Sophiology and the Unnatural Response to Nature

'Mary Magdalene' by Georges de la Tour

If I have learned one thing from this pandemic, it is that the primary recourse of most of the archons running the world is to flee nature and what is natural and cleave to the unnatural as the salvation of our souls. The unnatural idols range from the Messiah-like vaccine promised to arrive some time in the future and deliver us all from the scourge to the Ahrimanic desire to track people and isolate them “for their own safety” to the more simple “remedy” of sequestering people in their homes—by force if need be—under the mistaken assumption that nature is somehow unable to get in as if a safe zone in a game of tag, even though New York City recently discovered that most new cases of the virus are infecting those in their homes.

We fear nature, and due to our fear we attempt to dominate her. This has been the trajectory of science at least since the seventeenth century. Nature, formerly spoken of in decidedly feminine terms as Natura, needed to be dominated like any other willful female to the misogynistic and mechanistic thinking of early modern science, a practice that persists in all but semantics today. As Mary Midgley so clearly describes it,

“The literature of early modern science is a mine of highly-coloured passages that describe Nature, by no means as a neutral object, but as a seductive but troublesome female, to be unrelentingly pursued, sought out, fought against, chased into her inmost sanctuaries, prevented from escaping, persistently courted, wooed, harried, vexed, tormented, unveiled, unrobed, and ‘put into question’ (i.e. interrogated under torture), forced to confess ‘all that lay in her most intimate recesses,’ her ‘beautiful bosom’ must be laid bare, she must be held down and finally ‘penetrated,’ ‘pierced’ and ‘vanquished’ (words which constantly recur).”1

I could get into a whole Freudian thing about the method for injecting a vaccine here, but I will resist.

Coinciding with the scientific domination model during this COVID phenomenon has been a perhaps more troubling move toward political or governmental domination. Government authorities assert their power over their unruly charges with all the authority of a first-year elementary school teacher with no classroom management skills and a host of unacknowledged anger issues, while the populace wobbles between obedience and rebellion. As Wilhelm Reich observed, “People fear or admire what they cannot grasp.”2 It’s a recipe for disaster.

Trying to divorce ourselves from the natural world will not work, because we can’t. And no one needs expertise in quantum mechanics to realize this.

It is telling, I think, that the places hardest hit by the COVID phenomenon are places most alienated from nature and most afflicted by varieties of pollution, cities mostly. And the fact that most people are the victims of diets also characterized by the scientific domination of nature—and often the exclusion of nature—and thus even more susceptible to diseases (also known these days as co-morbidities). American diets, for example, are rife with unnatural products which contribute to hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stroke, and so forth. As an aside, one of my sons worked as a hospital orderly through college. One day he told me that his job taught him how harmful diets contributing to obesity are: the greatest share of the patients he had to move at the hospital were morbidly obese, their health and quality of life destroyed by the garbage they consumed sold as “food.” Interestingly, yesterday I was listening to an interview with two physicians on NPR about the disproportionate representation of people of color in C-19 deaths—but nobody said anything about diet. Poor diet, we could say, is the engine that drives our medical economy. I have yet to hear Dr. Fauci or Bill Gates talk about nutrition.

Illness and death, I am sad to report, are part of the natural world, as much as we fear them. All generations have been awed by the mysteries of illness and death, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh no less than the Psalmist or Dylan Thomas. But we have an antiseptic relationship to death—even bodes of the deceased are disappearing from funerals, not to mention the tragedy of so many people dying during this pandemic deprived of Last Rites and holy burial, unaccompanied on their journey to the undiscovered country. What an inhuman and unnatural tragedy.

It was not always thus. Julian of Norwich, for example, actually prayed that she could become ill in order to draw closer to Christ. Her shewings, or revelations, in fact, occurred during an illness when she came very close to death. And her take away, as told by Jesus: “All shall be well.” This way of being is absolutely foreign to our current ethos. We don’t think all shall be well. Not ever. Instead we tell ourselves creation myths about a “new normal.”

St. Francis of Assisi also acknowledged the reality of death as part of life. Toward the end of his relatively short time on this earth, he added a verse to his Canticle of All Creatures in honor of Sister Death:

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin. Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will, for the second death shall do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord and give Him thanks and serve Him with great humility.

It may be that part of our forgetting how to live is attributable to our forgetting how to die. Did the Master not say “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted”?

Sophiology, at its core, celebrates the shining of God through Creation via his Mediatrix, Sophia. The world, as the Lord says in Genesis, is good. Christ, the Lord of the Dance, is that goodness incarnate: “He has the full power of the God-given Life force. He understands the birds and he knows how to distinguish a grain of rye from a grain of wheat.”3

We can get through this, but we can’t hide from it.

A useful interview with an MD who understands both virology and nature.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), 77.

2. Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ: The Emotional Plague of Mankind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), 21.

3. Ibid., 33.

“Great Pan is...alive!”

Cernunos

“Once upon a time,” begins Eugene McCrarrher in The Enchantments of Mammon, “the world was enchanted. Rocks, trees, rivers, and rain pulsated with invisible forces, powers that enlivened and determined the affairs of tribes and empires as well. Though beholden to the caprice or providential design of a variety of spirits and deities, the world of enchantment could be commanded by magic or humbly beseeched through prayer.”1 He goes on to argue that first the Protestant Reformation, followed by the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so forth (we’ve heard it all before) further alienated human beings from the visible and invisible commonwealths of Things.

Of course, not everyone has been down with Project Disenchantment and a Counter Enlightenment, a Counter Modernity, though its adherents have been relatively small in number, has always resisted the totalizing claims of the false modernity we take for real. This was clearly the case with Hermeticism in the seventeenth century, with various forms of mysticism (though not all) through the centuries, through the persistence of folk religion and magic, and, obviously, through the various iterations of Sophiology.

At its simplest level, this counter stream is dedicated to the idea of the sacred. Modernity, it seems, has no room for a sacredness not attached to profit or efficiency—as is most disgustingly obvious in the anxieties Wall Street exhibits concerning sales numbers leading up to Christmas—but such is not sacred anyway. Sacredness is found when we enter the temenos, the space at the threshold of the visible and invisible worlds. As Patrick Harpur explains,

“We humans can make anything sacred. To the profane mind, nothing is sacred—the soul of the forest is only a metal pipe, the blood of Christ only weak wine. Everything depends on the creative act of imagination. The more we imbue the world with imagination, the more the world is ensouled—and the more soul it returns to us, singing with meaning.”2

Disenchantment—as well as sacredness—is also a matter of disposition. What is our state of receptivity?

One example of this is in the responses to a story told by Plutarch (De defectu oraculorum). According to the historian, a sailor named Thamus heard a voice, apparently at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, that told him, “Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.” The early Christian historian Eusebius interpreted this utterance as proof that the ancient gods, Pan the one most venerated by the agrarian peasantry, were no more as a result of Christ’s death and resurrection. There is another tradition, however, that suggests the voice was actually speaking of Christ and was horrified at the death of the God of Nature; that the God of Zoë, of Life, could die. I prefer the second tradition, just as I prefer to think of Christ as the Lord of the Dance, He Who Lives.

But the death is a very real thing, as it was to the disciples and as it was to voice which spoke to Thamus. But He Who Lives is simultaneously He Who Dies. And we all have blood on our hands. As the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich wrote in the 1950s,

“In Christ man has searched for the key to his own nature and his own fate for two thousand years. In Christ man has found the access to a possible solution of the tragedy of mankind. Christ had been murdered long before Christ was born. And Christ continued to be murdered every single hour of every single year since. Unless Christ’s fate is understood fully and practically, the murder will continue with no letup. Christ’s fate represents the secret tragedy of the human animal.”3

For Reich, Christ is the representative par excellence of Life, both bios and zoë, and in our daily, hourly murder of Christ we simultaneously murder life. The ways in which we murder life are the ways in which we murder Christ. It is that simple. We murder him through all of our life-denying commitments—in the poisonous methods of conventional agriculture (which may have even had a hand in the current pandemic), in the toxicity created by industry, in the technological colonization of the human person, in our life-killing economics (and, sorry, socialism and communism don’t get a pass here). Indeed, as Sergei Bulgakov has written concerning the latter, only a sophianic economy (which can only be simultaneously a sophianic ecology) is concerned with life: “The purpose of economic activity is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in Truth.”4

Great Pan, then, is really alive. But maybe we should stop killing him.

1 Eugene McCrarrher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity (Harvard, 2019), 1.4

2 Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul (Evolver Editions, 2011), 50.

3 Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), 54.

4 Sergei Bulgakov, The Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans. and ed. Catherine Evtuhov (Yale University Press, 2000), 153.

THE METAXU BETWEEN CHRIST AND ORPHEUS, LIFE AND DEATH: AN INTERVIEW WITH THERESE SCHROEDER-SHEKER

'Hope' by George Frederic Watts, 1886

This is an excerpt from my recent interview with Therese Schroeder-Sheker for JESUS THE IMAGINATION, VOL 3: CHRIST-ORPHEUS. You can read the entire interview and an essay by Therese in the print version.

