11.) Therese Schroeder-Sheker (and closing remarks) – Sunday afternoon – Mystics and Scientists Conference 2023

Using only six words to identify layers of healing that can move mountains, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton startled the world with a singular prescription: Try to recover your fundamental unity. Receiving this contemplative orientation to heart in an era of fragmentation generates a transfiguring fire. Its warmth and light support the gradual transformation of personal lead to universal gold, and this metamorphosis can in turn prepare one for a life of service.

Through the retrospective gaze of fifty years of work in end-of-life palliative medicine, medieval and modern music, and higher education, Therese will reflect on a luminous fabric that is formed only gradually and quietly. Its substance is integrative, is the exact opposite of technique and reflects the legacy of mystical spirituality. It can be embodied by artist, scientist, priest and parent. The work of the transfiguring fire is available to all today, in freedom, and its processes can be found in garden, library, and kitchen; at table, loom and at altar, in our birthing and in our dying, in the laboratory of the soul and in the streaming of the stars, wherever loving, knowing and sensing can be unified into harmonious coherence.