Choosing Beauty: the Mystical Path of Increasing Invisibility

Therese Schroeder-Sheker

“…To know beauty, one must live with it…” – Traditional Irish Proverb

Many years ago, I received one of the most helpful jolts possible, the kind that serves the ensouled body and the embodied spirit for the whole of the biography. Though it’s no longer possible to remember exactly what foolishness I must have been mumbling to my college roommate, I surely had to have been saying something vague, casual or uncertain about our music studies, or perhaps about repertoire that was due for faculty review soon. At the time, I had been a double major, working for degrees in both piano and woodwinds. Barbara turned to me with alarming simplicity and confidence, and said with more than a drop of indignation, “But Therese, it’s your personal responsibility to choose only that which is the most beautiful thing on Earth. Nothing less.”

I loved the piano, I loved woodwinds, they had both been part of my consciousness since childhood, but it was true that there was one thing on the planet that seemed to me to constitute consummate Beauty, and that was the harp. I had wanted to play the harp since an early childhood Christmas experience at the age of nine, but had never had access to one. Seeing them at Christmas each year in the windows of the Lyon and Healy showroom in down town Chicago was a bit like the soul revisiting the source. The deep, almost pre-natal longing would be stirred, and I would come home and beg my mother for a harp, but it was not to happen in childhood. Somehow, as the years passed, the longing had been subsumed into practicality. A piano had always been in our family home and so I somehow had let myself be pushed into other people’s shoes, and registered for a curriculum and degree program that was not truly part of my own tuning. I needed and wanted to be inside of music, and the piano is a superlative formation for any serious musician, but I was not making a conscious choice. Clearly, that disarming moment between two young women was a turning point and for me, a profound awakening. It was like remembering something holy that had been forgotten, and like being called personally by a Being just beyond an invisible border. As soon as possible, though people around me may have worried that it was a mere a distraction if not a luxury, I put a deposit on a commissioned harp made for my hands, made my Carnegie Hall debut on harp three years later, and the rest is history. I knew I was born to harp, had known it since childhood, and had benefited tremendously from Barbara’s one, gold-writ, fire-laden rebuke.

Even so, that biographical window isn’t a career story about harp; it’s a theological lens showing how the Transcendentals (Beauty, Truth, Goodness) irrupt in our lives, if we listen. Having much more to do with destiny, from that moment on, my heart and mind were thoroughly awakened to the fact that personal responsibility and Beauty are linked.

Choosing Beauty became a theme for everything that has ever since followed, from Carnegie Hall to the City of Medicine and on. The first piece of music I had ever heard on the harp is a late medieval ballata by Francesco Landini, entitled Angelica biltà, or Angelic Beauty. Looking back, and again, this relates to the impregnation that happens when we truly listen, I can see that I had been seared by this Beauty, as it came through time and space. It is one of the good wounds we can sustain. As a result, there are many modernist things and ways of being that this piercing precludes, but it became my nature to obey rather than abandon this original call.

In later years, two of the most influential teachers in my life have been Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905 - 1988) and Paul Evodkimov (1901 – 1970), both theologians of rare sensibility who in many different ways, spent their entire lives and vocations with Beauty – sacramental beauty, liturgical beauty, the beauty of creation and creatures, the beauty of the soul, the beauty of listening and responding, and more. It was von Balthasar who admonished us all to do everything possible to keep the three philosophic Transcendentals together – Beauty, Truth and Goodness are a trinity – and that to separate one from the other two always unleashes violence in the world. The briefest possible meditation on this principle validates his insight in spades. To press the issue, keeping the three Transcendentals together can easily become a diagnostic tool to help us from illusion, personal or corporate. We can measure or discern our faithfulness to God in our various works by reflecting and questioning if all three are present in our decisions, outcomes, policies, requests, and directions. If whatever it is we are doing or being reflects all three dimensions consciously, by choice, design, intent, and content, then we might be involved in something real. Even so, to the degree that we keep all three together, we will, nevertheless, meet adversarial anger, for the world loves mediocrity. .

Likewise, Evdokimov’s summa on Beauty led us in three steps from the pure aesthetic experience to the religious experience to the mystical experience, for all three are profoundly different in meaning, significance and intent. In this Russian Orthodox way, I began to see, sense, imagine and perceive that there is a world or a realm permeated with the philocalic spirit, the world where the love of beauty allows one to sing in the communion of the transfigured ones and to slowly, gradually, become transfigured into something like a sacrament of light where history is drawn up into eternity. Readers will understand that by this, I am not referring to some tendency that allows one to avoid incarnation, but rather, in the most profound way possible, to take up the mystery of incarnation and resurrection seriously, more deeply, as the truly Christian task of metanoia and transformation requires.

