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{"id":27157,"date":"2021-06-21T01:04:37","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T05:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/carlmccolman\/?p=27157"},"modified":"2021-06-21T01:04:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T05:04:37","slug":"companionship-as-a-key-to-the-spiritual-life-therese-schroeder-sheker-reflects-on-eternal-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/carlmccolman\/2021\/06\/companionship-as-a-key-to-the-spiritual-life-therese-schroeder-sheker-reflects-on-eternal-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Companionship as a Key to the Spiritual Life: Therese Schroeder-Sheker Reflects on “Eternal Heart”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I remember seeing an exquisite painting in a small private gallery in Brussels many years ago.\u00a0 Two souls were walking together side by side as the sun was setting in the west.\u00a0 Their heads were bowed, slightly inclined toward one another, and their glowing hands gestured gracefully like birds held aloft in mid-air.\u00a0 It seemed to me that something almost palpable was streaming from the painter\u2019s canvas.\u00a0 Perhaps it was the intimacy of shared dialogue or maybe it was the tranquility generated from such noble mutuality, but either way, the image not only made my heart leap. It befriended me, embedded itself in me. \u00a0\u00a0I am not describing a sympathetic response to a pleasing aesthetic.\u00a0 Those tend to come and go speedily on the currents of emotion and unconscious cultural conditioning.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0No.\u00a0 This painterly image was speaking of something eternal, and everything about it activated an interior recollection, offering much about the unity of the three Transcendentals: Truth, Beauty and Goodness.\u00a0 When they are woven together in a single framework, they move mountains and sustain life.<\/p>\n

Drawing close to this luminous source, \u00a0I discovered that the painter had chosen to reference the work as Tobias and Raphael Walking Together at Dusk.\u00a0 <\/em>The narrative of Tobias and Raphael is found in the Book of Tobit <\/em>and tells a story of transformative healing.\u00a0 In it, the Archangel Raphael lovingly chooses to \u00a0disguise himself as a human being so that two could speak with one another in trust, \u201cshoulder-to-shoulder,\u201d listening and responding. Conversation occurred organically, naturally, wisdom stirring amidst breathing cadences, silences and sounds. \u00a0\u00a0Raphael walks alongside the ailing Tobias and offers the exact kind of encouragement needed to help him heal and repair the gaps of his imperfect life.<\/p>\n

During the last six-hundred years, this \u00a0vision of the two walking together in sundown\u2019s transformative communion has been taken up by many artists. Even so, the painting in front of me that day thirty-some years ago was a 20th<\/sup> century imagination, almost a vision, and I am so sorry that I cannot remember the name of the painter, nor can I find the image from any on-line search.<\/p>\n

Regardless, that transcendent painting allowed me to remember how both Pythagorean and Christian Traditions once espoused the wisdom of walking together, two-by-two, shoulder-to-shoulder, rhythmically.\u00a0 Companions would walk together outside; they would walk in Nature, moving through forested groves, or across quiet fields, alongside lapping shorelines or over rugged landscapes. Two would walk together as part and parcel of a spiritual praxis<\/em> and their mutually fructifying conversation allowed something new to come into being and sight.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The walking cure invited a full spectrum of risking, trusting, uttering, listening, responding, questioning, grappling, suggesting, nurturing and encouraging.\u00a0 \u00a0How powerfully true and intimate this time-honored embodiment of the intelligence of the heart.<\/em> \u00a0Two meet one another and grapple together over paradox and mystery, meaning and ultimacy, vulnerability and radiance, strength and tenderness, success and failure. The companions share affliction and<\/u><\/em> the bread of insight.<\/p>\n

The philosophical or theological debate from which so many of us emerge takes place in the confines of the beige-colored harshly lit classroom. \u00a0Debate accommodates many people at the same time, emphasizes expertise, lauds brilliance, rewards competition, and begins and ends by the strict ticking of the clock. \u00a0Nearby, a dean, abbot or abbess might have a fireside chat for a select few, the most promising and hardworking of the current students and emerging novices.\u00a0 Finally, we have the sermon. \u00a0It is delivered from a raised platform or pulpit inside the enclosed church or synagogue. No matter how pastoral or inspired, the priest or rabbi stands.\u00a0 While vertical and elevated, the homilist speaks to a seated congregation.\u00a0 The listeners below, clustered with family, friends, neighbors, and dotted with solitary strangers have this in common: each receives the living word in silence.\u00a0\u00a0 Some are fully awake and thoughtfully engaged, while famously, a few almost always snooze or let preoccupied thoughts wander.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Such models offer the world much yet operate within institutional needs and collectives.<\/p>\n

How different the soul\u2019s companionship. The footsteps of two tread the earth in open friendship, treading at the same pace, at the same elevation, and gradually, synchronization takes place.\u00a0 The originally separate drumming of heartbeat and pulse begin to transform because the two companions are breathing together.\u00a0 The originally differentiated circulatory systems begin to harmonize, and as attunement begins to unfold, a mysterious third possibility emerges.\u00a0 Some would even say that the mysterious presence of the third takes place.\u00a0 No wonder St. Augustine said \u201cSolvitur ambulando\u201d \u2013 it is solved by walking.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

