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Transcripts from the 2005
Albuquerque Retreat and Reunion:
Saturday Evening Concert
Gerdean: “This is an honor for the Rio Rancho TeaM base, to host
you here and we have – as the Teachers have always said – come
closer by having this shared experience. This is something we
will be able to talk about for the rest of our lives, maybe
throughout eternity – “You remember the first Southwest TeaM R&R
at the Canossian Center in the south valley of Albuquerque, New
Mexico? I was there!”
[Dorenda Morse, a Concert Pianist from the Rio Rancho TeaM, is
introduced to the audience]
[Applause]
Dorenda: “This is the second movement of Beethoven’s Opus 27,
No. 2 Sonata. It is commonly referred to as the “Pathetique.”
[Dorenda plays “Pathetique” followed by applause]
>>>>>>>>>>>
Gerdean [transmitting]:
“I am the spirit of the descending son. This is indeed a
memorable gathering. This gathering of workers committed to the
field that the Father sends you into, as he sends me into your
midst.
This is a call to service. This is encouragement to you in your
hidden knowledge that you are born to serve, that through your
compliance to his will and dependent upon his power as your
source, you will do great things.
What are these great things? The music has said. The “Pathetique”.
Those of you who know the joy of the Father, you who have basked
in his presence and acknowledgement from him of your worth to
him as his ambassador and carrier of light, you who leave these
times of rejoicing and safety in the spirit, who by universal
law must relinquish this appreciation for divine relationship in
service to your fellows as you return to the field, this
supplies the Supreme. What this entails is reaching deep inside
to say, “Where shall I serve thee? How shall I serve thee? Send
me to your university that I may learn, and to your community
that I may do your bidding.” Thus given a place for your energy,
you are actualized, made stronger, and the Father has been
revealed one more time in the immensity of his creation. This
onward roll toward perfection is one that will not allow for
those who struggle as if alone to be left without guidance and
care. This falls upon the son who reaches back in deference to
the Father, in service to the son, that understands the power
inherent in descending into the realm where you will work to
reveal the Father through your actions to the children of time.
Not for sissies.
Many are called but few choose. Those of you who choose, blessed
be art thou. That we be able to assist in the reclamation, in
the discovery of that who is pathetic and breathes into him the
breath of life. This you can do through the Master and through
the Spirit, and this we shall do as we descend into the realm in
service.
Thank you for this opportunity to address you. Go in peace.
>>>>>>>
Dorenda: Bach’s 2nd Movement from the Italian concerto
>>>>>>
Men-O-Pah (also known as “Waya Wahili” in Cherokee): [In
Cherokee and in English] “Hello, my brothers and my sisters.
Good evening to you, and welcome to this place. I hope you
perhaps remember a few of these words from the native tongue of
my great-grandmother.
In order not to ramble, and to get straight to the point and put
a two-by-four across it and a ten-penny spike in it, I write my
thoughts out ….
Many things come and go as the years go by
Fads change every season
The years of life change our faces and our bodies
Yet the real … The Real … The eternal, the spiritual, never
changes.
If we learn, our knowledge increases as we travel the pathway of
life, for what we receive and learn from the time we are in our
mother’s womb through childhood and through coming of age,
adulthood, and the grandfather and the grandmother times, we
become more spiritual, as we develop ourselves to our greatest
potential.
The more I learn of the Real, the more I apply this knowledge to
my work, to my home life, to my personal life and my
relationship to others. This knowledge makes me a stable person,
so that when bad things happen to me or to those that I love, I
have a Real foundation under me, which will not fail. We hear
the lines of the old hymn, “in times like these, we need an
anchor. Be very sure, be very sure your anchor holds and grips
the solid rock, that rock is Jesus. Yes, he is the one.”
The pathway that we walk has many footprints on it of those that
we have known and have gone on before us and who have known the
power of our culture, the assurance of the eternal, the abiding
presence of the GrandFather Spirit. When we sing, [Native
American], there shall never be any bad medicine that can kill
the [Native American]. We know the power of the spiritual path,
the power of our ancestors who walked the infamous trail of
tears and sustained them and sustains us to this very day.
Here are the words of the philosopher and writer Alexander Pope.
He lived quite a long while ago. He made the remark, “Lo, the
untutored Indian who sees God in the clouds or hears his voice
in the wind. Yes, yes. Great Spirit whose voice I hear singing
in the wind, wind that gives the breath of life to all the
world, hear my prayer and find my little medicine song
acceptable.”
All we Indian tribes are rich in symbolism to express the
believe that they have and we all basically believe in one God,
one creator, one great loving GrandFather Spirit over all the
world. The Cherokee had their Father Creator and they called his
name Yo-wah, and I can see the semblance, I’m sure to our Hebrew
brothers who called his name Yah-weh. And, like them, this name
is very sacred, so that only a few of the shamans or medicine
men were allowed to speak it.
These < ? > beliefs, this God Fragment which is attached to
every one of us, lives in every one of us, but we have some
trouble to uncover it. Worship is of the heart. It is deep. It
is joyous. And it is personal. It is a real live current that
flows between each of us and our Creator, and we have the power
to choose, you and I. And so we may, by using our power of
choice, destroy our selves, but we may never destroy the love
that goes beyond and past all understanding.
It is there. It’s always there. Even when we are too stubborn
and intransigent to receive it, and I am reminded here about the
lines, again, of an old hymn, “Oh, love that will not let me go.
