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A chorister's reflections

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Quam Olim Abrahae

"O Lord, to pass from death to that life which of old you promised to Abraham and to his seed.” translation from Schirmer score.

Shulamit asked us one rehearsal to feel the emotions which each part of the requiem elicited with relationship to our lives.  During that rehearsal this is what arose for me, while singing Quam Olim Abrahae.

There was a time when my daughter was hospitalized for 81 days with doctors telling me nearly daily that she was dying.  I knew if I believed them, she and I would both be lost.  As competent as I always felt, I realized I was up against my limit of anything I could do. Likely for the first time ever, I handed over ALL of my desire to control the situation, and truly surrendered the outcome to God.  I simply held her Light and mine, and one image of myself sitting in the audience of a future lecture she was giving about this period of her life.

Each day, I also had the image of myself as Abraham in the bible, offering up his son Isaac to God when commanded to do so.  In the biblical story, three times Abraham is called: by God telling him to sacrifice Isaac, by his son Isaac, who asks where the lamb is to sacrifice, and by God telling him to stop the sacrifice of his son.  Each time he answers with the Hebrew word, Hineini, meaning 'I am here.  I am ready.’ Each of the 81 days, I found myself embracing this phrase as the lesson of this biblical story, and it became what I held onto as the only safe place to live from during that period of my life. Perhaps it may be the only place to live life from in these chaotic times as well.  Never applying what has been, the past, to what will be, the future, but rather solely existing in the NOW state of Hineini, 'I am here' and 'I am ready’.

I spent 10-16 hrs a day by her side holding this attitude.  And my daughter is fine and thriving today.  Two days a week, I’m caring for her daughter, my 3 yr old grandchild in Santa Cruz.

I saw this as exactly what allowed me to ‘pass from death to that life which of old you promised to Abraham and to his seed’, both, with my daughter’s illness, and with giving me a way to enter into fearlessness in our present chaotic times.

This is what I thought of singing Quam Olim Abrahae that day.

For me, it is also the ’secret’ of why Jews read this biblical portion each year for their New Year’s portion.  Hearing, I am here! I am ready! (Hineini) to enter their new year, no matter what it brings.

Agneus Dei



The other piece I reacted to on a deep emotional level that same rehearsal day, was the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God.

As we were singing that piece, this is what the currents of my thoughts and emotions touched upon.

My husband of 25 yrs died suddenly and unexpectedly in six hours, with nothing wrong.  Headache.  Unconscious in an hour.  Dead in six hours.  A hemorrhagic stroke.  Bizarrely it happened while I was listening to Jill BolteTaylor speaking on YouTube, describing her hemorrhagic stroke.

We had ranches, and at the time of my husband’s death, we had 100 sheep, a goat, a llama, and a horse.  I somehow managed to keep all that going for a year after he died. Our kids grew up helping with the lambs and sheep shearing.  I would wager I’m the only member of this group, whose husband paid for our wedding with two sheep.  The clergy person we used gave his religious proceeds at that time to 4H boys clubs.  We delivered the sheep to them to raise.

Perhaps this Agnus Dei, the lamb of God, was this sacrifice of my husband, who was sweet and 'of the land’.  Each weekend for six months a year, he hand-irrigated 20 acres, awakening at two in the morning to change pipes. Perhaps the Agnus Dei were the sheep used to pay for my wedding.  Or perhaps the Agneus Dei were the whole of our flock, often given names.  We lost a third of the flock to coyotes, neighborhood dogs and eagles one year, until we procured the beautiful fuzzy brown llama.  After that point, no further innocent sheep and lambs were lost.

At one point a ewe died.  We brought her two lambs to the sport court at our Lafayette house, so the 4th grade class my son was in could come up the hill to our home to bottle feed them. My daughter would wake up to feed these two Agnus Dei during the night until they could thrive on their own at our ranch.  The ranch was in my husband’s forty-niner gold miner family from the mid-1800’s. He was a blood relative of Daniel Boone through his niece, California Real, the first girl child born in the mining camps.

Such were the emotional waves flowing through my being, singing of the Agnus Dei, lambs of God, which have flowed through the fabric of my life. 


Harmonious Offering from Sundari 

Cheryl Dembe


The Choice of Happiness,  

Glimpses from an Extraordinary Ordinary Scientific Mystical Life  

by Sundari Dembe, PhD

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