Teresa Berger Ph.D.: Worshiping God with All of Creation

Imagine viewing yourself as part of a worshiping community that includes trees and animals, not just the people in the church pews with you. Join us on Finding God on Park Street as we sit down with Teresa Berger, a distinguished professor at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music (ISM), who gives us insight into how she worships God, and with whom. Her faith and scholarship explore questions surrounding creation and communion, which she lays out in her forthcoming book Benedicite. 

But how did this German Catholic dedicate her life to liturgical studies? Join this conversation to hear about Teresa’s journey through various Christian communities and different university contexts until she found a faith home at Saint Thomas More at Yale University. From overcoming institutional resistance to integrating nature into worship, Teresa's story is one of resilience and inspiration. Learn how she navigated personal and professional hurdles and the joys she experiences in teaching and learning with her students. Teresa's reflections inspire us to seek divine encounters in everyday moments, transforming our daily routines into spiritual practices. Tune in to be challenged and uplifted by Teresa’s experiences of the joys and struggles of this life. 

Mentioned in this episode: Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM)

Transcript

Grace Klise 0:10

This is Finding God on Park Street, a podcast from Sat Thomas More Yale's Catholic Chapel and Center. I'm your host, grace Kleiss, with our student co-host, michelle Keefe. Thanks for joining us. Joining us. Today's guest is taking a well-deserved sabbatical this academic year, but she graciously joined us in the studio after a day of working on her forthcoming book.

Grace Klise 0:39

Teresa Berger teaches in the fields of liturgical studies and Catholic theology at Yale Divinity School and within the Institute for Sacred Music. She holds doctorates in both liturgical studies and Catholic theology and is recognized as an important voice in academic and Church communities. A world-renowned scholar, a practicing Catholic and a beloved professor, Teresa sits down with Michelle and me to share more about her unexpected journey of faith from a post-World War II German Catholic home through different Christian denominations to Saint Thomas More. Along the way, she has learned more and more about what it means to worship God with and through creation, as well as how to hold the joys and the sufferings of our natural world and our faith together. Get ready to be inspired by Teresa's gift for recognizing the communities around us and how they draw us into worship. So let's dive in.

Grace Klise 1:45

So, Teresa, you came out of a sabbatical to do this podcast with us. Can you tell us what your days look like this year on sabbatical?

Teresa Berger 1:54

Wonderful, I must say, with praying in peace and without pressure to get up and run and do my million things that need doing. So that's, I think, one thing I've really looked forward to. And then I essentially chain myself to my desk and write and read and think and delve deeper into what I want to say and how to say it. And again, I don't put pressure on myself to write a certain number of pages or to have the book done by the end of the sabbatical or anything like that. I'm saying, no, this is time to dig deep and you have the luxury to think, and to think deeply.

Grace Klise 3:06

What is the book that you're currently working on?

Teresa Berger 3:10

The working title is Benedicite, so it's the canticle from Greek Daniel that has made it into Catholic liturgy since the earliest centuries.

Teresa Berger 3:24

Since the earliest centuries, in the Canticle in Daniel you find everything created being called to worship and praise, and human beings are in there, but not the most important creatures called to worship. I take my cues from that and other parts of scriptures and pieces of the liturgical tradition that similarly imagine what one might call a primordial or cosmic worship by everything created into which human beings who are latecomers to all this enter and where they have to find their place. So overall I think it'll be a grandiose attempt at rethinking what my scholarly field liturgical studies has done since it emerged in early modernity, which was really to focus on human beings who worship in human-built sanctuaries and their rhythms and their sacramental practices. And that's how I was trained, with that kind of lens, that kind of lens Post-Vatican II. The focus was very much on liturgy as a dialogue between God and initially man, now human beings. And I'm at a point now where I say that is so small a reality and so small a world, especially on a planet in peril. We need to think much bigger.

Grace Klise 5:09

The teaser for the book. You can get your copies next year.

Michelle Keefe 5:14

No pressure.

Teresa Berger 5:15

No pressure exactly.

Michelle Keefe 5:18

Does the work that you do shape your prayer and does the prayer that you do shape your work? And if so, do you intentionally set yourself up, without the pressure, to pray with certain passages or to think through certain passages, or do certain passages come to you and change the way you pray in this process of writing and prayer together? It's not the passages.

Teresa Berger 5:38

It's the community within which I see myself praying. So when I get up in the morning, I'm now very conscious of the fact that the sun has risen most days when I get up and there is a creation already that I now enter into. So it has changed my postures. I often pray towards the east. It has changed who I consider my fellow worshippers. It's the caterpillars that I discover in my morning walk through my garden. It's the flowers that have started to bloom. It's clouds and trees and rain and everything created. That is my primary worshiping community. So when I then head to a particular community like Saint Thomas More or another worshiping community, I think, yeah, yeah, those are the humans in worship with everything created.

Teresa Berger 7:15

So, of course, it also means that I gravitate towards certain texts these days more than others, certain texts these days more than others, but I don't waste too much of my time looking for passages I might like. I follow Lectio Divina every day, so it's the text, the Gospel text for Mass, I think. With devotional readings I might pick more intentionally things that resonate with where liturgical tradition. I read prayers, and ancient prayers, often devotional poetry, theological reflections, all day long. I don't have to go out of my way to find devotional reading in the day. It's right there. And sometimes I find myself I'm sitting the Beinecke the. I take off my shoes because I'm studying an old manuscript and the prayer jumps right out at me. Yeah, yeah.

Teresa Berger 8:40

As I sometimes say, some of my best friends and prayer partners are, you know, 1,600 years dead to the world.

Grace Klise 8:53

So yeah, thank you. You come to New Haven, Teresa, after having lived in many other places and taught in many other places. Can you share a little bit about what it was like growing up? What was your childhood like? Did you always have this inclination towards the divine and towards the natural world as well?

Teresa Berger 9:14

I grew up in West Germany, and I grew up in West Germany, Germany, not too long after the Second World War. So very conscious of the fact that, increasingly conscious as a child, of the fact that I grew up on the heaps of 60 million dead, not 6 million, 60 million, 20 of them from the then Soviet Union, 6 million Jews and so on and so forth, and my childhood images are marked by remembering so many maimed bodies. That said, I grew up in a Catholic home in a beautiful surrounding, so the pain of created life and the joy of created life was always together, which I think now is helpful for me in never having these fantasies that are prevalent in some eco-theological voices of this nice nature you know, it's the butterflies and the cat videos and the pretty flowers and that needs to be weighed against the other parts that also belong to the created world. In terms of my upbringing, my mother, I think, instilled Catholic faith. So often, at least in traditional households, it's the women of the family who do that. It was an upper middle class household, which meant there was certain sort of popular. Pieties were simply not there because they were considered cheesy, but the basics were there very strongly.

Teresa Berger 11:28

I had a very powerful evangelical conversion experience in my teens. So I started preaching the Gospel on street corners. Wow, a nd for all intents and purposes wasn't interested in the Catholic Church that much anymore. And so that began a long journey through a lot of communities of faith. I was with Pentecostals for three years. My first degree is from an Anglican theological college. I was in a Greek Orthodox community for six years, sang in the choir there in Greek every Sunday. I have a Master's from a Lutheran faculty. I spent a year with a Calvinist faculty in Geneva, 20 plus years at a Methodist faculty, at Duke, and somewhere in the middle of all that I rethought theologically my way back into a Catholic position and I think I'm back for good.

Grace Klise 12:42

We're glad to have you. Wow.

Grace Klise 12:44

I had no idea that that was part of your story. Can you share a little bit more about what that process was like, coming back and realizing okay, the faith of my mom and my home my first home, that maybe there is something here in my that I've been searching for?

Teresa Berger 13:08

It wasn't a form of infantile regression, going back to childhood or nostalgia yeah, it wasn't that at all. It was a theological realized that all the other communities of faith, in my humble opinion, had even more theological problems than the Catholic Church had. I connected very deeply with studying the liturgical tradition. I think that's where my faith is anchored, and by liturgical tradition I don't mean something that's long dead.

Michelle Keefe 14:14

It's a tradition that lives into the future. As you're making this journey through so many different communities and wrestling with these questions for yourself, I'm curious, when students entered into that for you, like when did you start teaching in that journey and what was that like, teaching and seeking at the same time in so many different spaces?

Teresa Berger 14:33

I think when you start teaching it doesn't mean you stop searching. Right, right, so that division doesn't map onto the path that clearly. And I started my actual teaching work at Duke Divinity School so overwhelmingly Protestant in the South where people, when I started, would still talk about Catholics worshipping Mary and misconceptions like that, I realized that the few Catholic students that were there could do with some support and we shared struggles. Students now probably experience me as very Catholic, but I hope to communicate that the searching never stops and, as a Catholic woman who had to fight with the Vatican over her standing in the church permission to teach, there is no way for me to sugarcoat the struggles in being Catholic.

Grace Klise 16:12

Yeah, it makes me think of how you described your experience of the natural world, with the joys and the sufferings and the grim realities together, hand in hand, and learning to hold those together, and I think that's something that many of us in the Church also have to come to terms with the joys and the struggles together, yeah, and I think it actually strengthens our witness to be able to say that rather than to think, when you talk with people struggling or discerning or even just wondering what the heck is this?

Teresa Berger 17:07

Being a Catholic and a woman with a brain at this point in time, it helps to say it's not all roses least. I've for a long time chosen that freedom for myself as a way to live. Particularly in worship, I am present. There are, what's a good English word, grades of intensity of presence. I've typically chosen to remain present, so I find ways of being there in adverse moments sometimes. Let's assume I'm not talking about anything. In New Haven, Connecticut, people probably don't often think about presence at liturgy in that way, but I think we have the duty to discern liturgical structures that we are in, and liturgy is as broken as the rest of the world is.

Grace Klise 18:42

I feel like we just got a little teaser of a class with you. I never was in grad school at YDS, but I'm like, oh, this is what it would be like to be in class.

Michelle Keefe 18:51

Sorry, I was going to say no class your class and admittedly, it was on Zoom in 2020 or 2021, I guess spring of 2021. But I remember your class being very profound for me and it was a space where I know we were wrestling with these questions. We were wrestling with these questions and there are certain moments and certain even lines that people have said that stick with me and things that you have mentioned or ways that we would engage with each other specifically from that class, and I'm very grateful for your pedagogy in that space. It was a really profound and thought provoking class. It was called Worship, Cosmos Creation yeah, so, and we were talking about that sense worship all creation in worship.

Grace Klise 19:33

So how did you come to Yale, Teresa? We've heard a little bit about your path back to the Catholic Church, but how about your path here to New Haven?

Challenges and Growth in Faith

Teresa Berger 19:43

Yeah, I can tell you the basics, but it still seems a strange path to me. So I taught at Duke for many, many years, never wanting to stay in the United States. It's to this day, and I'm now a citizen to this day. It's a culture that it's not my native culture for sure. So throughout my years at Duke I was applying to positions in Europe. I have two doctorates. I have a postdoctoral degree. I was the first woman ever to get that.

Teresa Berger 20:27

In liturgical studies I have, I think, two masters. So the scholarly credentials weren't the issue. The problem was that in many European places, certainly in German speaking contexts, faculties, Catholic faculties, have to go to the Vatican and ask for a prospective faculty member to be vetted and okayed. So the Vatican twice refused permission for me to teach. I ended up taking the Vatican to its own ecclesial court over this and the Vatican also had created new guidelines at that point that the Vatican now had to open up the reasons to the person charged for why they were refused this permission. So anyway, the long and short was I lost that recourse in the end. Everybody who knows the Vatican told me in advance that would happen.

Teresa Berger 21:38

A woman at that point in liturgical studies, teaching liturgical studies and a woman who wasn't in a religious community for the Vatican was not imaginable, and I had feminist positions, so the whole combination was not legible for the Vatican. Other than this is impossible. So I decided to stay at Duke. I decided to stay at Duke and then one day Yale called and said you know, we have this position, why didn't you apply? And I said I'm not interested in moving. I had a small child, lots of friends by that time. And Yale said well, at least fly up and talk to us, okay, well, the rest is history.

Michelle Keefe 22:40

And what year was that?

Teresa Berger 22:41

2006

Michelle Keefe 22:43

And that was with the ISM.

Teresa Berger 22:45

Yeah, yeah. In the end, the ISM was a large part of what lured me. Yeah, long and deep prayer, yeah, and in the end I decided to say yes, to take that leap of faith.

Michelle Keefe 23:04

Yeah, as you're sort of reflecting on all this in hindsight and seeing it all as the journey that's been laid out, can I ask what you imagined yourself doing when you were 10, like looking forward.

Teresa Berger 23:16

Oh, before my conversion experience, I must have been about 16, 17. Yeah, I had. I remember having two things in my head. In my head and this is coming out of an upper middle class household where my mother insisted you need to learn Latin and not how to cook. It was that privileging of education. It wasn't just Latin, you need to learn French and English and Russian. So my one vision was I'm going to do languages and work at the European Court of Justice. Then I have no idea where that came from, but someone it was. Oh, I want to learn Chinese and dig up fossils in China. And then conversion happened and all I wanted to do was preach the Gospel on street corners.

Michelle Keefe 24:20

It's so fascinating.

Grace Klise 24:22

I'm thinking back to what I was wanting to do when I was little, just you know like swim with dolphins and learn Chinese and dig up fossils.

Teresa Berger 24:35

My sister had a much more spiritual idea in her head. I still remember her saying as a young girl I want to be either a dancer or a saint. Wow, I thought that's impressive.

Michelle Keefe 24:50

I would have never come up with that.

Teresa Berger 24:52

She's neither. She's probably on the road to saint.

Grace Klise 24:58

What is life like here in New Haven, especially at YDS? I don't know if you wanted to share a couple of the favorite classes that you've taught or colleagues that you enjoy working with.

Teresa Berger 25:09

I have a number of close colleagues, especially at ISM, which is the Institute of Sacred Music. But we don't just do music. We do music, worship and the arts. So visual arts and literature especially. That combination, without me realizing initially, is exactly what I cherish and is, of course, also what liturgy is about. It's a multidisciplinary field. You have to do music, you have to do visual art, you have to do textual analysis, you have to do history and biblical studies. So this is why I love my field, because it allows me to do a number of things in terms of scholarly work that I all love. So I have a musicologist colleague who also happens to be German and of course, we chat in German. That's important to me.

Teresa Berger 26:17

I have a very good close colleague in theology who is wonderful when I go off into my creation theological tangents to say you need to think about this. Yeah, another person in visual art. So it's wonderful to be in a group of scholars, each with their own superb expertise that you can lean on or go to and say when I struggle with the Greek text, I have a colleague who is native Greek. I can take my little sentence to him and say did I do this right? Did I get this right? Same with Hebrew and Latin. So it's yeah, it's a great context. Classes I don't think there is a favorite class. Mostly what makes a class great for me is the combination of students, and when that gels we could talk about morning coffee and it would be fabulous both of us spent some time in the classroom as teachers, not at the college level or graduate level, but, yes, the students make the work.

Michelle Keefe 27:56

Yeah, and it's. There's a magic to it. There's like something that just sings when it's the environment of. It's a collegiality in pursuit of something together. It's a really beautiful space in my experience.

Teresa Berger 28:13

That doesn't mean that there cannot be classes where the chemistry, especially amongst some students, is off. Yeah, yeah, and it's hard labor. Yeah, and it's not all sweet and wonderful and intellectual.

Michelle Keefe 28:27

you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Teresa Berger 28:29

But in my experience those are the exceptions, or exceptions. been the exceptions. So, and because I'm international, I gravitate especially towards supporting international students in their flourishing. That takes extra attention and labor, but it's worth it for a class, it's really good that you and other members of our campus community recognize that.

Grace Klise 29:00

I was thinking just about what you said earlier of noticing the Catholic students. I think this was at Duke and that these were students who needed support. It seems like that's maybe just part of who you are, noticing the students that need support, and something I've experienced or I have gone through or something I identify with can be used to support them in their own experiences now.

Teresa Berger 29:30

I also find that they often have fascinating insights when they are encouraged into a space to speak up from their own faith tradition that nobody in this context would come up with. So it's very enriching for everyone.

Grace Klise 29:51

What was it like finding the Saint Thomas More community? Did you find STM immediately when you moved here?

Teresa Berger 29:56

No, with my European background, you didn't shop parishes. You went where, geographically, you were. So when I first moved I went where we lived. So my son goes up to receive communion just ahead of me, and he receives the bread, the body of Christ, and then he looks for the wine, which wasn't there. So he turns to me and says very loudly Mom, where is the wine? Oh, sweetheart. So we came to Saint Thomas More and we still had wine then. I hope that comes back at some point. So Peter goes up and receives and drinks from the cup and he turns to me and he says, mom, wow, I mean, it tasted good to him. Anyway.

Grace Klise 31:06

Well, I'm glad that you did find the Saint Thomas More community.

Teresa Berger 31:09

Yeah, and of course, the music program program too, because there are ISMers. Yes, so now I'm actually back singing in the choir, and Father Bob was amazing. In my experience, whenever I went to a Catholic parish, the priests typically were afraid here is a person who is a scholar of liturgy, what is she going to think about this, on the other hand? So Father Bob immediately said let's have lunch and you can fill me in on what you think we should do differently. I'm thinking what? So finally, I had to say to him you know I have to work hard coming to Mass not to run my own critical program through because I would be very busy and would never get to prayer, but still he said well, you know, just give me some ideas. So I said a couple of things, but it started us off on a really positive sense of being in this together.

Michelle Keefe 32:33

You were saying with Father Bob, it was such a wonderful, positive way to feel incorporated and yet you also are trying to not feel like you're at work with a critical lens all the time. How do you maintain presence while also letting it be a space of worship? It's hard.

Teresa Berger 32:50

Yeah, it's hard, it it's hard, it's a constant struggle. So two things come to my mind. The one is from the parish I came from Strong lay leadership, an older, very open priest. There was never a Sunday liturgy where we wouldn't process in with the Gospel book. That's the word, that's the symbol for the presence of Christ in the word. I have to hold on to my pew when I see that dropping out. One thing I said to Father Bob that he didn't do that. Also in my other parish we had the priest who simply said, " this is how it will be no more private baptisms. Everybody is baptized in the middle of the Sunday assembly. Boy, that was hard on some parish members, but we did it. Yeah and it yeah and it was. It's good, it's good.

Grace Klise 34:15

Well, as we are starting to wrap up here, I would love to just hear a little bit about your writing process. You told us that you're spending a lot of your days chained to your desk writing, but not adding any pressure, but just you've published a lot over the course of your career. What does the writing process look like for you today, and has that changed in the decades that you've been writing?

Teresa Berger 34:43

Well, the big change has been that I don't write in German anymore. I would have a hard time now, in terms of my scholarly writing, writing in German, which is very strange. That said, I think different scholars have different strategies for writing, and some of the strategies that my colleagues live by I find impossible, such as you set aside half an hour every morning to write. What if I don't have anything to say that morning? What if I need to read more? You know, or you're committing to writing X number of words every day.

Teresa Berger 35:33

I don't count words, I write, I count, I don't count at all. I think about insights. So I read and draft and think and research a bit more and write some more, and then a lot of it. Probably more than some other people, I spend crafting my language because I'm convinced that language and beauty and clarity, scholarship without that doesn't satisfy me. So for me, whatever I write has to be clear, not only to me but to the reader, hopefully. And there has to be beauty in in the very construction of the thinking, in the display of your thoughts. So I probably spend a lot more time on that than some other people do, given what I read, and then at some point I come to the happy moment when I think this chapter is basically together for now. It'll get rewritten as more thinking happens, but for now the research is done and I have a draft.

Grace Klise 37:14

Great day yes.

Teresa Berger 37:16

It happened today, so I'm happy.

Michelle Keefe 37:20

Good day.

Grace Klise 37:22

Well, the final question that we're asking all guests this season on the podcast is where do you find God on campus?

Teresa Berger 37:29

Yeah, given what my work is and how I go about it, I think there are many places. So one moment certainly is when I cycle to work and see a blue sky and white clouds and green trees. That's got to be the most gorgeous combination of colors imaginable. I find God often in my office, in the texts I deal with. As I said before, many of them are prayers, ancient prayer texts. My goodness, some of it is stunning. I find it in conversations in my office, doors close. There are sometimes really difficult situations that come to light and where I know I have to internally say to the Holy Spirit I have no wisdom, no resources for this, so you need to take over. I have no idea how to respond. Well, those are three, three good ones. Probably by three o'clock in the morning I will come up with six more for now.

Teresa Berger 39:07

I think that's what I would lift up, thank you. Thank you for offering those, and I think that's what I would lift up.

Discovering God in Everyday Life

Grace Klise 39:11

Thank you, thank you for offering those and, I think, a good reminder for us and those listening to look for God in those spaces too, because God is there with us. So thank you for joining us and thanks to everyone for tuning in and we'll see you next time on Finding God on Park Street. If you enjoyed listening today, please share this episode and leave us a rating and review. The producer of this podcast is Robin McShane, Director of Communications at STM. Sound mixing and editing are by Ryan McEvoy of Yale Broadcast Studio and graphics are by Mary Lou Cadwell of Cadwell Art Direction. We hope this podcast encourages you to seek God's presence in your everyday life. Thanks for listening and be assured of our prayers.