fascinating facts until I delved into “Philadelphia Mansions” by Thom Nickels. It’s a book packed tight with such facts, some offered simply as delectable nuggets, others (like the Jim Jones and Howard Hughes stories) presented in rich detail.

As author Nickels says of this work, “It’s a book of stories.” But it’s also a book of storeys. Nickels takes us on an informed tour of many iconic Philly buildings as well as little-known treasures. He relates the problems faced by architects and builders who fought to challenge the ban on erecting any building whose height exceeded the peak of William Penn’s hat on City Hall. He also looks at the practical problems of making sure new buildings are structurally sound and/or not offensive to the prevailing aesthetic of its surroundings. More, he shows how buildings can change radically with the times, reflecting changes in tastes, in social mores, or in the shifting fortunes of the families that had them erected.

Nickels knows his stuff. An earlier Nickels book bore the title “Philadelphia Architecture”. I asked Thom Nickels where this interest in – and knowledge of – architecture came from. He explained that both flowed from a combination of “osmosis and ancestry”, as his grandfather and father were both architects. (The man who swayed Howard Hughes into gifting the Nazareth Hospital property to the Archdiocese was, in fact, Thom Nickels’ grandfather.)

As a result, he grew up surrounded by drafting boards and blueprints. His father, who always yearned to be a great architect, taught young Tom how to read blueprints. More significantly, his father took him along on many surveying trips. These trips had “a mystical/magical quality” to them and sowed the seeds of a lifelong fascination with buildings and their origins.

It was only Mathematics that kept Thom himself from becoming a third-generation architect. He was bad at Math, and weakness in that key subject thwarted any hopes of becoming an architect. Instead, he gravitated towards journalism.

But it’s not only osmosis and ancestry that gives such authority to his writing about architecture; Nickels also has done much reading in the subject. And as he moved into the field of journalism, he found that he was well-equipped to write about architecture, something he did for the Metro newspaper in its more serious era and the resurrected Philadelphia Bulletin of the 1990s and early 21^st century.

The idea for the Mansions book had actually been percolating in his head for some time. So when he got the green light from a publisher, Nickels dived in whole-heartedly to realize the project.

Much of the research for this book already existed from those years as a journalist reporting on architecture. By the time Nickels sat down to write his book, he had assembled quite an archive from his earlier stints as a journalist. (Though he admits that sometimes he needed to correct mistakes he found in those personal archives.)

In addition to his personal archives, Nickels found he needed to carry out one-and-a-half years of new research. This involved both combing through municipal and corporate archives and face-to-face interviews as well as phone interviews. Though the interviews generally proceeded smoothly, there were a few occasions when people refused to share stories or facts with him as his research started scratching on closets where some family skeletons were stored.

When he ponders architecture and the aesthetics of buildings, Thom Nickels clearly has preferences – some may even call them biases.  He’s not at all reluctant to express strong likes and dislikes or extol the many splendors of pet projects. But his expressions are never nasty or even petulant; they actually add welcome dashes of spice to the narrative.

One particular passage in the book can serve as a guide to the author’s approach and a key to the appeal of the work for the layperson as well as the maven: “When we work in a building for years, sleep in it at night, worship in it once a week or take classes in it for years, afterward something of us – a part of consciousness – remains in the stucco, cinderblock or carved mahogany. A memory or impression is left. Return to a beloved building from childhood and you will still feel something in the walls reaching out to you.”

His writing projects keep Thom Nickels rather busy. He’s already published over a dozen books, including a rundown of the Johnny Bobbit scam, published in October 2018, shortly after “Philadelphia Mansions” came out. (Bobbit was the homeless man who supposedly gave his last $20 to a couple who had run out of gas. A GoFundMe campaign to “help Bobbit” netter $400,000, most of which was spent on luxury goods and expensive trips for the trio.)

And Nickels is already at work on his next book. His first idea was to produce a book about the adopted son of Father and Mother Divine. (The son had to be adopted, as ALL members of the Divines’ mission must commit themselves to total sexual abstinence. Sex is forbidden even in the service of procreation.)

While the Divine son’s story is interesting in its own right, Nickels came to view it as just one of many intriguing gems to be found in the realm of religious cults. When a publisher approached Nickels and asked what book he might write for them, both sides quickly agreed that an in-depth look at religious cults in Philly could be a sure success. The book now has a scheduled publication date of early 2020.

Digital Septa Falls Apart After a "Storm"

  Navigating Philadelphia’s regional rail system after a winter storm

is rarely easy.