By the time you have completed reading the fourth chapter of Carl McColman\u2019s Eternal Heart<\/em><\/a>, you may discover that you can hear his voice and that you are being accompanied!\u00a0 His modest, warm, gracious companionship fills your room not only because he reflects upon things that matter but because his eight chapters emerge naturally.\u00a0 The voice is authentic, resounding at a breathing tempo, at a walking pace, not unlike when two are shoulder-to-shoulder, in loving and thoughtful sustained conversation.\u00a0 His reflections sound at the octave rather than at a tonic, because they are born from embodied and ensouled human experience. \u00a0Ambitious scholarly summations, talking heads abstraction and doctrinaire rigidity are absent from these pages, and instead, the author is at peace with referring sometimes to one of the historical exemplars in the same way that a painter might introduce a single brushstroke or a nuanced hue to draw attention to and amplify a certain reality.<\/p>\n

Precisely because of the quality of his ability to companion, McColman demonstrates and integrates the wisdom born of \u00a0his own movement through the sacrament of failure. \u00a0He does this while avoiding the sensationalism of extravagant disclosure. \u00a0Exploring themes as lofty as infinity, as complex as discernment, as deep as silence or forgiveness, as creative as hospitality, as uncomfortable as stinginess, as timeless as love, he quietly, lovingly, naturally, rhythmically and prayerfully introduces readers to profound themes, practical exercises and beloved friends.\u00a0 He brings us those people whom he has taken into his own heart and life, and to whom he has given of himself, at times, at great cost.\u00a0 He also shares with us those praxes<\/em> which have been personally purifying, transformative and regenerative. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His friends include the Greeks, the Jews, the Christians, the Buddhists, Cistercians, Trappists, Benedictines and more.\u00a0 They include Plotinus, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius of Loyola, Benedict, Augustine, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thomas Merton, William Blake, Paramahansa Yogananda, Sylvia Boorstein, Caryll Houselander, Rabbi Zalman Schacter, the prophets, the saints, the faithful, all of whom are ultimately and gloriously subversive.<\/p>\n

Like that painting on the wall that depicted how the archangel once descended to companion a human, Eternal Heart<\/em> is a work of humanly sung companionship.\u00a0 The year 2021 may seem to operate at the crossroads of urgency and probation, so this book is as timely as it is transcendent. The author reminds us that becoming more truly human is not only the first step toward the mystical vocation; it is the primary practical assignment of life on earth and the first step toward a fruitful and contemporary holiness.\u00a0 I am writing these words amidst the pandemic; \u00a0all norms have been disrupted. \u00a0Many across the globe have entered solitude by choice and by default, and many are searching deeply, wanting to recalibrate, in need of an extended spiritual retreat.\u00a0 \u00a0Sister Wendy Becket once described prayer as God\u2019s taking possession of us.\u00a0 \u201cWe expose Him,\u201c she said, \u201cto what we are, and He gazes on us with the creative eye of Holy Love.\u201d\u00a0 My sense of things is that Carl McColman\u2019s open door and warm companionship will direct many sincere readers to a radical rediscovery of essentials both mystical and transcendent. \u00a0\u00a0Read this unpretentious book slowly and prayerfully.\u00a0 It teaches metanoia and kenosis in the most practical ways.\u00a0 Enter into sustained conversation with the author, as if you were walking together with him in a meadow.\u00a0 The influence of the healing angel who can help us repair our fragmentation can be found in these quiet pages, precisely because of the creative eye of holy love, an ensouled capacity that Carl McColman inhabits and shares with all.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Therese Schroeder-Sheker, Candlemas 2021.<\/p>\n

About the Author:\u00a0Harpist, singer and composer Therese Schroeder-Sheker has devoted more than forty years to\u00a0serving the physical and spiritual needs of the dying with prescriptive music. Ms. Schroeder-Sheker founded the palliative medical modality of music-thanatology and\u00a0The Chalice of Repose Project<\/a>, the first music-thanatology organization in the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Her beautiful and award-winning recordings include\u00a0The Queen\u2019s Minstrel<\/a>,\u00a0Rosa Mystica<\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0The Geography of the Soul<\/i><\/a>. She is the author of\u00a0Transitus: A Blessed Death in the Modern World<\/a><\/em><\/span>.\u00a0<\/i>As the title of that book suggests, her work has a contemplative dimension that explores how music can be a gift to those who are dying or in hospice or palliative care.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

N.B. Today\u2019s guest post is by noted musician and thanatologist\u00a0Therese Schroeder-Sheker. She wrote this piece in response to Carl McColman\u2019s latest book,\u00a0Eternal Heart. I remember seeing an exquisite painting in a small private gallery in Brussels many years ago.\u00a0 Two souls were walking together side by side as the sun was setting in the west.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27160,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[6871],"class_list":["post-27157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-therese-schroeder-sheker"],"yoast_head":"\nCompanionship as a Key to the Spiritual Life: Therese Schroeder-Sheker Reflects on "Eternal Heart"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"N.B. 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