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At 4:00 A. M., I awoke with this supportive dream:
It was suppertime, Paris, France. I walked into a restaurant and recognized a fellow traveler from last year’s tour seated at a table near the entrance. I greeted him, but was unprepared for his enthusiastic response; he had been only an acquaintance. To my surprise, more tourists from that group also entered the restaurant and swelled the camaraderie among us. My new friends filled the lonely fissures in my heart. I felt whole.
My psyche gladdened me with this glimpse of camaraderie: a conjoining of male and female energies, an enlivening that contrasts with my waning physical energies.
The time of the dream, suppertime, alludes to the end of day/time, my present circumstances. The image of Paris, France suggests the Sacred Feminine, the former hub of Christianity with its multiple soaring cathedrals, many of which I’ve visited.
The fellow traveler, in Jungian terms, is a positive Animus figure: the Sacred in the disguise of my new friend. A slow trickle of male/female couples pull up chairs to the table and joins us, more evidence of the Sacred. Still the trekker, I welcome each day’s new sightings from my psyche
This dream supports the loneliness of my individuation, in process for decades. Never am I alone, existentially, and for that I’m grateful.
Ever since that crucifixion took place on Golgotha, outside of Jerusalem, in 33CE, the victim has been Romanized, theologized, even socialized into invisibility. But the original Hebrew texts and the four Gospels witness to what happened: the ignominious death of a Jewish teacher, Yeshuva, believed to have been the Messiah.
Questions, if asked today, still ponder the depths of this person, still recoil from
the revolutionary nature of his teaching that fired the hearts of his listeners toward radical change. First-century Judea, like or own was corrupted by materialism, secularism, and hedonism; similarly, the gap between the affluent and starving still persists.
Yet, into this morass comes an oratorio, The Passion of Yeshuva (2017), composed by the Persian-American Richard Danielpour. It was time: Yeshuva would not keep silence, having nudged this artist, years before, to present the last day of his life in all his Jewishness. In thirty-seven days, its first draft was composed. That was in 2014. Central to the narrative are the voices of Yeshuva’s Mother and Mary of Magdela.
Continued revision of the Hebrew scriptures and English amalgams from the gospels and the selection of two choruses and five soloists filled out the years until its premier in 2019 by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. The CD was released the following year and nominated for three Grammy Awards at tonight’s presentation: Best Engineered Album, Choral performance, and Contemporary Classical Composition.
However, such acclamation falls short of the substance of Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshuva. Within the oratorio, Yeshuva speaks. I’m still shivering …
A lover of silence, I found another in the Swiss theologian Ladislaus Boros (1927 – 1981):
True experience always comes about in withdrawal “from the crowd.” The original, true and proper attitude of the mind is, as Heraclites says, that of “listening to the truth of things…”
Our journey into the territory of being should be made in silence, with wondering, wide-open eyes. The fullness of truth and reality is revealed only to those who attain to a silence which covers every aspect of their beings, or who, in other words make their basic attitude toward the whole of being one of delicate and reserved courtesy…
For anyone who wishes to hear what is true and real, every voice must for once be still. Silence, however, is not merely the absence of speech. It is not something negative; it is “something” in itself. It is a depth, a fullness, a peaceful flow of hidden life. Everything true and great grows in silence.
Without silence we fall short of reality and cannot plumb the depths of being.
~ from GOD IS WITH US by Ladislaus Boros
Heart Whisperings 