[247.1] AN ABIDING HOPE

An all-Canadian opera, Lloyd Burritt's Dream Healer, based on Timothy Findley's novel Pilgrim, will have its world premiere on 2 March 2008 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver. It is a production of the Chan and the University of British Columbia, marking the university's centenary and the Chan's 10th anniversary.

There's no knowing what Findley would have thought of the opera, but it seems fitting that this is the novel Burritt chose after that long-ago trip to Little Sister's. Findley dedicated Pilgrim to a composer, Michael Tippett. Tippett died in 1998, a year before Findley published his novel about dying and not dying.

For Pilgrim's dedication, Findley quoted Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time - for which Tippett himself wrote the libretto.

"Here is no final grieving," the dedication reads, "but an abiding hope."

UBC is also holding a Dream Healer Symposium on Psychiatry and Mental Health beginning Monday evening 3 March. Details at http://www.dreamhealer.com.

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