Birthdate: August, 1943 URS: December 1, 2024
Saphira Linden (1943 -2024)
A life of Creativity, Devotion, Service
What comes to mind as I bring Saphira present to my heart space is her remarkable life of unwavering dedication to creativity, healing and spiritual service.
Many know Saphira best by her collaboration with Pir Vilayat in crafting the Cosmic Mass, a theatrical celebration that wove together the threads of all religions into a tapestry of universal harmony.. She was a wonderful creative match to manifest Pir Vilayat’s cosmic vision.
As the director of an avant-garde theater company in Boston she used the stage to explore and illuminate the profound depths of human existence, inspiring unity and uplifting countless hearts.
Not only was she a trailblazer in the creative arts, Saphira also excelled as a therapist, guiding others towards healing and wholeness through innovative and compassionate methods.
Above all, Saphira was a devoted mother—not only to her beloved sons, but also to the extended family she cultivated at her Sufi center in Boston. Her nurturing spirit, wise guidance, and boundless love touched many lives, leaving an enduring legacy of light.
Her presence will be deeply missed, but her work, love, and inspiration will continue to ripple through the lives she so profoundly shaped.
Submitted by Taj Inayat
Saphira’s Accomplishments
In the midst of a masters degree program in theater and directing, Saphira was inspired by Julie Portman in 1967 to found together Theater Workshop Boston as an experimental theater. They hoped to break down barriers between actors and audiences. They experimented with ways to bring audiences actively into the theatrical experience. They produced plays such as Riot, Tribe, and Creation addressing contemporary issues of racial tensions, unjust treatment of native peoples, and pollution of nature and human values. These productions engaged audiences in the issues by experiencing directly the injustices. The experimental theater gained national attention when Saphira appeared in the PBS television series Artists in America.
A turning point came in her career when she attended a Sufi camp in Arizona in the early 70s. She was inspired to orient her theater work to the Sufi vision of the awakening of humanity. Her next production was Praise, Three Rings from Jerusalem, a street performance in New York City engaging passersby in creating a vision of peace for the Holy Land. Back in Boston, she adapted this theme into a giant board game played by families.
After working in the public schools with children with learning disabilities, she created a healing production called Sunsong in which the actors portrayed a dysfunctional family and children with help from their parents and actors created healing gifts based on the elements.
Saphira has often told the story of impulsively jumping on a flight with Pir Vilayat so that she could continue brainstorming how his vision of the Cosmic Celebration could be translated into a theatrical pageant. This production involving hundreds of murids became a spiritual practice for each participant. Pir Vilayat met with the participants individually and assigned them roles according to his intuition.
The Cosmic Celebration was performed in many places, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the mountains of Chamonix and most notably at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in October 1975 as part of the World Spiritual Summit Conference at the UN.
Theater Worship Boston became Omega Theater and evolved into an educational and therapeutic center for the arts. Saphira worked closely with the founders of psychodrama and Omega Theater was awarded a certification program to train therapists in psychodrama. Saphira also taught a master level course on drama therapy at Lesley University. In 2012 she was awarded the North American Drama Therapy Association Teaching Excellence Award.
She compiled articles by many artist/therapists documenting how they applied the practice of psychodrama in practical ways for many settings. These articles were published in The Heart and Soul of Psychotherapy, an acclaimed book in the field of psychodrama edited by Saphira.
Finally, Saphira and Susan Nisenbaum Becker together developed a production called Motherblood which dramatized an encounter between two mothers from Israel and Palestine whose sons had died as a result of the conflict. They took this performance to the Holy Land and confirmed with Israeli and Palestinian audiences that the dialog fairly represented both sides. Of course, their mutual suffering brought them closer together and spoke to the hearts of the audience.
submitted by Suhrawardi Gebel
