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The Catholic Standard and Times Thursday, March 1, 1984 By Bob Koenig This article contaians 646 words.  Bucks County's internationally acclaimed woodworker George Nakashima is a man of paradoxes. He's a Hindu monk and he's a convert to Catholicism. He's been awarded the Third Order of the Sacred Treasure, a high national honor, by the government of Japan, and yet he was born and lives today in the United States. He's an artistic rebel, yet he's a great success within the system. He's a self-proclaimed dreamer, yet he's very much a doer.
All these facets of George Nakashima's character are presently converging in a project that is very much his dream his designing and building of an altar to peace, "a shrine for all people and owned by no one," as he describes it, built from the largest, most perfect walnut log he ever found.
If all this sounds a bit abstract, it may be because Nakashima's attaches an almost spiritual quality to wood. And the idea did come to him in a dream, he said.
"I feel wood should be used to its utmost capacity," the craftsman told The Catholic Standard and Times last week at the Bucks County estate that also serves as the base of his business. "It should express the aspirations of a tree, what it wants to be. So I felt that this tree (a 300-year-old, 125-foot, 10-ton tree he found in Long Island, N.Y.) could only be used in its full size."
 "It is a tree that should be the symbiosis of nature and man in the deepest spiritual sense," Nakashima said "I felt the only way to use it would be to cut it thick, and that evolved into a table that would be roughly 12 feet wide by 12 feet long. Something like that you can't use commercially, but I thought the only logical thing was to use it as an altar and make it a symbol of peace."
Nakashima is not now sure where, if it is completed, the altar will be placed. He has approached the United Nations, but he has also envisioned it as a "pilgrim shrine" in many places.
The man who was recently honored by the government of Japan was born 78 years ago in Spokane, Wash, where he began an artistic and spiritual odyssey that would take him from architecture to furniture designing and crafting and from the U-S-to Europe, then to India and a Hindu monastery for two years, back to the United States and Christianity and now to what he's called "a farout ecumenism."
"I started out as a Protestant, a Methodist," Nakashima said. "Japanese can be almost anything — a Buddhist, a Shintoist, a Christian. They're very tolerant."
At the outbreak of World War II, he left India to return to his family in the U.S. There in Seattle, Wash., he met a Maryknol priest, Father Leopold Tibesar, who would support him in business and be a strong influence on his faith. "He was just a nice guy and he believed in me," Nakashima recalled of his patron. Nakashima was later baptized a Catholic in St. Martin of Tours parish in New Hope, which he also helped furnish.
George Nakashima and his Japanese-American wife, Marion, whom he met when he returned to the U.S., have two children: a daughter, Mira, and a son, Kevin. They all work with his staff of 10 designing and crafting furniture. Nakashima has designed furniture for the Rockefellers and one of his designs was part of the recent "Design Since 1945" exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has also crafted the sanctuary furnishings for the Immaculate Conception Chapel in the theology division of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook.
He is currently designing a Carmelite monastery outside Oklahoma City, and has also designed and helped construct "Christ in the Desert," a Benedictine monastery outside of Sante Fe N M. He was also awarded the Hazlett Award for esteemed artists in Pennsylvania.
www.nakashimafoundation.org a 501C3 non-profit organization 1847 Aquetong Road New Hope, PA 18938 E-Mail The Nakashima Foundation Contact the webmaster |