When Therese Schroeder-Sheker was an undergraduate music student working as an orderly in a geriatric nursing home, she saw at firsthand how death in contemporary culture is outsourced, how the elderly and declining among us are warehoused in containment environments until finally sent to the ultimate salvage facility. She knew this way of going about things was wrong (I think, somewhere within us, we all do), yet she didn’t possess an answer until the day when she found herself present to the death of an elderly (and often cantankerous) emphysema patient. Not exactly knowing what to do, she nevertheless did what she knew: she held the man and she sang. Inspired by the moment and by the death that unfolded before her, she sang the entire Mass of the Angels, the Adoro te devote of Thomas Aquinas, the Ubi Caritas, the Salve Regina, and the Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In this combined moment of song and prayer, Schroeder-Sheker not only helped a fellow human being enter the spiritual world, she also discerned her vocation. That is, she heard a call. Or, more accurately, one of the three calls that have shaped her vocation. The first, she tells me, was the Eucharist, the second was the dying man, and the third was harp.

Born in Detroit to immigrant parents (her mother was from Ireland and her father from Malta), Schroeder-Sheker was initially an art major, but changed to music when a sensitive Jesuit professor at Denver’s Regis College recognized she had a wonderful ear for music and encouraged her to pursue it as a course of study. She studied piano, woodwinds, and composition, but after completing her baccalaureate and spending time in Europe, she came home and commissioned her first harp. At the age of twenty-six she switched from piano to harp as her primary instrument (to which she subsequently added the psaltery and voice). Three years later, she made her debut at Carnegie Hall as a harpist and singer.

Schroeder-Sheker’s recordings (under the Windham Hill and Celestial Harmonies labels among others) and touring schedule supported her bi-vocation in what she eventually termed music-thanatology, the art of assisting the dying through music, and to this end she founded The Chalice of Repose Project, the first music-thanatology organization in the world.

Schroeder-Sheker’s clinical work is deeply rooted in Cluniac spirituality, though her grounding in medieval music and spirituality should not be understood as academic or theoretical in the least. Indeed, her work’s vitality is marked by an absolute attentiveness to the present moment, be it in life or death, which is what gives such immediacy and vitality to her project.

I first encountered Schroeder-Sheker’s work at least twenty-five years ago when my wife bought a CD from Celestial Harmonies that featured her beautiful track “Rosa Mystica,” a haunting musical prayer featuring her transcendent contralto accompanied by psaltery and bells. I fell in love with that piece, that voice. A few years later when I was working as a Waldorf teacher, I invited psychologist Robert Sardello to give a talk at a conference and in conversing with him I learned about his work as a faculty member at The Chalice of Repose Project; he told me a great deal about Therese’s clinical work. Then, three years ago I began communicating with Therese when she contacted my publisher after reading one of my books. So, it’s safe to say that she has inhabited my soul for a good long while. We conducted this interview over the course of a few weeks, via email and telephone.

MM: Therese, when I think of your work, I can’t help but think of you as a kind of Orpheus figure, but I also know you well enough to know that this would make you wince. Can you speak to your roots? Whether mythic or sacramental or both? Can you say something about your spiritual formation? What individuals or elements were influential to you as a young person emerging into the larger professional world? And, after four-plus decades of career and vocation, has any of that early influence remained? Sustained work and travel, sustained scholarship, and cumulative life experience have allowed you to encounter many different voices and cultures. How has diversity shaped you? As a contemplative, a musician and composer, a writer?

TSS: Well, one Orphic element that I do know inwardly is the grief that comes with the loss of the Beloved. Thankfully, the transformative possibilities that arise from going all the way through (not around) that kind of loss are vast. Eventually, one can choose a life of faithfulness and fine-tuning. Those are Orphic themes and signatures. Other than that, I’m basically a gal from Motown.

I was born in Detroit yet raised in Chicago, and my earliest memories of beauty are intrinsically tied up with Carmel. From my mother I received the power of the word, whether written, spoken or sung. She also brought me to the Carmelites in Des Plaines, and even at the age of eight, I was sort of pierced with the beauty of Carmelite monastic culture and monastic liturgy. On top of that, my mom encouraged and supported the love of reading. She was resourceful and subversive about the need to resist television, so books and reading were her strongest antidote. From my father I received a gift of equal creativity and vitality. He thought imaginatively, spoke in pictures, and said repeatedly: You can do anything if you love it. He didn’t suggest contingencies such as: you can do something once you’re an adult...or, when you get married you can…or, after you get your degree you can…. This manner of speech was not part of his makeup. Nor did he point to the exterior conventional markers that seem to convey institutional validation or imply some kind of collective authority, but rather, he taught about the transformative power of love which is something one can nurture and generate within, regardless of circumstances. The main thing to relay is that he was a scientist, fully capable of data analysis, he was a walking slide rule, yet he functioned imaginatively.

For instance: as a girl, I had a terrible time with math and assumed that this must mean that I was stupid or deficient. My dad came home from the office one day and saw me struggling at the table where I was frowning and sputtering over fractions. “Honey, I see what the problem is! You don’t love it. Math is a game, only a game. Let me help. I can show you how to love it….” He then proceeded to translate all mathematical abstractions into living images and the whole entangled mess unraveled into a shimmering ribbon that was a source of joy and elegance. Boom. Overnight—D-minus pouty-face to A-minus gleam.