   On the morning of March 4 I left my house in Fishtown and prepared to take three modes of transportation to Wayne, Pennsylvania, where I was to tape a cable TV show.  The weather forecast the previous day had called for 6 to 12 inches of snow after a harsh battering of sleet and rain, but one cannot always depend on ACCU weather. As it turned out, there was no snow accumulation at all although the ground contained very thin patches of frozen sleet. Otherwise there were blue skies and a sun unencumbered by clouds, enough to make anyone ask, “What storm?”

   On that bright morning the Septa 15 bus was on time, as was the Frankford El. In fact, the Girard station stop platform was filled to capacity with 9 to 5 workers, many of them millennials--this despite the fact that all city public and Catholic schools had been cancelled. 

   It was, as they say, another “Much ado about nothing” storm of the century.

   Yet what I thought would be an easy trek to the Main Line changed once I got to Jefferson Station to board the 8:32 Paoli-Thorndale line.  The first red flag: all the digital departure billboards weren’t working. That was also true on the lower boarding platform area. Passengers waited for trains but the look in their eyes suggested that something had gone terribly wrong. For a good twenty minutes or so no trains pulled into the station; there were also no conductors or trainmen in sight.  

    Given the absence of conductors, I asked a fellow passenger about the 8:32 Paoli train and was told that it hadn’t arrived yet. There was some relief hearing this news especially since it was 8:40 but another twenty minutes passed without any train coming into the station.  

   Finally a train finally pulled into the station. It was from Germantown and a conductor from that train got out and told passengers on the platform that the train was only continuing to 30^th Street Station. A friend of mine was among the hordes exiting the train and told me that the train was so crowded that he had to stand all the way from Chelten Avenue. The faces of the passengers leaving the train had an overdrawn Monday depressed look. It was a look of pure existential pain, proving to me that this was not one of those mornings where you’d ever hear someone shout, “It’s great to be alive,” or “life is worth living.”  

 

    I sensed transportation trouble ahead; I also knew that I’d be late for my Main Line interview. All I could do was study the faces around me—all of them sad and stress filled.  Everyone was feeling the same thing so I could no longer feel bad for myself when so many others were sharing in the misery. The collective angst was like one big ocean wave. The only solution was to let go of worry and go with the flow of the calamity… to embrace the calamity and see if by embracing it that somehow it would get better. 

      I headed up to the Information Desk where two frenzied looking controllers were manually scrolling through computer train schedules. 

    They told me that Septa had put everything on a Saturday schedule. “Because of the Saturday schedule all the trains are overloaded. We’re trying to piece this together. We’re having a hard time of it,” one of the men said.

     I was given a new departure time for the Paoli train but once on the lower platform the only train that seemed to be running was the Airport line. It did not become immediately apparent to passengers that all trains coming into the station were only going to 30^th Street. A rare conductor on an arriving train announced this fact, while most did not. In most cases there were no conductors visible so waiting passengers could not ID incoming trains. The trains had no signage so passengers asked passengers what train was what. Then, like a belated parting of the Red Sea, the station intercom system began announcing incoming trains. A degree of normality returned even if everything was still stopping at 30^th Street.  

    Having embraced the calamity head on, I had no worries. “I get there when I get there,” was my mantra.  

   At 30^th Street Station there were some conductors in view, although where your “we’re only going to 30^th Street” train left you off was not necessarily where you had to be for your real departure train. The discombobulated reconfiguration of schedules had the effect of disorientating many passengers, so many stood on the platform where the “only to 30^th Street” train left them off while their real trains left on the track on the far side of the station. The scene became a vintage Charlie Chaplin movie with passengers running this way and that in a mad dash to have something go right. 

     My “real” departure train was also on the track on the far side of the station, but all the fancy footwork in the world did no good. One would have thought that the conductors in charge of the “real” trains would have waited a couple of extra minutes given what everybody had just been through, but oh no, the “real” departure trains operated as if it were a normal Monday.

    As a result, I missed the Paoli train, watching as it faded away in front of me like the uncomfortable ending of a Hitchcock film. My embrace of the Calamity at that point had turned into something like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.   

   Other Paoli passengers like me who had to walk to the far track to board also missed the train.  

   The TV station, in deference to The Calamity, rescheduled the interview for Noon, which meant that I could take the next train and still have an hour to spare in case there was another calamity. Calamities sometimes breed like rats; one inspires another and before you know it, you have a regular calamity orchestra.  

  

   A few days later I discussed the Monday fiasco with a friend who used to work for Amtrak. This friend, whom I’ll call Ajax, worked on long distance Amtrak trains for almost a decade.

