Jim Forest: Crooked Yet Straight
Jim Forest crossed the river, unexpectedly, January 13 2022—he was 80 years of age. Many were the seeming crooked paths taken and yet each was his paradoxical straight trail home. Jim and I met, initially, when I was on staff with Amnesty International in the 1980s and he was on staff with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Many a handwritten and typed letter crossed the ocean from Holland to Canada and back in those years and as emails became the standard way of communicating, they became our dependable bird of delivery.
Most who know Jim are acutely aware of his journey as a “red diaper baby” to the military, to Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, friendship with Thomas Merton and Daniel Berrigan (he wrote biographies of each of them). Then Jim’s turn to Orthodoxy and founding of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, the “Peace” vision ever held high. Such a straight yet crooked line pilgrimage is tracked, in a compact way, in his autobiography of sorts, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir (2020). Jim’s final book was on Thich Nhat Hanh, Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh (2021). There were also the many intricately illustrated children’s tales and book on the Beatitudes which are must-reads. There is so much that could be said about Jim’s living and written journey, his wife, Nancy, as he said in Writing Straight “one of my editors long before it ever crossed our minds that we might marry each other” (322)—such a lovely photo of Jim and Nancy together on page 322.
I have been on the National Board of The Thomas Merton Society of Canada (TMSC) for more than 20 years and the TMSC invited Jim to Canada to speak on Merton a few times, Jim’s photographs of each visit more than worth the heeding and seeing. The fact that Jim lived in Holland many a decade, Erasmus was from Holland, Erasmus was, probably, the most significant “peace theologian” of the 16th century and Erasmus an icon for mine, meant we had much in common on the Erasmus journey. Jim sent me many a photo of Erasmus from Holland, and we were invited to write a book together, by Orbis, on Erasmus. We never did do such a book but many were our affinities with the crown prince of “peace theology.”
It was just a matter of time before Jim and I were on the same path again with the American Beats. Merton had an interest in them, Jim did also and I published a book, Thomas Merton and the Beats of the North Cascades (2008) that Jim wrote a kindly “Foreward” to. It is, though, the many walks (when Jim was on the west coast of Canada, he bunked in with us), conversations, extensive correspondence, generous vulnerability, and life lived with its crooked yet straight line homeward that will forever massage my soul, mind, and imagination—rest well my dear friend, well done.
amor vincit omnia
Ron Dart