My sense of things is that the parental inheritance I received was simply perfect for who or what or how or why it is that I breathe and live. These were the very currents I truly needed to sail the vessel that was to become not just life but my particular life, so I feel gratitude and awe for their attunement, their insights and intuitions….

Herself

MM: It seems that you don’t separate life from work, or music from prayer, or clinical care from vocation. They are all interconnected. So let me start with music. The music you have composed and recorded—and the Catholic culture in which you were raised—I hear your connections to Tradition in the music you embody, and yet you go beyond. Seamlessly. Distinctly. Can you say something more about Catholic sensibilities, or about the composers who have been formative for you, or about your relationship to harp or voice?

TSS: That’s a big swath. Let me try. After we left Detroit and moved to Des Plaines, I attended Mass every day of my life, summer and winter, from second grade to eighth grade graduation, because I could walk to Mass, needed no parental driving. I wanted to do this; no one pushed it. It was lovely to get up early, make tea for my dad, and then walk to Mass before school. I sang in the parish choir for daily mass and loved it, and my mom drove me to Carmel many weekends, so the beauty of monastic liturgy gradually became metabolized. It sealed me. You must know what this means. You literally breathe it in, breathe and phrase the exact text and content.

Translated, this means (among many other things) that every fiber of being was not only being sculpted in music, but raised inside modality, modal music. (Modal music is very nuanced toward degrees of light and dark, and is very sensitively colored). The chant literature at that time was pre-Vatican II, and reflected the Latin texts, yet remained largely unmetered. The chant literature I heard was suffused in timelessness, this sense of the eternal was palpable in the shape of the melody and the meaning of the texts. In addition, the transition from being someone who attended Mass to someone who became Eucharistic took place early on, and deeply. I remain a Eucharistic person, and note that that can be very different from one’s relationship to an institution. I never confused the two realities. I mean, I don’t conflate the direct contact intimacy with Christ that is so possible in prayer with the relationship one might have to a large impersonal and structured institution.

MM: But your composition teachers. Surely they asked you to become informed by and conversant with tonality, and polytonality, and atonality, and many schools of composition?

TSS: Yes. Every period from antiquity to the 20th century. And, thankfully, some of the British composers unashamedly explored modality and polymodality even after Schoenberg, not as a throwback, but as an advanced form of recollection. As a lover of music, someone who is always still learning from the nature and significance of music, I listen to music from radically different time periods and cultures, written tradition and oral tradition, and approach them with few preconceived notions. I cannot say enough for Bach, Mahler, Scriabin and Finzi. The same is true for the Bulgarian choirs and the music of Zimbabwe.

As a performer, I have always found myself personally moved, startled and changed by the possibilities arising from the margins and edges, from the two farthest shores—ancient and modern. Something from ancient Greece is at times as compelling to me as an Olivier Messiaen or a Paul Hindemith. But that being said: I don’t want to live on the planet without Bach. Musically, to me, Bach is in equal parts terrestrial and cosmic, something like the center as well as the periphery, the heart as well as the North, South, East and West of body, soul and spirit. He developed his horizontality as deeply as his verticality, and I have never stopped learning from him. And of course, I love the contemporary metaphysical minimalists: Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki. They allow you to breathe and expand while deepening, and in spiritual terms, I think of them as the masters of recollection....

... Years later, as an artist and scholar, I would study and metabolize the works of the Renaissance master Marsilio Ficino, who understood Plato and the healing nature of the self-accompanied song. So it is that we discover and rediscover lineage, in its deepest and broadest sense, always emerging like a fresh spring, and perennially going underground again whenever the waters become muddied or too compromised. After every period of desiccation, it re-emerges again when and where the time is right: usually miles and light-years away.

Therese in a clip from a 1991 television broadcast. Lyrics below.

For the Roses  

(text and music TSS)

He was a drummer one summer

with time on his hands.

And all that mattered was scattered

like Wastelands.

I never knew what a darkened lie

could do

But then the clock stopped

With no child in my arms:

I held roses.

On a bright stage for no wage

we were playin’ for peace.

And in the cafes those sweet days

held Love’s lease.

We never know where a rose might bloom

or grow.

But when your heart stops to the beat of a drum:

You’ll hear roses.

I hope this finds you and binds you

to the part of your soul

that you tasted but wasted:

On old roles

That you needed but conceded:

to old roles

Still you held it and then melted:

Like rose-gold.

All of the wounds from the thorns of dark desire,

they dissolve now and they shine in my  eyes:

Much like roses.

You’re such a liar

but your voice on the wire:

Would be roses.

And when you hear this,

please don’t fear what you’ve missed:

Just send roses.