   “Years ago, before the dawn of the technological digital age, weather disasters on the railroad were handled manually. Each station had a stationmaster, and often the stationmaster lived above the station in an apartment. There were also towers every so often on the tracks where there were always workers who would clear crucial switches of snow and ice. Today that’s all done digitally. These (digital) elements are exposed to the elements so when we get a storm like we had on Monday the circuits freeze or become impaired and they have to be fixed digitally. And it’s not as easy. to fix things digitally. It shuts down communication; things go blank.”

   I thought of the station master who used to live above the Paoli station when I was a boy. He usually sold tickets to passengers during the day. He was a thin man with spectacles and he always wore a white shirt and tie. Selling train tickets then was serious business, as was the running of the trains themselves. Ajax said that the system used to be run like the military with a strict hierarchical system. In those days if a conductor, trainman or breakman called in sick during a bad weather day he was given an instant warning notice.

   

  Ajax, it should be noted, made up berths in Pullman sleeping cars, making and unmaking scores of beds and often getting jostled by the movements of the train in the process. He hit his head several times as the train lurched this way and that. 

   Our train talk morphed into some pretty heady stuff. He spoke of witnessing a small pickup truck somewhere in Florida racing to beat the train at a railroad crossing. The pickup truck did not make it, was hit by the train which demolished the car and then turned it into a square looking container that flew backwards in the air in a semi circle past the dining car where Ajak was looking out the window in horror.   

     

   “You didn’t want to look at it,” he said. “A father and his teenage son died in that one,” he said.

   In another instance, an overnight train he was on ran into a cow while racing through farmland. “Parts of the cow were all over the front of the train,” he said. 

  Another time he happened to be looking out onto the tracks from the dining car when he spotted another car trying to beat the oncoming train at a railroad crossing. This driver was lucky, however, because the train clipped off her car’s front section. She emerged from the accident unhurt. She thanked God for her life by standing beside the tracks and screaming at the train for hitting her car. 

   Calamities run the gamut from high to low, but a low calamity is always preferable.

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Philadelphia Free Press

      

      

    

    

        

City Safari: Insanity, when Mary Poppins went black face.

By Thom Nickels• Philadelphia Free Press Wed, Feb 06, 2019

Last week proved to be another high voltage social issue week. The topic once again was race, when the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, was accused of appearing in blackface 35 years ago in his medical school yearbook. Northam, unfortunately, created a public relations disaster for himself when he apologized for the photo and then promptly changed course and denied that the person in the photo was him. Northam’s change of mind created some confusion—did he or didn’t he? - even though he was already in the "There ain’t no forgiveness” hothouse when the allegation surfaced.

In today’s world, an allegation is all that’s needed to set up a national chorus of "Let’s Hang the Man (or Woman).” It’s the way we do things in America now. This set of new operatives started with the #MeToo movement and is now making its way into every hot issue narrative. Hanging people on allegations certainly does not bode well for the future, if only because the range and depth of the Orwellian Fault Finding Machine will be ten times as powerful in 2025, meaning that things that are not considered offensive today will be considered offensive tomorrow. The upshot of all this is that you had better be careful what you say or do (or write or draw) in your private or professional life today because that invisible recorder of misdeeds is working overtime to accuse you twenty or thirty years from now, and probably when you least expect it.

In short, no one seems safe from this new Salem Witch Hunt mentality that’s currently sweeping America.

In past articles, I’ve offered my own theories as to why this might be, so but I don’t mind restating them here. Even people who have little or no religion or who do not practice a faith of any sort, often put the energy they might have put into a transcendent God, into a secular ideology of ideas. This ideology, whether left or right, becomes a kind of infallible church of its own. It becomes a remorseless secular crutch by which to judge all things (and people), social and political. A better word for this might be idolatry, because for believers of this type any transgression is considered unforgivable. In politics, generally, there is no redemption or forgiveness; there is only eternal damnation ("His career is over”) whereas in religion, minus the bitter fanatical "faiths,” there’s a knowledge that God does not hold a grudge like the petty mortals who rule this planet. .