I would not hide myself from thee. I give thee back the life I
owe. Yet from its ocean depths, may fuller, richer be.”
I was interested to hear the remarks that our brother … Barry, I
believe; the one who came in last … talking about some work that
he is doing, listening to the Voice Within. I want to hammer on
that a little. When something on our mind rings a bell, that
warns us, then we do well to listen. What is it that wants to
lure us from the chosen path? Is it not from the evil side? It
runs like a rabbit. Every one of us has a sounding board, that
testing place, that directs our path. Like a compass, it points
the true direction, and we are foolish not to understand …
“Golaga” To ignore the impressions that are within us is like
trying to go through the door without twisting the knob first.
It is one thing to be dense; and quite another to be fully
determined to be lost in the wilderness and listen to the voice
within. It is there for a reason. Later on, you see, we will
have to say ‘something told me that I should do this or the
other. I should have taken this path, but I didn’t listen and I
didn’t do it.’
Great Spirit, let me always walk in beauty before thee. Make my
hands respect those things that you have made. Let me understand
the mysteries that lie buried deeply in every rock, every leaf,
every snowflake. Make my ear sharp that I may hear thee.
I told you last evening that I am from the woods. I am a wooden
Indian. I lived in the Great Shawnee Forest almost all my life.
On the winter evening the owls call on each other as the last
rays of the setting sun sink into a rosy glow, a silence steals
over the countryside and for a short while everything is hushed,
and in that near dark hour the wind brother lays down, and no
sound is heard. The whole forest listens, but the moment is
brief, and those of the daytime creatures, they find their place
of abode and the nighttime creatures start to awake. And for us,
the two-leggeds, it is a time to rest from our labor, find a
quiet place and let the pressures of life ebb away.
One of the great wonders of the universe is the rhythm and order
of nature, but even greater, perhaps, is the flexibility of the
human nature. We can move, we can think, we can project, we can
plan, we can see the whole thing, the whole picture before us,
and as the day wanes, we can put it all down and take on the
peace of nature.
History has a way of intruding on the present. Perhaps those who
read it will have a clearer understanding of what the American
Indian is by knowing what he was. They will be surprised to hear
the words of wisdom coming out of his mouth and of an individual
who had been stereotyped by the American myth as a ruthless
savage. Perhaps they will learn something about their own
relationship to the earth, to the earth brother, from people who
lived in balance and in harmony with nature, who were true
environmentalists, true conservationists. The Indians knew that
life was equated with the Earth Mother and her resources.
I say to you that the America that they knew was a paradise,
indeed, and they couldn’t understand and they couldn’t
comprehend why the intruders from the east were determined to
destroy everything that was Indian, and even the Earth Mother,
our America itself.
The American Indian has always loved a feast, long before the
pilgrims came to dinner.
When the missionaries came to tell them of the crucified Jesus,
the Chief stood up and said, “No, we would never do such a
thing. This Jesus sounds like a fine warrior. If he came to us,
we would ask him to sit down and feast with us.”
And so comes the invitation for the Feast of Days. That feast, I
say, begins every morning, when the sun pokes its head over the
crest of the mountain and sprays its golden rays on the valley
below, it is time to turn over a new leaf and celebrate a new
beginning. The way of the Cherokee is to know that the past is
gone. Though we are tied by a golden thread to it, it no longer
holds us captive and our feet are not stuck anymore in the mud
of the trail of tears.
[Native American] “There is no bad medicine that can ever kill
the [Native American]
Wahili. Eagle. Wahili flies again. We have a new understanding,
a new wisdom, and we dare to put down yesterday and reach for
the new day.
Early morning sunlight sets the frosted grass ablaze with gems –
topaz, emeralds, diamonds -- the heart is supremely rich and
lifted up and enlightened. Such mornings call us to brightness
of spirit, to healing of the deep earth that lay deep within us
and say, ‘step out and breathe in the peace. Turn up the palms
and give thanks and receive strength and wisdom for the new day
because nature thrives where humans fail and give up. The
negatives turn away. All around us the breathtaking scenes say
to us ‘You do the same.’
[Native American] “Thank you”
>>>>>
Dorenda: [Plays a third piece of music with an invitation to
transmit – no one accepts the invite]
Dorenda: “The first piece was Beethoven’s second movement of the
Pathetique sonata
The second piece was the second movement from the Italian
concerto by Bach
The third was the first prelude in C major from the first book
of the Well Tempered Clavier (Bach)”
“This next piece is the first Arabesque by Claude Debussy.”
[Sounds like waterfalls.]
[Dorenda plays followed by applause]
[next] A favorite Scott Joplin song – called “Bethina”
[Dorenda plays followed by a very enthusiastic applause]
“You want one more? Or do you want two more?” [Uproarious
response] “All right. One or two of these you will recognize
somewhat, probably right away.”
Dorenda plays
1. [Pink Panther type rendition of “Joshua Fit the Battle of
Jericho”]
2. [Dramatic piece…skulking, slinky, high-steppin “When the
Saints Go Marching In”]
[ followed by a Standing Ovation]
Encore: Dorenda’s “favorite” Scott Joplin Piece -- the Grand
finale.
Dorenda: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
>>>>>>>>>
Angus: “ Now you understand why every chance we get for our
Sunday meetings we have her play prior to our meetings. Awesome.
Awesome.
First of all, I want to invite everybody tomorrow morning, at
10:00, we are going to have a worship service in the chapel.
We need to be checked out of our rooms by noon. Before lunch.”
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