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.  

JESUS THE IMAGINATION, VOL 3: CHRIST-ORPHEUS

JESUS THE IMAGINATION, VOL 3: CHRIST-ORPHEUS features, among others, the work of Emi Shigeno, Daniel Joseph Polikoff, Jim Stoner, Devan Meade DeCicco, translation by Jonathan Monroe Geltner, and an extensive interview with harpist, composer, and founder of music thanatology, Therese Schroeder-Sheker. The following is the introduction to the volume.

INTRODUCTION: THE KEEPER OF ZOË

In his fascinating discussion of the myth of Dionysos (Orpheus being a permutation of the god of wine), the twentieth-century Hungarian mythologist Carl Kerényi contemplates the importance of honey in Dionysian ritual. Dionysos, he writes,

“was said to have invented honey, and the ground on which his handmaidens, the maenads, danced was said to have flowed with milk, wine, and the “nectar of bees.” It was also said that honey dripped from the thyrsus staffs that the maenads carried. Before the feeding of the infant Dionysos, a privilege of his non-animal, sacred nurses, his lips were sprinkled with honey.”1

Honey, a natural preservative, symbolizes the zoë (indestructible life) Kerényi holds to be the preeminent quality of Dionysos. C.G. Jung, working similar terrain, relates the story of the Roman writer and rhetorician Aelian (AD 175–235) who preserved the head of his deceased friend Archonides in a jar of honey for use as an oracle—a practice also said to have been employed with the head of Orpheus following his tragic encounter with the maenads.2 Honey, to borrow a notion from Goethe’s Mephistopheles, is a very special fluid.

The resonances of this mythos with the Judeo-Christian tradition are easy to detect. The Israelites left the desolation of Egypt for a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:17), and there is evidence that milk and honey also figured into early Christian sacramental life.3 John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, was beheaded at the bequest of an Israelite maenad; and Christ tells us that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (zoë), a life indestructible.

Other resemblances abound. Orpheus, according to the myth, descended into Hades to retrieve his wife Eurydice (her name means “wide-ruling”) from the realm of Death. Christ, too, descended into Hell: from which he rescued humanity. And, even more than Dionysos, Christ is the god of wine: for his blood is drink, indeed, and unless we drink it and eat his flesh we have no life (zoë) in us (John 6:53).

But there’s more. As W.K.C. Guthrie observes, Orpheus “civilized” the often bloody religion of Dionysos through a kind of reform, combining it with more of the propriety characteristic of Apollonian worship. Christ, the true Lamb of God, offered himself as the final and eternal sacrifice, obviating the need for blood offerings. Unlike most heroes of the Classical age, Orpheus “was always on the side of civilization and the arts of peace” and—very much like Christ— his “outstanding quality is a gentleness amounting at times to softness.”4 He was an important figure in farming and husbandry: for culture as well as cultus is unthinkable apart from agriculture. I have often thought that the further Christianity has strayed from the agricultural cycle it has simultaneously strayed from Christ—and into politics.

The synergy between Christ and Orpheus is no new discovery. Images of Orpheus are found in the catacombs, often in the guise of a shepherd: a cipher for Christ. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Western artists, poets, and composers—among others Apollinaire, Cocteau, Delville, Stravinsky, and Rilke (included in this volume)—revisited the constellation of images around Orpheus in response to the horrors they beheld as the violence unleashed through the massive powers of technology wreaked havoc on any conception of truth, beauty, or goodness. They invoked Orpheus, both prophet and emblem, as the Western world grew more and more intoxicated with the dark gifts of industrialization. To these these we could add modernity’s unholy and diabolical innovations in agriculture which have done so much harm to life on earth, and nowhere so devastatingly as in apiculture. Orpheus was a poet; and the evils of the twentieth century did much to destroy all the poetry embedded in the world, a tragedy that gradually metamorphosed in the twenty-first century to indifference. Orpheus torn apart, these forces subsequently focused their energies on destroying Christ.

But, as I said earlier, Christ is the keeper of zoë, which is indestructible. Poetry, true poetry (by which I mean all the arts, including agriculture) participates, if only as an echo, in this indestructibility. As Rainer Maria Rilke so eloquently articulates it, here in Daniel Joseph Polikoff’s sublime translation,

Furious, mad for vengeance, they tore you apart;

yet your voice echoes on in birds and in trees,

in lions and stones. There you sing still.5

Sing on.

1 Carl Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXV, 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 31.

2 C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 244.

3 See Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy (Grand Rapids, 2009), 20.

4 W.C.K. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement (1952; reprt., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 40.

5 From Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Daniel Joseph Polikoff (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015), 1.26, lines 9–11.

The Redemption Business: Easter and Biodynamic Farming

This article, in slightly different form, originally appeared in Church Life Journal.

Biodynamic farming, though it possesses many practical benefits—such as raw milk, fresh vegetables, fresh meats and eggs—has always been for me a kind of sacred activity. This sacredness resides in one undeniable fact: the blood of Christ saturated the earth on Golgotha. This is not some minor, locally-interesting detail. Rather, it is a supernatural event of the highest importance for the entire planet; and, indeed, for the cosmos. He makes all things new.

