Holy Saturday

My dear Friends
Woke up in the middle of the night (more my style in the last few years) and wrote my diary. Then I took a bath (my first in 3 weeks, only showers up until now) and then decided to have a little snack.I am in the apratment of a new Friend, strangely enough in the very block of apartments where I am planning to move once the immigration process is complete.So I have the chance to explore the incredible neighbourhood around me in the Annexe, 5 minutes from all transport, shops, restaurants, the folk club where my cousin Gordon has taken me twice before, and the university campus of St George only 15 minutes away.

On this day between Good Friday and the Resurrection I took my breakfast facing the window, next to the verandah, watching the beautiful trees, still surrounded by snow.And then I felt that something was missing: whenever I have felt really at home before, it has usually been in the Middle East, when the sound of crickets, or cicadas, to give them their proper name, has been overwhelming. First time I was in my cousin's house in Pardess Channah, near Tel Aviv, the whirring noise was so overpowering that i wanted to flee and go back to Scotland. Of course I didn't and spent the rest of that summer of 1968 very happily.

Now I stepped out onto the balcony to make sure that I could not hear any cicadas.And then I was given my cosmic present: a huge yellow moon, very low, through the trees, right in front of my eyes. 19 years ago on this day, I was preparing for my Baptism in the evening and could feel the whole of Creation stirring and moving from its darkness to light. With the cosmic Christ.

This is a beautiful and mysterious city. All cultures belong here. East and West, North and South and that is how the streets run. I know that when I go home I will feel differently to
what Yehudah ben Levi, the mediaeval Jewish writer wrote:

'I am in the West, but my heart is in the East.'

My own heart will remain very definitely Westward, for in the crisp acidic blue light of a Torontonian sky is contained all I ever knew of the East.

Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed!
Shalom from
Sister Gila