Race has been on my mind lately for another reason. Recently I attended the Inter Act Theatre production of Hype Man: A Break Playby Idris Goodwin and directed by Ozzie Jones at the Prodcerium Theater (till February 17) at the Drake. Hype Man concerns a small Hip Hop group about to make their national debut on The Tonight Show. Verb, the black rapper (played by Carlo Campbell) is often at odds with his childhood friend, Pinnacle (Kyle Glenn), a white Irish rapper more or less molded in the style of a latter day Emeinen. The female member, Peep One (Blanca Sanchez) acts as a bridge between the two friends, especially when Verb wants to go political after he hears news of how the local police shot a 13 year old black boy to death afterthe boy held his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

Verb wants the group to work on a ‘Justice for Jerrod’ statement for their Tonight Show debut but Pinnacle insists that as musical entertainers they must stay neutral. Pinnacle fears that a radical political statement on national TV will destroy their big break and everything they’ve worked for. Unconvinced, Verb wants the group to go full social justice warrior regardless of the consequences. His willingness to sacrifice money and fame creates tension and some pretty compelling onstage moments.
 
Both Verb and Pinnacle take extreme views in this "all or nothing” world: Will it be blatant bullhorn tactics or only the kick ass lyrics of "fun rap?’ What about something in-between that combines the entertaining elements of good rap (some would argue that good rap is an oxymoron) with well placed references to a troubling social issue? It can be done, of course—and this play shows how it can be done-- without either Verb or Pinnacle having to go off alone and live on another planet. It takes compromise and dialogue, not an outright dismissal that has both men walking away from one another while hurling insults and labels.
 
 As I see it, there can be no progress in race relations when one party throws out labels and insults and then walks away, as if the label, in this case, racist, were a steel casket that entraps one forever. When everything is considered racist, in the end, nothing is racist, and this cannot be good for society.

I’m reminded of something I read in The Spectator: "These days, throwing insults often just means ‘I disagree with you.’”

As for the ever popular label, "racist,” Tucker Carlson’s piece in The Daily Caller listed the most far flung definitions.

1. The 2017 film The Little Mermaid is racist because of Sebastian Ariel’s exaggerated Jamaican accent.

2. Milk is a symbol of the alt right

3. The report that some South African students called science racist because it cannot explain "black magic.”

4. One university professor stated that mathematics itself operates as ‘Whiteness.’

5. Military camouflage is frowned upon because the soldiers who wear it often paint their faces when they sneak around in the jungle.

6. Some college professors maintain you shouldn’t expect students to show up on time because that’s not being sensitive to "cultural differences.”

7. Some researchers are working on solutions to stop newborns from showing preference to adults of their own race.

8. The vintage Mary Poppins film has been labeled ‘racist’ by a U.S. academic because Dame Julie Andrews is blackened up with soot in the famous rooftop chimney sweep scene.

Mary Poppins, which I saw 200 times as a teenage theater usher, caused one writer for The New York Times to state: "When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker.”

What is this if not insanity? Or clearly, the first step on the road to insanity.
The better option is to do the hard work of getting to know one another, like the characters in Hype Man,and to leave the labels on a shelf in Staples.

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A Priestly Repast

y Thom Nickels•  Philadelphia Free Press

Wed, Feb 13, 2019

 

 

I recently had dinner with Father Mark Shinn, pastor of Saint Andrew’s Russian Orthodox cathedral, and his wife, Mistakiha Shelia in their rectory home in Northern Liberties.

Going to Father Shinn’s house is always a memorable experience. No matter the subject—art, politics, the varieties of French wine--one can always be sure of a discussion that will lead to something significant.

Father Shinn is also one of those priests who isn’t afraid to show the world that he is a priest. Whenever I’ve eaten at Father Shinn’s house or whenever we’ve gone to a local Asian restaurant, he will wear his cassock and cross, a marvelous thing in this secular world where practically the only uniform one sees is the skinny black yoga pants popular among millennial hipsters.

 

Father Mark Shinn

Walking into a restaurant with Father Shinn, it’s always interesting to view the reactions of people chin-deep in their Tom Yam Kung or Napa Cabbage soup. In many cases, these looks suggest that the diners have never seen a priest wearing a cassock in public, a sad thing to be sure. One sees the Roman collar of Roman priests of course, but in today’s world even that is often exchanged for the anonymity of the open Polo shirt. As for nun-spotting, well, you can forget that. Nuns—the Roman ones anyway-- have long ago abandoned their habits, except for a minority of contemplative orders that rarely get to mix with the outside world.

My humble contribution to the dinner was a Tiramisu cake from my local grocery store. After all, we were to dine with two other guests, Father George and his wife, Mistakiha Jill, who teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Fr. Shinn had often spoken of Father George in the most interesting terms. Father George, you see, was once officially Roman Catholic but somewhere along the line he switched over to Orthodoxy—Orthodoxy being the more traditional of the two expressions of the ancient faith before Christianity itself split into a zillion denominations.