When I work the land, I am mindful that this soil has been redeemed along with all of Creation by Christ’s blood. This is not some piece of abstract doctrine for me, but a scientific truth. However, this is a truth I must not fully understand: if I did, I’m afraid I’d be too awestruck to do anything. Nevertheless, His blood saturated the soil and its power still enlivens it. My job, as I see it, is simply to help the vegetables and forage crops I plant find access to that power. This care implies tending: planning, planting, weeding, composting. In Genesis, God sets Adam and Eve in a garden, a cultivated space. As beautiful as the woods are, He does not place them in a forest. The Resurrection takes place in the Garden of Gethsemane. Symbol is reality.

Christ the Redeemer Greenman in Philadelphia, from "A Life in Philadelphia" blog

In the parables, Jesus never uses forest analogies. What he does, at least in many of them, is speak in the language of farming and animal husbandry: the sower, the mustard seed, the vineyard, the vine-dresser, the shepherd, the flock. He emphasizes the necessity of cultivation in our faith. Our spiritual lives need to be cultivated just as much as a garden does. Otherwise, all will go to waste and be prey to the Evil One. This is as true of the soil as it is of the soul.

Easter underscores the being of the biodynamic farm: for the farm, in its modest way, participates in Christ’s work of redeeming Creation. I don’t mean to suggest that biodynamic farming will save us from our sins, of course, only that it participates in the enlivening action of Christ’s blood when it soaked the ground at Golgotha.

As we are now only too aware, conventional farming—with its intensive use of pesticides, herbicides, and glyphosate on plants and vaccines and antibiotics on animals—envenoms the land, weakens animal life (look what’s happened to the honeybee), and seasons our foods with poisons. This is big business, BigAg, and, quite frankly, the work of the devil. It turns farms into green deserts, places void of natural life. Biodynamic farming is nothing if not pro-life. There’s a reason biodynamic practices are called “sustainable”: because chemical farming is not.

The problem with the BigAg approach is that it treats the earth as something to be exploited, not as something sacred. It embodies an ethos of rape. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis laments this horrid mistreatment of our common home, the earth:

This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22).

“Sustainable” practices of farming certainly represent a sane alternative to the pathologies currently part of the mainstream, but they will not prove sustainable unless they can be transformed by the sacred, unless farming itself becomes a sacred vocation. How else could sustainability be sustained?

But the sacred often doesn’t make sense in a market economy governed by neoliberalism and scientific materialism. The cosmos is a sacred space, not an indifferent, cold, hostile backdrop to our sinful characters. With this understanding, in biodynamic farming we attend to the movements and phases of the moon in regard to planting. Some may think this unnecessary. Some may think it weird. But I belong to a religion that celebrates the Resurrection on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox: planting by the moon sounds pretty normal to me.

The Church’s calendar, like the biodynamic one, is cosmologically configured: it recognizes the relationship of the heavens to what happens on the earth. Prior to modernity, this was even more the case. The Church year then, especially in Europe, acknowledged the harmonies between the agricultural year and the holiness of the liturgical cycle. Ploughs were blessed, fields were blessed, greenery was brought to church on Pentecost, fires burned on St. John’s Day, the first bread of the year was blessed at Lammas (“Loaf Mass”) in the beginning of August, and the dead were remembered on All Soul’s. Most of these customs have fallen into disuse long since; and our culture is impoverished for it.

Though this has not always been the case, one of the scars of modernity is that the sacredness of life and of the year are not connected to our lives in any real way in a cultural context. At best, for those of a Christian sacramental sensibility, it is merely reserved for the miracle of the Eucharist on Sundays. The rest of the week, most people seem pretty content to go along with the cultural trajectory set by the Enlightenment and neoliberalism. We trust in science for the working days and God on Sundays. But a science without God will not save us. As one-hundred years of chemical farming have shown, the promises of the Enlightenment and neoliberalism when applied to farming have, at best, short-term benefits, but many long-term detriments. Science, that is, (and farming is the earliest kind of science we have) needs God.

What I’m saying is that biodynamic farming is a branch of the redemption business, the business of Easter. The point is not simply to provide nutritious foods, raise healthy animals, and behave in a “sustainable” manner. The point is to restore life (zoë rather than bios) to the organism of the farm. This restoration is not the work of the farmer, however. The work of restoration is the province of the blood of Christ.

I realize that what I profess here might strike some as weird. But I think those kinds of perceptions are really inimical to a truly Christian epistemology. The earth, as the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov argued, contains a mystical (yet ultimately scientific) significance due to the blood that flowed on Golgotha. The earth, he says, is the Holy Grail:

The whole world is the Holy Grail, for it has received into itself and contains Christ’s precious blood and water. The whole world is the chalice of Christ’s blood and water; the whole world partook of them in communion at the hour of Christ’s death. And the whole world hides the blood and water within itself. A drop of Christ’s blood dripped upon Adam’s head redeemed Adam, but also all the blood and water of Christ that flowed forth into the world sanctified the world. The blood and water made the world a place of the presence of Christ’s power, prepared for the world for its future transfiguration, for the meeting with Christ come in glory…. The world has become Christ, for it is the holy chalice, the Holy Grail.

The biodynamic farmer, then, participates in serving this chalice; and, thereby, the vocation of the farmer becomes a kind of priesthood: a priesthood, like the sacramental one, that doesn’t make any sense without the presence of Easter.