Perfect Peace

My dear Friends
I would like to share with you something that I heard from a friend some time ago, when I was staying with her by the coast in East Anglia. It was something that made a deep impression on me and is related to my Peacemaking work.

My friend told me that she had been walking along the sands, near the pier. Suddenly she saw a long line of women, an endless line, shoulder to shoulder and with a look of perfect peace on their faces. Surely a beautiful sign of the future?

In the Bible it is the women who have the tenacity and endurance in their personal relationships and in the hardships they have to face. We only have to take the Book of Ruth, and the covenant love between Ruth and her daughter Naomi. Ruth pledges to remain with her mother-in-law when she has been bereaved and lost her husband and her son, who was married to Ruth, from the Moabite people.

'Do not entreat me to leave you, or to go from following after you: wherever you go, I shall go. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you shall die, I shall die, and there I shall be buried.'

This capacity to live out different roles as women and to form close bonds, extends to the New Testament, to the relationship between Mary, pregant with Jesus, and her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, who leaps with JOY in the womb on encountering Jesus and his mother. In my own life I have experienced very close bonds with my female cousins. The relationship between Naomi and Ruth and Mary and Elizabeth transcends any boundaries of age, as they share a common suffering and a common vision.

It is my firm belief that the peace of this present world will come from the women. In Israel/Palestine at 12 midday each Friday, the 'women in black' stand silently at all the major crossroads, holding up banners of peace. We women from all cultures,religions and ages have the capacity and tenacity in our feminine way to carry a peacemaking process through. We must use all our nuanced resources at the pastoral as well as the intellectual level to bring this about.

Shabbat shalom, rest well
Sister Gila

Haydo

My dear Friends
I hope the group of Swedish people I met the other day will forgive me if the above spelling of their word for 'Goodbye' is incorrect. Ashamed to say it is the only word I now know in Swedish, despite its being my maternal grandmother's tongue. My mother, who lived until 97, but was not well travelled, remembered her childhood trips to Sweden, often across the Sound from Denmark, until just before she died.

She was taken to Joteboy (the Swedish name for Gothenberg) by my grandmother, whose Swedish Jewish family lived in Karlstadt, in the middle of Sweden on a lake, until the end of the Second World War, when we lose trace of them, at least on a family tree. We know that Henri Bergson, philosopher in Paris in the 1930's, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, came from this part of our family, of which we are very proud. I have since learned that his philosophy of the 'elan vitale', the life force or principle, spans the divide between Judaism and Catholicism.

But it was on a different theme that I wanted to talk about the Swedish connection, and, indeed, the Scandinavian countries as a whole. Including Iceland. Iceland may have gone bankrupt in the world's eyes, but it has not seemed to need Peace and Reconciliation. Why? I have asked myself on several occasions.

The Swedes gave me the clue. SILENCE. Scandinavian countries have a landscape and way of being which invites silence more than most other countries. We have to work at it here. I am not yet in Canada for good, but it seems that that silence is in the blood of those who live in cold countries-silence bred of beautiful landscapes, woods and water. When a friend of mine moved to Iceland, he showed me photos the like of which I had never seen equalled in beauty, I could only think of Paradise.

There are many kinds of silence. The silence which sometimes surrounds me where I live on the estate is an unnatural one, and usually precedes some kind of human storm. I have cultivated an inner silence and solitude through prayer, but which I am not very good at extending to the outside world in Cambridge. That must surely be my task if I am going to have patience to wait it out, before moving to Canada. and even there it will have to remain, cultivating silence.

Silence, in the sense of non-retaliation, can be a good weapon against violence, verbal or otherwise. I have always been one to intervene. For the sake of my sanity and my long term aims, I am going to invoke the help of a wise silence to attain an inner and outer peace.

Haydo!
Sister Gila
Does not a wise silence go with a still or deep JOY?

Feast of Tabernacles

My dear Friends
The primary motto of The Little Sisters of Joy is, as I have mentioned before,

'In the JOY of the Lord is your stronghold.'

Taken from the Book of Nehemiah, (Chapter 8, verse 10), in the Hebrew Bible, the context is a celebration of the newly constituted Jewish community, after they return from the Bablyonian exile. Ezra the scribe and Nehemiah have been instrumental in this: Nehemiah was granted permission by the Persian king, Ataterxes (Xerxes) whose cup-bearer he was, to return to Palestine after the destruction of the First Temple to 'rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.' How appropriate that is for the present day!

Nehemiah describes how the people start weeping with emotion when the Torah is read all day. What I did not realise until this week is that this all took place during the Feast of Tabernacles, one of the 3 'Foot' Festivals along with Passover and Pentecost. Foot Festivals becasue the people were making 'aliyah,' going up, that is a pilgrimage.