When Father George was Roman, he worked with the homeless in parts of New York City. He was also a part of Dorothy Day’s NYC Catholic Worker House. Day, along with Peter Maurin, founded the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in 1933. As a college student, Day was a fiery radical-literary-journalist who drank with Eugene O’Neil and marched in women’s rights and support-for-the-unemployed protests. Social protests alone, however, were not enough for Day who hungered for more. In 1927, she converted to Catholicism, incorporating her new-found faith with her social justice activism.

Father George also knew Thomas Merton, the Roman monk and writer at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Louisville, Kentucky. In fact, Fr. George was on such familiar terms with Merton that he referred to him as “Tom” during the dinner party. Fr. George recalled how, as a frequent visitor to Gethsemane, Merton would seek him out. Fr. George went to Gethsemane as an Orthodox priest, which didn’t matter one iota to the Cistercian monks there. There was even one occasion, Father George said, when a dying monk who loved the Byzantine Rite requested Eastern prayers at his bedside, and Fr, George was called to do the holy honors.

Fr. George told us that he felt very close to Dorothy Day and that the two of them had many private conversations, the contents of which he said he could not reveal. He told us how when Dorothy died, he shed more than a few tears. Yes, he added, she was that memorable a woman! Of course, I already knew this to be the case because an Episcopal priest friend of mine once related how Day came to the rescue of poet W. H. Auden when the latter was arrested on a morals charge in New York and needed bail money. Day, who had heard of Auden’s misfortune, went immediately to the police station with the money in hand and the famous poet was released.

Here was a woman without judgment, a holy woman who, while strict in her religious beliefs, was still not of the Pharisaical frame of mind. You had to love her, as they say.



There was a lot of levity during dinner. We discussed (and ate) Shelia’s tasty Blanquette de veau, Crescent-Wrapped Asparagus and bitter herb salad. The marvelous red and white wines on the table fired up the conversation in a delightful way. Prior to dinner, of course, we said grace (a lost devotional “art” in many homes) before Fr. Shinn’s icon wall. After that there was no stopping the conversation, with Thomas Merton’s name coming up again and again, whereupon I offered my own experience of reading all of the monk’s journals, including the most controversial parts where Merton writes about his love affair with a nurse from a local Louisville hospital. This experience brought Merton to the outer limits in terms of feeling guilty, not to mention his sketchy behavior as he snuck calls to his beloved in the monastery kitchen.

It’s also interesting, I think, that Joan Baez, a friend of Merton’s and an occasional visitor to the monastery, advised Merton to elope with the nurse and start a new life somewhere far away.

After telling the nurse story, which all the dinner guests knew anyway, Fr. George was quick to say that “Tom” had just fallen prey to human nature, and that human nature holds us all in sway, and that one shouldn’t—Fr. George inferred this—let this tarnish the good monk’s reputation. After all, a thorough reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions will show that Augustine was once a gallivanting Henry Miller and Jean Genet rolled up into one. What the nuns never told us in eighth grade Baltimore Catechism class was that the saint even had a male lover.

Fr. George then told us how, when he attended Dorothy Day’s funeral, he asked the undertaker if he might take the crucifix affixed to the lid of her casket. Now, as anyone who has ever been to a Catholic or Orthodox funeral knows, there is usually an external cross affixed to the lid of a casket which is easily removed. When my great aunt died in the 1990s, I also asked the undertaker if I might take her cross so I could bring it home and hang it on my study wall. Casket crosses are so easily removed that one cannot imagine them staying put for long in the ground where they might be subject to earth tremors or whatever else goes on down there.


Fr. George also happened to be wearing a cross from “Tom” that he showed us during dinner. When I saw the cross I immediately recognized it as the Cursillo cross especially popular among Catholics in the 1970s. The Cursillo movement was founded in 1944 in Spain as a “little retreat” venue—three days of religious training and contemplation with separate retreats for men and women. The original Cursillo cross was a beautiful thing although I cannot say for certain whether the cross has morphed into a modernist mess in recent years. My father gave me his Cursillo cross before he died, which I then foolishly lost, but seeing “Tom’s” cross put me in mind of my father in a profound but fleeting way.

When dessert was served we discussed the recent marriage of one of the Shinn daughters to a rock musician. Their wedding ceremony was preformed by Father Shinn and captured in a stunning book of photographs, resplendent as only Orthodox weddings are with Byzantine crowns being held over the head of bride and groom. Years ago I attended the marriage of another one of Fr. Shinn’s daughters at Saint Andrew’s, where I took great delight in seeing the startled faces of the Irish Catholic members of the wedding party who seemed mesmerized at the high Orthodox ceremonials.

