In 1988, Palace Publishing published Bhaktipada’s seventh book, A Devotee’s Journey to the City of God, a retelling of John Bunyan’s 1678 classic Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, regarded as one of the most significant works of theological fiction in English literature. Bhaktipada’s semi-autobiographical story revolves around a man living in New York City named John who becomes dissatisfied with life; he suspects there must be something more than eating, sleeping, drinking beer and watching the Super Bowl on TV. He reveals his frustrations to his family, who dismiss him as crazy.

One day while walking down Second Avenue, he meets a beautiful, effulgent man dressed in saffron robes standing before a modest storefront called “Matchless Gifts.” The man, known as Spiritual Master, initiates John, gives him the name Devotee, and directs his new disciple to follow the bright light which leads him along the straight and narrow path to the lotus gateway of the City of God. The book describes the adventures that Devotee faces on his perilous journey.

During the summer of 1990, I was inspired to write a musical play based on Bhaktipada’s book. I wondered, “Perhaps New Vrindaban residents could, in time, produce an extravagant musical play like the villagers of Oberammergau in Germany.” I thought this would be an exciting way to spread the gospel of Krishna consciousness in a way which would appeal to the American public.

In Tuscarawas County, Northeast Ohio, at Schoenbrun Village, the biblical musical, Trumpet in a Strange Land, is presented to thousands of tourists every summer. I wondered, “Why couldn’t we create such a musical play at New Vrindaban? It could be a grand epic, like Oberammergau and all the New Vrindaban residents could participate.” Twelve years earlier, in August 1978, Bhaktipada had spoken to me about creating grand operas at New Vrindaban based on Krishna conscious stories. I had always wondered when I would have the opportunity to work on it. “Perhaps the time had come,” I thought.

With the assistance of Sankirtan (Andy Frankel), New Vrindaban’s resident actor and playwright, I selected the most important sections of the book to set to music. At first I decided to create a short fifteen- or twenty-minute musical based on a minimum of text for just a few actors; just enough to present the “bare bones” of the story. If my musical was a success, I planned to gradually add more and more scenes to each subsequent performance until it became a full-length two-hour-long production.

After writing the script and musical score (Prepare to Die is written in an artificial whole tone scale, which I thought fit the character of the villian, the Prince of Darkness), I recruited singers and musicians, and set up a rehearsal schedule. The musical, titled Journey to the City of God, premiered on Saturday, October 6, 1990 during the Fifth Annual New Vrindaban Interfaith Conference. It was repeated again on Tuesday, October 9th. The Wheeling News Register and Moundsville Echo printed notices about the performances.

The musical touched the hearts of devotees and visitors alike. I recall many members of the audience, including Nityodita Swami, were brought to tears during the initiation scene, when the Spiritual Master removes Devotee’s great burden and tosses it away. Rev. George Exoo, a City of God interfaith resident who earned a doctorate in music history from the University of California at Berkeley (his dissertation focused on the music of the great British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams), wrote a glowing review of the musical play which was published in The City of God Examiner:

Joyful Noise

In 1952 Ralph Vaughan Williams completed and produced his opera, A Pilgrim’s Progress. A lifelong project, the composition took him some forty years to complete. The score is dotted with mystical snippets in musical form, built largely on the pentatonic scale, which Vaughan Williams, in other works, developed over the years into full-scale compositions. This relationship to the Fifth (“Pastoral”) Symphony is particularly striking. If the work suffers, it does so in that the mystical snippets are given insufficient development in the final denouement—like a sneeze built up with a mighty force through increasingly powerful intermittent whiffs of pepper, only to conclude in a piddling “a-choo.”

The libretto (text) reveals Vaughan Williams’ Protestant ethic. As a youth in Victorian England, his mother, like mothers in other “correct” families, each Sunday afternoon took her family into the parlor and read Bunyan’s works out loud. Bunyan thus became for Vaughan Williams a Bible and a recipe for life: eschew vanities, “overcome” difficulties, and keep your eye on the goal of the Celestial City.

At every turn, Henry Doktorski’s (Hrishikesh dasa) Journey to the City of God invites comparison to Vaughan Williams. In Journey to the City of God, Hrishikesh dasa reveals a work of remarkable spiritual genius. Where until the advent of interfaith, the ethos of the New Vrindaban Community has discouraged the flowering of original theological reflection, it has encouraged the development of dramatic and musical originality that would do Ralph Waldo Emerson proud.

