The Presence of the Presence

It is quite beyond me why what I first remember after deciding to write about what for me is the heart of the Jewish-Arab village of peaceful cooperation Neve Shalom – Wahat al Salam – is a scene from a novel by Peter Weiss about exile in Scandinavia. The ending has always felt profoundly erotic and heart-warming to me- although the only other comment I read about the same scene viewed it quite differently. The book in fact ends with the author, the outsider, viewing in the dark, through a window how the coachman’s shadow melted with the maid’s shadow. I can understand the other reviewer emphasising the loneliness of the person in exile being heightened through being an outsider and in the shadows at that. However, he who looks in, gives them, leaves them privacy by referring to their shadows only while observing some intimacy as the two copulate on the kitchen table. Strange as it may seem, for me the author in describing that scene is entering a dialogue with it. There may be sadness, even envy, but in the gaps in description there is also some tenderness.

All this seems to have very little to do with Neve Shalom’s Place of Contemplation, Doumiah, Place of Silence, newly built when I visited in 1994. Bruno, the founder, had been an engineer before he became a priest. He designed the dome.

an alien at home

looking in on

new light

The Doumiah remains Bruno’s legacy. There is nothing special about the place but when you sit there. Overlooking barren land and the monastery. Really, you are staying in to look in on your own reality, as part of the globe.

~ by Barbara S on April 27, 2021.