HOMAGE TO DR. HOLMES

MAHENDRA MEGHANI

Dr. John Haynes Holmes

(1879-1964)

It was Helen Keller’s birthday when on the sunny morning of June 27, 2009, I took a train to New York. I was off on a pilgrimage to the Community Church of which Dr. John Haynes Holmes was minister from 1919 to 1949. I wanted to pay homage to the memory of Holmes whom C.F. Andrews described as ‘the very first to make the name of Gandhi known and loved in America’. “What Romain Rolland has done in Europe, he has accomplished in the New World,” said Andrews, the greatest interpreter of Gandhi to the whole Western World, and a very dear friend of both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

And, I wanted to have a look at the pulpit which John H. Holmes climbed tremulously nearly nine decades ago, on April 10, 1922 to preach to his people on the subject: “Who is the greatest man in the world?” and to answer his own question: “M.K. Gandhi of India.”

Amazingly, that was nine years before Holmes met Gandhi face to face for the first time in London in 1931. He was to meet him again for the last time during a visit to India in 1947-48. Later, Holmes recalled the audacity of his 1922 declaration and asserted: “Everything that has happened since that date, every word spoken and deed done by Gandhi, his life, his death, all have conspired, as it were, to confirm my pronouncement.”

In 1953 Holmes published an intimate account of his experiences with Gandhi in a volume called My Gandhi. Incidentally, it was in the magazine Unity, edited by Holmes, that Gandhi’s autobiography was first published in America in serial form.

I was told at the Church that the original building from which the moving sermon of 1922 was delivered is now no more. In fact, the present building at 40 East 35^th Street is the fifth home the church has moved into. Holmes preached here also in his last years, and I was shown a plank in the hall underneath which are stored the ashes of Dr. and Mrs. Holmes. Looking down upon them from the platform are two small busts: of Gandhi and Schweitzer.

I presented a copy of The Gandhi Story: In His Own Words to the church. How I wish I had the privilege of placing it in the warm hands of Dr. Holmes as a humble attempt to carry forward the task of making the name of Gandhi loved in America! He would have blessed my appeal to Indians in America to gift the book to at least one American friend.

As I walked back to the Penn Station, I passed by the Empire State Building, once the tallest in the world, now under repairs. As my eyes stretched to the pinnacle of the great skyscraper, my ears seemed to resound with Holmes’ words on Gandhi:

“Where was there anybody to match him in our troubled and wicked world? Did he not hold in his heart the secret of man’s deliverance from the evils, mostly of man’s own choosing, now threatening to destroy him?”