The Vox Feminae: Choosing and Being as Christian Form and Praxis

Abstract

The readers of this anthology will understand, because my session in the Practicing Catholic conference was laced with voice and harp, we cannot publish the contents of that evening without having produced a recording or documentary film. However, in this article, I attempt something new, a departure from systematic scholarship, from musicology or theology, liturgy or history. For the same reasons, I have not written a medical or clinical treatise on the principles of prescriptive music used in the care of the dying, nor the historical practices at Cluny. (I have done those things in detail elsewhere).¹ Risking the periphery, and this is consistent with living or dying, here I have written something with a wide circumference and a different voice. Through narration and reflection, memory and discernment, I change key from archival scholarship and send out something which I hope will be a theological and hermeneutical poetry of living and dying made more whole through risk, through feeling forward into the unknown. To that end, I have written a meditative essay on the vox feminae, the strongest and most authentic element I am and have as an artist, clinician, teacher, and a practicing Catholic.