And the Feast of Tabernacles is still being celebrated today. The main focus is to remember how the Israelites were sojourners in the desert, leading to a more permanent place and the promised land. But if we read the book of Exodus carefully, we see that the promise of the Land contains a gentle warning: 'that you are sojourners in this land.' That is, temporary residents.

As we all are. As the New Testament states in the Book of Hebrews: 'there is no abiding city in this life.' The only real home is in the Divine, as I must remind myself, when Toronto starts feeling like the eternal city!

A makeshift shelter of beauty, that is what a Succoh, a booth on the Feast of Tabernacles is. But in our temporariness, our reliance on our love of God and each other, is a great JOY.

Love and Shalom and Chag Sameach, Happy Feast!

Sister Gila

Upbeat

My dear Friends
From time to time I pop into my favourite hotel in Cambridge, the Regent, a small family business run by Italians. The former owner, Mrs P, who lives on the premises, handed over the business to her children, a brother and sister, who run the hotel with love and hospitality. If I feel a bit blue to begin with when I come in, I am sure to be consoled with wise advice and pots of tea by the time I leave.

The place has a fabulous view over the green and towards the police station; Anglia Ruskin University beckons nearby. As a former Technical College, this was the very first place I attended as a student in Cambridge, in my first weeks here in 1982. I have fond and happy memories of my Foundation course in Music, and still know many of the people who taught me in those days. When I got to know Alexia, who came here to study, I revisited the place and love to sit in the library, open all hours and very warm and comforting.

Cambridge has many amenities, and it is good to be reminded of them. I am happy that I have just booked myself a cinema ticket at the Arts Picturehouse to see a film on Thursday-relaxing in the tiny bar area upstairs is always nice too. The Fitzwilliam Museum is free, and convenient for the University, Catholic church and a series of Colleges, to say nothing of the Graduate Centre, where I once spent a whole day practising, dressing and resting before giving a concert nearby in Pembroke College.

Gratefulness is happiness-I once read a book by a German monk living in America whith that theme. Somewhere deep inside I must be longing for the other side of the pond, but its not so bad here after all.

Good friends and good wine - nothing better than that-and I shared a glass by the river with a new friend just the other day.

Lechayim! To life!
Shalom from
Sister Gila

Armour of light

My dear Friends
Travelling 'accross the pond' to say nothing of almost crossing the country,East -West takes a bit of recovery time. So its chillout in a big way,with little expeditions out from time to time. I am enjoying the solitude,and there seems to be an Indian Summer in Cambridge, for which I am grateful, while I nurse my heavy cold. I notice about myself that I gaze at the trees which are definitely changing colour; I guess I feel I am in Canada. My dreams have been a little confused, with some lack of orientation, but when I wake I feel quite calm and reassured that some deeper process is gently moving me on.

There were some really tough patches this time on my trip, but I was rescued by 'the armour of light' which St Paul talks of in his Letter to the Romans. The breastplate of righteousness is another image he uses, this is surely the way we are all trying to achieve, as fellow companions along the way.

Words are not coming very easily at the moment; a good sign which means I am allowing my weakness to come through, so that I can regain my strength in the proper way.

A bientot! And thank you!
Shalom from
Sister Gila

Thank you for being my companions in the last few weeks; writing the Blog has been a great source of strength, whether you made your presence known or not.

Till the next time

My dear Friends
Well, its so long for now, the plane leaves tomorrow at 4.30pm and arrives on Saturday at 5 in the morning, sunrise and Resurrection. Happens to be the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, the channel of peace for so many things and people. As we are hoping to be.

It has been a time of Feasts, today is the Feast of the Guardian Angels, we had the Archangels a few days ago, with the Jewish New year in between! For the first time in ages, I have developed a really bad cold, which I have nursing at Gary and Emiko's, the beautiful guest house I discovered early on but in a roundabout way, and to which I will return, at their invitation, every time I come back.

But of course one day I will be here for good. Being ill has some advantages; I have been listening to Canadian radio-the great advantage in Toronto is that it is in English! While I used to enjoy struggling with French radio at home or in Paris, at least I can concentrate all my energies on adapting to the different culture! And I have been reclining in a really beautiful room, complete with a lovely desk which I have been happily writing on each evening.

The guests have been nice, occasionally a bit of a mixed bag, part of the experience. The people who came for the Film Festival have yielded to tourists, old timers, and people who have their elderly relatives in the neighbourhood.

So its so long for now to Susan in her Ten Editions Bookshop, one of the best anywhere, Gabriel in the Joy Internet Cafe, and my friends on Walmer road. Also to the nice girl working in the superior tea shop on bloor, where I met the charming and unusual Jewish elderly lady who said: 'I became myself when I came to live here in Toronto.'

I hope too, to add new dimensions to the self I have know for nearly 57 years. To mellow in this interesting town, and to find new ways of expressing myself and relating to others.

Next entry in England!
Love and Shalom
Sister Gila