The Master’s Programmer

Dennis McCabe never missed a weekend program. He never took vacation but a handful of times in the decades that he ran the programs at the Center. It happened to be a Friday night, April 25th, 2025, when instead of being at his treasured weekend program, Dennis went to His beloved, Meher Baba.

The next day, as his co-workers and community members heard the shocking news of his sudden demise, a deep gloom devoured the Center. The spring day suddenly turned over-cast above the trees that seemed to be drooping with a sullen heaviness as if the elements had lost one of their own.

That night, inevitably, Dennis became part of the evening program he so loved. A  film of him running the torch from Meherazad to Meherabad on Amartithi day in 1989 was played to remember him. The audience clapped each time Dennis  appeared on the screen. He was young and impassioned for Baba in that film. And his passion never dwindled. When the audience left through the back door, the lone, empty chair still sat by the back entrance of the Meeting Place, where Dennis always sat – a resolute fixture.

In June of this year, [it] will have been 42 years since Dennis started working on Center. I learned his lesser-known Baba story from his wife Mardi. As things are with Baba, He laid the foundation for Dennis’ work and devotion to Him, long before his work here began. Mardi tells me, “Dennis was an athlete from a very young age, coached directly by his father. Not surprisingly, he was at university on a wrestling scholarship, when his father who was hale and hearty, was golfing one day and fell over and died with a heart attack. The family was devastated, and Dennis went off the deep end himself,” she says.

Then came drugs, utter disillusionment and the loss of faith in that he could never get his life back. Then, one night he dreamt of his father who urged him to get his life back on track, but Dennis did not know how. At the time, his friend Peter Busse told him about Baba and Dennis also found a Mother Earth magazine that had featured Meher Baba. Simultaneously, he found a Baba book. Everywhere he went, Meher Baba followed.

Mardi goes on to share, “That year on July 4th, he was on the roof of his dorm, and he suddenly remembered Baba’s message on drugs. Dennis got all his drugs and threw them in a dumpster. Then he said aloud, ‘Meher Baba, this is for you. This is my Independence Day.’” Meher Baba had turned his life around.

After his graduation, he moved to San Francisco because all the Baba books he read were coming out of California. “It would be a little while until he found out that he had gone to the wrong coast,” Mardi laughs, teary eyed.

In San Francisco, he lived in a basement apartment where it was dark and very cold with no heat. He worked at a gas station in the daytime and bought reel to reel Baba films wherever he could find them. Eventually, he drove a delivery truck with a large poster of Baba and distributed Baba cards around the city. At night, he bundled up in his Chicago winter gear and stayed up in his bed and watched and re-watched Baba films over and over and read Baba books, all night long.

When he did make it to the Center, he volunteered here for a while but then went back to school in Chicago on Kitty Davy’s insistence. After he got a master’s degree in Sports and Leisure Management, he ran a gym.

“One day, he was at work and got a call from Kitty Davy who said in her perfect English accent, ‘We have a job for you here at the Center,’ Mardi says. “He dropped everything and packed his bags, put his dog in the car and drove straight to the beach without any stops. With him came his substantial collection of Baba films and a projector.”

It was no coincidence that the projector came with him. After doing many jobs such as creating trails, groundskeeping, cabin crew, Dennis eventually became the coordinator of programs on Center. His training came directly from Elizabeth and Kitty.

For years I had pleaded with Dennis to be interviewed about what that training entailed. Since this training was so homegrown and authentic, he thought he would have to prepare hard to articulate it.  So, I asked Mardi, what was his training?

“Elizabeth monitored everything you did. It had to be perfect for Baba and if it wasn’t, you had to fix it. She was a businesswoman and ran the Center like that. She had learned meticulousness from Mehera and Mani and other mandali,” Mardi says. “As per Elizabeth, the experience of the guest is to be preserved and promoted as an experience of Baba’s presence.”

A great medium to experience Baba’s presence is to view Him in moving pictures. After giving up His alphabet board, Baba said, “If people who have not seen me personally see me through the medium of film – it will help them in the process of liberating them from maya (illusion).”

To plan these programs, which were the focal point of his life, Dennis based them on any date related to Baba’s life or related to the mandali. He also always considered regular guests who had some connection to a particular film or person in the film and chose those films for them. Not everyone knew this, but every week Dennis sat at the Lagoon cabin and inwardly asked for Baba’s help in deciding what film he should play. Even though he perhaps knew the film by heart, he practiced narration (which he took on from his dear friend and program companion, Marshall Hay, after he passed) and re-watched it. He did sound checks every single time. As for choosing musicians to play before a film, Dennis worked months in advance to look ahead at the reservations chart to see who would be here. He was very mindful to give a chance to a guest musician who might not have played for a while.

Apart from imbibing Elizabeth’s meticulousness, the programs on Center reflected the sole fact that Baba is in charge. A program only gently supported the budding or already existing relationship that a guest had with Baba and for that reason programs were intentionally minimalistic with mindfulness around over-programming to not fill up the guests’ day with too much stimulation on their retreat.

In the early years, the confines of the technology blended with the intent of purity of content. Being so close to Baba’s earthly advent, we had access to His films and that of His close disciples in their raw form. The unadulterated content, often without sound, without music, or any kind of commentary that tells the audience what to think or feel, created a response that came directly from the depths of their hearts and from the individual spot that they found themselves in relationship to Meher Baba. The unquestionable fact remained that the focus was always on Baba as if He were present in the building giving Darshan.

The fast development in the world of technology in recent times brought a hard fact to light. Why would people come to a program if they could watch widely available Baba films at home? Dru Swinson who partnered with Dennis on programs and was also his technical assistant says, “To me, the Elizabeth and Kitty model means that no matter where else you can find it, on a small screen of your phone or tablet, there is a certain feeling you are going to get in that room that you cannot get elsewhere. At the Meeting Place people come intentionally to watch Baba as a group at His Center where He was in His physical form. And every image is important.”

Dennis’ sincerity, sacred sense of the responsibility laid on him by Baba, and his oozing love for Baba through such astute dedication has touched so many hearts of staff and guests alike. To me, Dennis’ work represents an era of purity where no clever musings of the mind, which likes to jump to interpretation and judgment, were allowed to come between the lover and Beloved. I will always remember him as just that – the holder and gatekeeper of that purity while Baba gave and still gives Darshan to His lovers without fail.