With Shelia’s mildly sweet home baked dessert came a tea that proved to be an instant hit. I don’t think I drank as much tea in my life. By this time we had depleted our talk of Dorothy Day and “Tom,” although another personage would soon emerge: Walt Whitman. That’s when Fr. George took off his black cap and revealed that many people have often said that he resembles the Great Gray Poet. Fr. George’s white beard is an extremely modest version of Whitman’s massive crumb catcher but the two do look somewhat alike when it comes to the eyes.

A prayer and the sign of the cross ended the dinner party. Then there was the long good-bye in the living room, with Fr. Sinn remaining seated and commenting how when people stand to say good-bye nothing ever moves and nobody ever leaves, it’s just more conversation that threatens to go on and on…necessitating, of course, another round of tea and desserts.

Twig & Stick Master Sculptor, Patrick Dougherty

  Growing up in the wilds of Chester County my friends and I would fashion tree branches into spears and use them as weapons in our pretend childhood battles. Whether it was a game of cowboys and Indians, a Passion Play--one Easter we built a giant cross and tied a playmate to it as “Jesus,” then planted the cross in the ground—we were imaginative when it came to the earth’s raw materials. My childhood was all about sticks and saplings, walking sticks for hikes, my brother’s home built forts, sticks for kindling in the fireplace, sticks for marshmallow roasts, or gigantic bishop’s staffs. The piling of many sticks together sometimes resulted in bonfires or quickly built wigwams along the banks of the local creek.

 

Frazer, Chester County, Pennsylvania

  Thinking about those country days, I realize that they are the perfect precursor to the sculpture of Patrick Dougherty.  

 If you’ve never heard of Patrick Dougherty, I’d advise you to Google his name and check out his work. If you don’t want to do that, wait until the month of April and then head out to the Morris Arboretum where you will be able to see the work of the Chapel Hill, North Carolina resident. Dougherty’s work is composed of all natural materials like twigs, saplings, branches and sticks. His stick woven sculptures are generally 25-plus feet high and they can take many forms. They can take the shape of houses, thatched huts, wigwams or haystacks with curvy windswept tops that seem to be “singing” and alive. The structures have open doorways and windows or oval like portholes through which viewers can peek through. Sometimes there are pathways that lead from one dwelling to another, a stick work fantasy that conjures up the primal and which leads viewers into another world.  

 I had an opportunity to interview Dougherty recently, but since a long conversation was not possible, I suggested a brief chat, perhaps 15 minutes tops. I was given a day and a time in which to call, 3 PM EST on a weekday when the artist would still be working on his Long Beach, California installation. After the completion of that installation, he would then head to Philadelphia in March to prepare the Morris Arboretum exhibit. Dougherty is no stranger to the Morris Arboretum. His first installation there was in 2009 (“Summer Palace”) and in 2015 he was back with, “A Waltz in the Woods.” Dougherty never titles his installations until the sculptures have been erected. It’s then that the name or the theme of the installation comes to him. Since his new installation at the Morris opens to the public on March 30^th, the Morris probably won’t be able to announce a title until March 29.

   When I called Dougherty, he answered on the second ring. ”I’m on top of scaffolding in Long Beach, California,” he said. “It’s a beautiful sight… it’s right on the ocean. We’re at the Long Beach Museum; they have a large pottery selection here so we decided to take on these 15 feet ceramic shapes…various kinds of shapes with different tips and it’s looking pretty good.”  

  I mentioned his upcoming trip to Philadelphia for his third Morris exhibit. “Can you believe they want me so much?” he said. 

   Dougherty travels extensively for his work and says he works for three weeks of each month on location. He makes about ten sculptures a year both in the United States and internationally.  In Belgrade, Serbia, he built a sculpture in front of the American embassy. He’s built about 250 sapling sculptures in his 30-year career and he is the recipient of many awards.  In 2010 The New York Times ran a feature on his work (“Building With Sticks and Stones”) and described it as “whirling, animated shapes that resemble tumbleweeds or gusts of wind.”  

  

  Dougherty told me that people love the idea of simple shelters and of walking into structures that may resemble the forts they may have built as children. His perishable sculptures can last anywhere from one to two years depending on weather conditions. But they always conjure up a fantasy world where, Dougherty says, “for just a minute you can forgive the rest of the world and focus on those primal feelings within.”  These sculptures are also where children seem to thrive. 

 “You know,” Dougherty told me, “Viewers of my work carry a lot of subliminal ideas about sticks, whether that might be childhood play, the Garden of Paradise, or talking to animals. Certainly for children, sticks are an imaginative object.”  

