The San Jose Mercury News
January 3, 1987

The idea of creating an "Altar for Peace" from a 125-foot English walnut tree came to the woodworker George Nakashima in a dream.

"There has appeared an extraordinary natural phenomenon, something that occurs only once in a lifetime or perhaps only once in the history of a nation or in all time," the 81-year-old Nakashima wrote to his friends three years ago, after the dream- "It is a great walnut tree. It is a tree that should be a symbiosis of nature and man in the deepest spiritual sense. It is now on hand."

Though Nakashima had spent a lifetime "listening to the cries of wood," creating furniture that seems to unlock the hidden souls of trees, he had never encountered apiece of lumber like the one that began life as a sapling 200 or 300 years ago on a Long Island estate.

"I felt the peace movement needed something tangible, a sort of symbol, something you can put your hands on," Nakashima said recently, clad in leather moccasins and a hanten, the traditional Japanese wrap coat. "It was a great tree. Trees with this character should have a special meaning and special use."

On New Year's Eve, the great tree—the one that , took a whole week to cut down, the one so massive there was only one type of saw powerful enough to hew boards from it—was dedicated and installed in its new incarnation in the Cathedral of St.John the .Divine in Manhattan at the fourth annual Concert for Peace, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

The altar, which weighs three-quarters of a ton, was transported to the cathedral on a 40-foot flatbed truck. It was constructed at Nakashima's self-built Japanese compound in Bucks County, Pa—a serene, village-like place where the only disturbances seem to be deer dining on Nakashima's bok choy.

The quiet refuge is a reflection of its maker. A self-described "Hindu Catholic," Nakashima was horn in Seattle to Japanese parents- His grandfather was a samurai. He earned an architectural degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then spent seven years traveling around the world —to Paris, Tokyo and, finally, to a Hindu ashram in Pondicherry, in southern India. "I had more to learn than I had to give," he explained, "so I gave up my salary to become a monk.

There, he studied with the spiritual leader Sri Aurohindo, a relationship that was to have a lasting impact. Unlike many modern furniture makers, whose aesthetic judgments often are molded by the marketplace, Nakashima's designs are based on a belief in "the relationship between material things —nature—and the human spirit."

A reverence for nature pervades Nakashima's work. Much of the drama of his designs comes from a willingness to accept and exploit a tree's knots, gnarls, worm holes, fissures and whatever other deformities nature might yield. Known widely for his construction methods, Nakashima combines mechanized cutting and planing with elegant hand-made details. In the "Altar for Peace," which resembles a gigantic table, delicate rosewood butterfly inlays are used to span natural crags between two inch-thick walnut surfaces cut from the same log. His approach to wood is non-interventional: The edges of the altar are ripply and follow the natural shape of the tree trunk.

Although Nakashima has designed distinctive works of architecture, like the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Albuquerque , N.M. most of his life been devoted to furniture, an activity perfect under traumatic circumstances during the 1940, when Nakashima and his family were sent to a Japanese internment camp in Idaho.

After their release, the Nakashimas settled in Bucks County, where he has been pursuing his craft ever since.

The altar, too, is a survivor. The tree was hauled to North Carolina and back after a mill there informed Nakashima that there was no saw on the East Coast that could handle the job of cutting it into boards. Not to be deterred, Nakashima consulted a sawyer friend in California, Scott Wineland, who specializes in walnut His 8-foot-long dual-engine Alaska Mill chain saw in tow, Wineland flew to Philadelphia to cut the tree trunk, what Nakashima called a "delicate and adventuresome process," which lasted an entire week and was performed mostly in a blizzard. There were some anxious moments, such as when the saw hit a huge concrete pipe, put in by a tree surgeon 75 to 100 years ago to aid drainage. Fortunately, the pipe was buried in only a small portion of the walnut trunk.

The altar has been paid for largely by Nakashima who estimates that he has spent about $10,000 on the project. Six months ago, a fund-raising committee was formed by admirers to further Nakashima's goal and to provide funds for maintenance. The group is headed by Steven C- Rockefeller, dean and professor of religion at Middlebury College in Vermont, who acted as an intermediary between Nakashima and the cathedral.

In the vast reach of Nakashima's life, the altar represents the perfect butterfly joint—not so much a piece of furniture as an ecumenical symbol of peace.