Hrishikesh dasa is an organist and composer of astounding ability. His performances are always energetic, authoritative, and flawless. In hymn tunes and anthems (which lamentably get almost no play in the Temple), his use of syncopation and cross-rhythms is electric, and these, combined with his own harmonic signature, culminate in musical language evocative of the music of Leonard Bernstein.

Journey to the City of God “Krishna-izes” Bunyan, and in four Broadway-style “numbers,” presents the essential New Vrindaban plan of salvation: alienation, gurudeva, distraction, redemption. I would like to think of these four numbers as an initial sketch of a larger work and would encourage the composer to think of the Vaughan Williams example.

Already Hrishikesh dasa has bettered Vaughan Williams by giving us a finale, which is a powerful icon of a glorious mystical awakening. The repeated use of the unfolding perfect fifth accomplishes this end, for there is no better musical metaphor for conveying the feeling of mystical openness and suspension than the interval of the perfect fifth. (Parallel fifths, for example, are what gives Vaughan Williams’ Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis its distinctively mystical sound.)

The peak of the finale comes with the ecstatic descant which was sung by Rupa Vilasa so magnificently that his voice became a veritable trumpet obbligato in style of Roger Voisin.

Journey to the City of God, the play, can have tremendous public relations value for the City of God, the municipality. It interprets Vaishnava theology in a style friendly to Christianity. Over in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, at Schoenbrun Village, the summer musical, Trumpet in a Strange Land, was running when I was a teenager and is still running today! Hrishikesh dasa’s Journey to the City of God is worthy of that same longevity. The composer might do well to offer his services, on a fee basis, to other traditions entering the City, to develop a dramatic presentation of their own spiritual path or heritage.

Devotee’s Journey returns by popular demand

At the request of Paramahansa Krishna Swami and other senior New Vrindaban elders, Journey to the City of God was performed again at the Sixth New Vrindaban Interfaith Conference during February 16-17, 1991. Again, Rupa Vilasa sang the lead role. I expanded the production with the addition of three new musical selections. The first was an overture, the second was a ballet (a minuet for string quartet) which accompanied the dancing of residents of the City of God, and the third was a piece to accompany the curtain call, when the actors, singers and dancers (and the music director) take their bows to audience applause. All three pieces were based on the City of God theme.

In addition, the first song, A Great Burden, was lengthened with the inclusion of an elaborate drum solo in the middle of the piece, at which time six female teenage dancers, led by the community’s dance instructor, Nectar, attempted to seduce Devotee from pursuing his spiritual quest. Since sufficient orchestra members were not available at this time, I made a cassette tape of the music with a computer sequencer and Kurzweil keyboard to play during performances.

The music on the studio recording was recorded in February 1991, as a sound track for the actors, singers and dancers on stage. The voices on this cassette were added later. The string quartet ballet music (a minuet) based on the City of God theme was recorded in the summer of 1993 and added to this cassette at that time. This minuet also appears on my November 1993 compact disc, A Classical Christmas.

In the studio recording, Sankirtan dasa served as narrator, I sang the role of John/Devotee (as Rupa Vilasa had left New Vrindaban for parts unknown), Bhakti Rasa Swami sang the Spiritual Master’s part (as Vishvatamukha was overseas in the Fare East, as I recall), Kripa Maya sang the part of the Prince of Darkness, and Brihan Naradiya Purana devi dasi sang the finale. —Henry Doktorski (November 2022)

To listen to Journey to the City of God, Rehearsal (October 6, 1900) go to YouTube.

To listen to Journey to the City of God, Live Performance (October 6, 1900) go to YouTube.

To listen to Journey to the City of God, Studio Recording (February 1991) go to YouTube.

Photos courtesy of the Keith Gordon Ham/Swami Bhaktipada Archive at the West Virginia Regional and History Center, University of West Virginia, Morgantown.

Paintings by Krishna Katha dasa (Carl Carlson) from Bhaktipada’s 1988 book, A Devotee’s Journey to the City of God.

My godbrother Rupa Vilasa (Ronald Dewayne Hayes) left New Vrindaban around 1992 and I lost track of him. Recently, I discovered that after leaving West Virginia, he served as the director of the Sanctuary Choir for the Hill Street Baptist Church of Louisville, Kentucky. He also sang in the James McCray Chorale Ensemble of Cincinnati, Ohio. He passed away at the age of 49 on June 13, 2009. See: Louisville Courier-Journal

For more about music at New Vrindaban, see Henry Doktorski’s book, Gold, Guns and God, Vol. 8.