    Susan Crane, Morris Arboretum’s Director of Marketing, writes that, “Patrick’s structures have no nails or hardware that hold them together aside from the strength of the woven sticks and branches. For a public garden to have such a natural and dramatic piece of art is so special.”
  On the Arboretum’s website there’s a call for volunteers to help Dougherty construct the installation. Volunteers must be able-bodied and not afraid to climb ladders or work on scaffolds; they usually work in groups of four for four hours a piece. Dougherty’s working pace, it’s been said, is “fast and furious.” The 2019 work will be built in the Madeleine K. Butcher Sculpture Garden, not far from the Arboretum’s Wisteria Walk and the English Park. Opening day is March 30 (10 AM to 4 PM) with Irish bagpipers performing at the sculpture site.

    Dougherty told me that this year’s Morris installation will be very different than what he did in 2009 and 2015.  “After all,” he said, “it’s difficult to follow yourself, but we will probably make objects that are more ‘open to the sky.” He praised the Morris staff for their help at the 2015 installation.  “They were especially helpful when it came to working at the top of the scaffold. ‘You just tell us what you want and we’ll do it,’ they told me.”   

  Although raised and educated in North Carolina, Dougherty’s family came to the States from Donegal County, Ireland in 1850, settling at first in Chicago and then moving to Oklahoma.  

Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor
Philadelphia Free Press

  

 

A Chat with Patty-Pat Kozlowski, Philadelphia Free Press

  Unpopular political candidates in Philadelphia will always include Republicans and conservatives. Democrats in Philadelphia outnumber Republicans on a scale of more than seven to one, and it’s been that way for over 70 decades. Can this be healthy?  There are barely 120,000 registered Republicans in Philadelphia which means that a Republican stands little chance of winning a major election in Philadelphia.

   “No opponent, no problem: How Philly Dems spent more than a million bucks against no one,” ran a Billy Penn headline in its election 2018 coverage.  “Uber rides, theater tickets, political largesse — here’s how candidates paid their way to uncontested reelection. “

 So what’s wrong with this city? When incumbents win year after year, doesn’t that pave the way for corruption? Mayor Frank L. Rizzo’s death in 1998 while running for mayor as a Republican and not a Democrat was one of the saddest days in Philadelphia politics. It was sad not because Frank Rizzo was a flawless visionary leader but because had he been elected he would have effectively overturned almost a century of Democratic feudalistic control. (The last Republican mayor of the city was Bernard “Barney” Samuel (1941-1952). Occasionally, of course, there have been glimmers of possible change. Thacher Longstreth, who was instrumental in streamlining Edmund Bacon’s vision for the city, ran as a Republican candidate for mayor in 1955 and again in 1971.
    Another city Republican who refuses to give up is the 27^th Ward leader (attorney) Matt Wolfe. Wolfe will run in the May 21^st primary in hopes of attaining a City Council seat. Wolfe ran but lost for a Council at-large seat in 2014 and 2015. On Wolfe’s website one can read the message he’s been giving for years, namely that the city is doing itself a disservice by electing only Democrats.          

Philadelphia did not become the poorest big city in America due to a natural disaster. There was no Superstorm Sandy. Philadelphia’s disaster was man-made. Bad decisions made by politicians for whom reelection trumped good government. The status quo is slowing Philadelphia’s growth down and hurting our most vulnerable citizens 

                                                         *

 One of the ugliest races in the November 2018 was between Patty-Pat Kozlowski ® and Joe Hohenstein (D) for the 177^th Pennsylvania House District seat which covers part of the Riverwards and lower Northeast Philadelphia.  That seat was held by Republican John Taylor for three decades in a district where Democrats had a 2 to 1 majority margin. When Taylor announced his retirement, Kozlowski decided to run for the seat as a Republican. Kozlowski’s years in public service included working for former Councilwoman Joan Krajewski and lately as director of Park Stewardship at the City Department of Parks and Recreation. 

  I asked Patty-Pat Kozlowski why she ran as a Republican.

 

“For 32 years Taylor was a good representative for our area, he never asked your affiliation and his office helped everybody. For the past 10 years, I was asked as a Democrat, to run against him and I always refused because the Dems wanted the seat to turn blue-but here you had a guy who was a great public servant-our district was better because of him-why would you want to change that? He never had a scandal, did excellent constituent service and this guy would come back from Harrisburg on a Wednesday night and actually show up at community meetings and not just send a staffer.”