A third unmistakable signpost that I saw while walking towards Lady Beauty echoes in Benedictine and Cluniac life, and comes from the 11th century annals of monastic medicine, in particular, the customaries of Bernard and Ulrich. These works, and the way those Cluniac monks cared for the sick and dying in their Burgundian infirmary have long served as the spiritual and theological inspiration for the Chalice of Repose Project, the palliative medical, pastoral field of music-thanatology, and the Vox Clamantis Clinic. Central to Cluniac spirituality was the understanding of the spiritual significance of Beauty and of its continual circulation throughout the world. The human being needed exposure to Beauty in order to become inwardly (spiritually) beautiful, and in becoming inwardly radiant and beautiful, one integrated Beauty back into the world. (Or, that order might be wrong; perhaps one slowly becomes more inwardly beautiful first, and then makes it available, visible and palpable in culture!) The early abbots Berno and Odo had a mystical relationship with Beauty, and established a foundation wherein the community expressed adoration, in prayer and liturgy, through the maintenance, cultivation and refinement of Beauty, even to the insight that the perception of transcendental Beauty is one of the ways in which we experience the countenance of God. It is true that artisans from all over Europe were drawn to Cluny, and became monastic artists skilled in the creation of musical compositions, scribal illuminations, stained glass windows, cloisonné work, chalices, altar vestments, candle sticks and the making of reliquaries. Make no mistake, the original Cluniac charism towards Beauty was not inclined towards materialism, but rather, towards glory. With time, however, the order grew to such immeasurable wealth that the monk Bernard of Clairvaux who was to set the world on fire with the Cistercian reform advocated the need to withdraw from the splendor, in order to find oneself again purely. Our own humble Vox Clamantis Clinic, where suffering people come, in many ways resembles a Cistercian purity. The impress of Beauty has been sought and considered in every fiber and element, so that the dying person or the person suffering from loss, grief, exhaustion or depression is held up inside Beauty.

So history shows us that too much of anything, even Beauty, entails a loss of Truth, and thus we return full circle to von Balthasar’s wisdom to keep the three together, in special holy proportion. We could continue here with small, life-giving, essential stories from the life or work of a Novalis, a Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, or an Edith Södergran, each poets of the spirit, each married by destiny to Beauty, each deeply influential in my own life, but I won’t, for the purpose of this reflection isn’t to survey history but to look within and reflect upon the signs and infusions which come by grace and indeed, come to each of us. The point is, however, that we can miss what is right in our own back yard if we are sleeping, ignoring, not listening, not bowing, or if we think we have to go to exotic places and conditions to approach that altar. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t also say that a major part of my own formation in Beauty had to do with the growing understanding and cumulative experiences of Beauty as a transformative force equal to Love. This was brought home to me poignantly in reading diaries smuggled out of Ukrainian and Soviet work camps during the 1940’s and 50’s. Of particular note are the works of Abraham Tertz and Julia de Beausobre. In different ways, they each describe conditions of unbearable deprivation, cruelty, and sadism, the kind which would have caused complete ruin in most humans. The point I would most like to make about involuntary incarceration is this: from the deepest abyss, from the blackest pit in history, a sheer ray of religious beauty – the silent compassionate light in someone’s eye, the gesture of a single outstretched hand, a ray of sunlight – had such effect on those who were unjustly incarcerated and stripped of all individually identifying human-making elements (bodily and facial hair, clothes, name, family) that the receivers who had become so permeable were convinced, as am I, that they were experiencing the presence of God more intensely.

I remember hearing from a colleague about his interviewing four elderly survivors of the Terezin camp which exterminated so many Jews. In horror, the journalist asked something like, “How could you possibly have kept your faith? Did you ever wonder, because of the crematorium, where is God in all of this?” Without missing a heartbeat, the woman replied instead about the fallen nature of a degraded humanity that had come into bestial power and said, “Oh no, God was everywhere, we experienced God everywhere, clearly, in every moment. We wondered, instead, in all this horror, where is Man?”

I am so convinced that Beauty, like Love, is both mystery and healing force. It is like sacramental holy oil, seeping into the skin, re-uniting us back again to those parts of ourselves which have become most broken and separated from an original holy unity and from an original communion with God. In my own life, now in my fifties, I often need healing, more than bread or water, and as age claims physical beauty (for such was only briefly lent), I become culturally invisible. That which is inward can grow steadily, surely to greater depths, and this is needed, right, and serves the spirit in an ineffable bending and transmutation. Beauty is more than ever present in music, is audible, and present in words, written and spoken, but even more so following a day or days of fasting from sound. Beauty also alights in the garden, appears at dawn and at dusk, and in the quiet moments that will never and can never make history, and that is a wonderful paradox: Beauty’s hidden name is Modesty.

Therese Schroeder-Sheker
Duke Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina
January, 2004

Harpist, singer, composer and educator Therese Schroeder-Sheker has a life distinguished in three disciplines: music, medicine and theology. She studied composition with Normand Lockwood, made her Carnegie hall debut in 1980, and has concertized throughout North America and Europe. Her numerous CD recordings, films, compositions and publications bring a highly original voice to the international classical music world. Concurrently, with three decades of continual work with the needs of the dying, she founded the palliative medical modality of music-thanatology and the premier music-thanatology organization, the Chalice of Repose Project, located in Mt. Angel, Oregon. Having chaired four graduate and undergraduate programs at American institutions, she now divides her university teaching time between the City of Medicine, in Durham, North Carolina at Duke University and in Washington, DC, at Catholic University of America. She continues to publish often in the areas of the women mystics, contemplative musicianship, and the theology/medicine interface. Beyond that, she loves the garden. Please see www.chaliceofrepose.org starting February 1st.