‘The Virtues Are the Respect of Our Spirituality’: Pastor After Shen Yun

Audience members who attended a Shen Yun performance at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts on Dec. 23 appreciated the traditional values and spiritual aspects presented on stage.

“As the song said, tradition is good. And staying with the traditional sense of values and cultural norms that we have brings people together,” said Richard McDonald, an attorney. “In a way, that is difficult to maintain these days because of the separation that this pandemic is creating, and any opportunity for people to be brought back together culturally, I think is very important.”

“I do remember a part of the dance where they talked about getting back to your origins,” said Bob Eusebio II, a pastor. “We can very easily let go of the origins, like honoring our mother and our fathers, and we get caught up with honoring the world, and then we lose perspective. But when we can stop, maybe it's a situation in life, and I think in the performance, a lot of it was situations in life that wake us up and take us back to our origins, the traditions, the virtues are the respect of our spirituality.”

Under the Chinese Communist Party, much of the traditional culture of China was nearly lost. Shen Yun’s mission is to revive it through dance and music. The performance cannot be seen in China today.

“With the current government, I think that it may be difficult to preserve those traditions, especially as rising generations come up, maybe they don't know that as well. So it feels like someone who would need to do that to make sure that those long years in history would be preserved,” said Scott Aldous, a manager at Google.

“We live in a time where cultures of every kind, even our own in the U.S., are being crushed from political powers that really don't have any reason to have that extraordinary power in our lives. And we have to take that back,” David Leach, a manager at Cisco, said. “And we take that back by understanding the depths of our spirit and the depths of our connection to each other. And all of our cultures are interconnected. And we all share a common fate and a common purpose: to live to a higher good.”

“The performance also put in my heart the discipline of Shen Yun,” Eusebio said. “The discipline, the hard work from the dancing, but also the balance between the orchestra and the dancers. And I feel that discipline which we teach discipleship. Discipleship is being a student of our spirituality, of being consistent and visible every single day, not just once a week where we practice our faith, but it's consistent, and I found that in Shen Yun today.”

Shen Yun will perform in San Jose for two more days. They will head to Berkeley next.

NTD News, San Jose, California