QUOTES FOR ETHER 6-10
Nancy Baird
Nancy Baird
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us."
Nelson Mandela, Inaugural Speech, 1994
"The rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash wove a wonderful tale about a kind of primordial, otherworldly light that came into being in response to God's first command, and that continued to trace its way through the history of the world...One version of the legend imagines that God placed a bit of this primordial light in a jewel [Hebrew: tsohar] God gave to Adam and Eve, who passed it down through the generations to Noah (who used it to light the ark), and eventually to Abraham, then Moses, to the desert sanctuary...to the Temple itself."
Rabbi Amy Eilberg, "Noah: Finding light in shadow of darkness," Jewish Weekly, Oct 18, 1996.
"On May 27, 1992, in Sarajevo, one of the few bakeries that still had a supply of flour was making and distributing bread to the starving, war-shattered people. At 4 p.m. a long line stretched into the street. Suddenly, a mortar shell fell directly into the middle of the line, killing 22 people and splattering flesh, blood, bone and rubble.
Not far away lived a 35-year-old musician named Vedran Smailovic. Before the war he had been a cellist with the Sarajevo Opera, a distinguished career to which he patiently longed to return. But when he saw the carnage from the massacre outside his window, he was pushed past his capacity to absorb and endure any more. Anguished, he resolved to do the thing he did best: make music. Public music, daring music, music on a battlefield.
"For each of the next 22 days, at 4 p.m., Smailovic put on his full, formal concert attire, took up his cello and walked out of his apartment into the midst of the battle raging around him. Placing a plastic chair beside the crater that the shell had made, he played in memory of the dead, Albinoni's Adagio in G minor, one of the most mournful and haunting pieces in the classical repertoire. He played to the abandoned streets, smashed trucks and burning buildings, and to the terrified people who hid in the cellars while the bombs dropped and bullets flew. With masonry exploding around him, he made his unimaginable courageous stand for human dignity, for those lost to war, for civilization, for compassion and for peace. Though the shellings went on, he was never hurt."
Paul Sullivan, "The Cellist of Sarajevo," Hope, March/April, 1996.
SCRIPTURES
Ecclesiastes 1:9 "There is no new thing under the sun."
Genesis 6:16 "A window shalt thou make to the ark..."
D&C 88:12 "Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space--"
Ether 6-10 - Nancy Baird - February 14, 2012(Audio)