   Kozlowski says that when Taylor announced his retirement he knew she was interested in running but that he also reminded her that the State House was overwhelmingly Republican and to go up there as a Democrat she would probably be spending all her time playing on her phone while the majority pushed through legislation. Taylor told her, "If you want to bring home the bacon for your District and the City of Philadelphia, you're not going to do either as a Democrat......"

  Kozlowski says she didn't want the $85k year job just to cut ribbons and get the summer off. “I wanted our seniors to get more services to subsidize their food, utilities and medical needs and do away with their property taxes. When a senior citizen has to go on a payment plan to pay off their $1500.00 a year property taxes while shopping at the dollar store for their food we have a problem in society. Meanwhile we let huge hospitals, universities and big corporation big tax breaks and no property taxes, that's ass backwards.”

  Kozlowski lost the election to Hohenstein although she had been ahead in the polls up until Election Day. “It wasn't R versus D for me, elephants against donkeys, it was all about the community and getting us the best services and a bigger piece of State dollars. I promised not to take a state vehicle and believed that voters would vote the person not the party.”  Not in this day and age, however, and not in Philadelphia.

    “…The anti-Trump vote hurt us in the 31st ward,” Kozlowski told me. “People were voting straight D no matter what and in the Mayfair section where I knocked on doors up until Election Day, visited senior centers and community events it was unbelievable the vote from absentee property owners who don't live in the City but they were bussed in to vote from New York. On election day, before noon, we took 6 calls from our poll workers that buses and vans were pulling up to Lincoln High School, Mayfair School etc with a translator because they didn't speak English and they were voting straight Dem. We asked for help for-election lawyers to be on site but they were all at Samuel Rec center at Gaul and Tioga Streets with a measuring tape making sure my niece was more than 30 feet from the entrance because she was wearing a Patty-Pat shirt.”

  Kozlowski says that the Friday after Election she and Taylor had lunch and he showed her a folder full of the numbers which showed an unusually high voter turnout in the 31st ward.. Taylor then told her, "Patty, I don't know if I would have survived this one.....wow."

  I asked Kozlowski if she thinks she lost the election because of the Republican identification with President Trump.

 “There were mailers linking me with Trump and his policies. Planned Parenthood and Philadelphia Teachers' Union didn't even give me the courtesy of asking me my views before endorsing. LGBTQ organizations ignored me because apparently you can't be gay and have an "R" next to your name.”

 

Telling it like it is

 

   Then there was a firestorm of sorts when Kozlowski’s encounter with a drug dealer near her property in Bridesburg went viral. The news she had threatened him with a  baseball bat and used the word junkie. The Hohenstein campaign went to town lambasting Kozlowski for her choice of words, as if the word ‘junkie’ somehow linked her with the KKK and violated the Left Progressive code against so called hate speech.

  What I didn’t tell Kozlowski was that I decided to vote for her as soon as Hohenstein’s team condemned her for her language choices.    

“When a Democrat grabs a bat and chases the drug dealers off their corner and tries to rid their neighborhood from drugs they get a movie, staring Morgan Freeman as a kick ass savior made about them. But when a Republican does it,” she added,” they are called racist, uncompassionate and ignorant. They publish your home address and tell social media to go swing a bat at this ‘fat dyke’ and her dogs. It's a double standard. The leader of Angels in Motion, (an organization I respected but didn't agree with their end game of constantly giving food and clothes to addicts but not successfully getting them into rehab) went on Facebook and called me a racist (because the drug dealer was Hispanic) and then campaigned for Hohenstein. Again, it's all part of the game.”

   But calling Kozlowski a racist on Facebook wasn’t enough. The next day she says a KKK image of a cross burning showed up on her page. “The only thing I burn is the toast. But I was a Republican, so it was OK.”

    The irony here, of course, is that the majority of Bridesburg residents were with her. “The City and the news media do not pay attention to that stuff. The robberies, the car break-ins, the muggings, the stripping of any metal from your homes and cars and the hundreds of addicts living under tunnels with no bathrooms and no running water…”

   Kozlowski will run as a Democrat against City Councilman Bobby Henon (D-6^th district) in the May 21 Democratic primary.

    “I switched back to Democrat to run for this City Council seat because Henon has to be defeated in the primary,” Kozlowski said. “That’s how you stop his corruptness and greed. That’s how you stop a guy from Pennsport who lives on Moyamensing Avenue controlling what happens on Richmond Street, Cottman Avenue and Torresdale Avenue.Everyone is afraid of these guys and their union power and bully tactics. They have millions of dollars to blow in this election….

  “But guess what? They don’t own me or my family. They never did a favor for me and can’t blackmail me”

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor