Do Not Look Away

Keep the Eye of Your Heart Trained on This World

Dear Friends,

To you who read these letters in Southern California ravaged by wildfires raging: may you be safe from harm, may you be comforted now and in the days ahead, may you know that you are not alone in bearing this devastation, this trauma, and the grief to come.

To every one of us: do not look away.

Do not look away from California. Do not look away from the people of Tibet digging out from the earth-quaking rubble. Do not look away from the icebergs falling, glaciers melting, the seas rising, coral bleached, salmon confused, whales beached. Do not look away from the cut-up carcasses of trees across the southern Blue Ridge, twisted and splintered by the howling winds of Helene—forty percent of the forest, every one of them at one time your breath.¹ Do not look away from shorebirds bloated on oil from the next spill and the ones whose feet are trapped in a Gordian knot of plastic twine.

Do not look away from the unspeakable agonies and war-gripped pleas in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan. Do not look away from a young mother without enough water on any one day to quiet her child’s thirst in Mexico, South Africa, parts of the Middle East. Do not look away from that child’s brother’s emaciating hunger in Somalia, Syria, Mali, Guatemala, El Salvador, your own backyard. Do not look away from your neighbors whose politics you abhor. They have bodies like you do.²

Do not look away.

Keep the eye of your heart trained on this world, this living Earth, and every body like and not like your own, and then look again. Look until your heart is broken open, wide as a canyon. Do it. Look until all that’s left is the soft pulpy inside of your newborn innocence newly found. Then you and I might come to hope made pure, hope not our own, hope given through originary presence deep inside the inside of us.

Then and only then, you and I might change our life.

We might wake from the comfort of our walking sleep, splashed out of the haze of forgetting. We might cease believing someone or some technology, a government or an otherworldly God will save us.³ We might see that it is up to each one of us—you and you and you and me—to unfold humanity anew. Then we might bring ourselves to bear the uncertainty of letting go of life as we know it, dying to our daily drive to secure a happy tomorrow, dying to believing, even, in such an inalienable pursuit. We might let our ideas about anything at all become so unraveled at the edges that all that’s left of the cloth of what we can do is meet the moment with nothing but the nakedness of naked intent.

Freed, pray God, from holding on, we might at long last unleash our bonds with struggle (not suffering as is but unconscious suffering self-made). “[Casting] our awful solemnity to the winds and [joining] in the general dance,” we might become again native to this place—our home—and to one another, living out in soulful devotion this, our once-given, present ecological-evolutionary imperative.⁴

This world, our own precious life, and the universe as one seamless “process of communion” is waiting.⁵

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Join me today and Wednesday, January 15, noon–12:15 pm ET, for a vigil in Silence. Join from the quietude of wherever you are; this gathering will not be on Zoom. I will light a candle just before the hour and invite the singing bowl when we begin and again when we end. If you are so inclined, let me know if you join.

If there is interest, I will host a Zoom vigil in Silence on the day of the US Inauguration. (comment, DM, or email reneeeliphd [AT] gmail to let me know your interest)

With tender hope in the whole of us,

Renée

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1. An estimate from the North Carolina Forest Service, reported by Andrew R. Jones, “Report: About 40% of Buncombe Trees Were Damaged or Downed by Helene,” Asheville Watchdog, November 7, 2024. https://avlwatchdog.org/report-about-40-of-buncombe-trees-were-damaged-or-downed-by-helene/

2. A reflection stirred by bio-philosopher, Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014).

3. In his book of essays, Evening Thoughts, Thomas Berry contends that Western civilization is vulnerable to six personal transcendences: 1) belief in a transcendent, personal, monotheistic deity with the accompanying tendency to “desacralize the phenomenal world”; 2) assigning the human as spiritual and the natural world as material; 3) belief in redemption, the notion that “we are not of this world”; 4) the transcendence of mind, a Cartesian legacy, which in effect, “desouls” the world; 5) transcendent technology, allowing us to transcend the basic laws of biology, which otherwise place natural constraints on species and life-processes; and 6) a transcendent historical destiny for the human being, i.e., that we are destined for another transphenomonal place and/or mode of being, significantly diminishing our care for life on Earth and one another. Thomas Berry, “The Place of the Human,” in Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community, ed. by Mary Evelyn Tucker (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006), pp. 25–32.

4. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 297. Teilhard de Chardin contends that in certain instances, rare and fleeting, circumstances are ripe for a leap across an evolutionary threshold (Phenomenon of Man, trans. Sir Julian Huxley (Harper & Row, 1959). Thomas Berry refers to these instances as moments of grace, that there is a spiritual dimension imbued in them.

5. Thomas Berry, “The Universe Story, with Thomas Berry,” an interview, also featuring Mary Evelyn Tucker and Christopher Chapple, Ojai, California, 1992.