Wordless Well of Hope in Uncertainty
+ JOIN ME on Election Day
Dear Friends and Family,
Firstly today, to you who received multiple emails from me on Friday, please accept my apologies. I do not intend to overwhelm your inbox . . . or you!
Thank you to all of you for your continued tenderness and care in your correspondences to me and your ongoing presence and prayers offered on behalf of everyone here in the wake of Helene. Admittedly, exhaustion runs high as we step through these early days of recovery and metabolize personal and collective shock and grief. But I want you to know that I am taking good care, and my loved ones and I are ok, and we extend to those of you in Spain our deepest sympathies and prayers.
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
We began this month’s reflections with a short passage from Mary Oliver.
In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith. ~Mary Oliver, "Winter Hours," Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, Poems
If I close my eyes, I can almost see her, a certain synchrony about her pace across the coarse sand of a New England shore still dark from the night tide retreating, morning light waking over winter waters lapping a metronomic beat. She walks inside the darkness and the light—as we all do—“Darkness of nature, darkness of an event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing.” And she refuses any inclination to rest in the well-worn faith in reason.
Stumbling into the wordlessness of the magnanimity of this light reaching into “the darkness of the world,” she writes a blank onto the page—this light of _____.
A blank on the page discloses an inner kernel of emptiness within the writer, within us. Of this blank on this page, it is an absence of any ready answer. We’re thrown (in the Heideggerian sense) into the unknown. She lets us pause in the blank. She lets us not know with her.
Then she gives what reason cannot understand.
Maybe hope.
Maybe faith. In a glow of wonder, you responded. In comments, you responded, bringing forth fractal pieces to a whole, a hologram you did not know you were creating.
You said the light has no name because it is wordless.1 If it is wordless, it means we know it by means more than the light of the intellect, the intellect being the sun from which the rays of reason are cast. Being wordless lends the immediacy of a living recognition within the knowing flesh of our being. We could say it like this: we know this light because we are stardust. We carry light in our very cells. This is not metaphor. Wonder with me the energetic warmth of you. Tell me it is metabolism, then scroll back eons before metabolism first made molecules breathe.
the light of _____ is primordial, and so whatever words come are words that walk in circles. This light is before words in the same way that tears are.
You said the light is innocence2 . . . an interiority of naked openness that dwells in the tender heart absent any preconception. Like the best of Halloween, you said, a cold night beaming of young children, learning that strange doors open by miraculous means . . . spilling sweets.3
You said the light is knowledge.4 And of this, I supposed you intimated a certain kind of knowledge, that perhaps of gnosis—a quality of knowing by the fullness of our being fully present to the numinous within all that is. Some would say this is mystical knowing. What I suppose they would mean to say is the understanding that comes from being fully present to the Presence within, which is at once the Presence in which we are ceaselessly bathed, the Presence that breathes us.
wordless. innocent. knowing.
hope. faith.
A friend told me about a friend who, by what can only be said to be miraculous means, escaped death by drowning during Helene. The friend was standing in her kitchen at her home in a holler.5 Downhill, a small creek, nothing that would ordinarily flood the house, did not [yet] flood.
A ways away, enough of a distance away that you would not think to think water would threaten you, the torrent of water from the storm collapsed the wall made to hold back reservoir spillways. When that wall collapsed, walls of water breached the spillways, and way out in the holler where she lived, she being completely unaware of the breach, this woman looked out her kitchen window to see that she was suddenly in a fishbowl, and there was no way out.
And then the water began to rise from the floor.
Not at all what she would ordinarily do, she did the only thing she knew to do. She got down on her knees. And she began to pray.
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy Will be done. On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
This friend made it out with help that came just in time. We cannot ever say what role praying played. We cannot say.
What we can say is that it is as if in such moments, this wordless, innocent, knowing kernel of light within us accesses us. We’ve been cast a rope, this rope an inner pull tethered to hope for hope’s sake—a hope that knows by and through the innocence with which we come into this world that there is mercy even in the darkest hour.
“We ourselves are not the source of that hope; we do not manufacture it. But the source dwells deep within us and flows to us with an unstinting abundance, so much so that in fact it might be more accurate to say we dwell in it.6
We dwell in hope not because we believe our hope will make what we hope for so but because we know that without hope, it cannot be so.
Hope proclaims:
What has been is that which prepares what will be, and what has been done is that which prepares what will be done; there is only that which is new under the sun. Each [moment] is a unique event. . . .7
The late quantum visionary, David Bohm, whom some say was the most influential theoretical physicist of the twentieth century, said that all existence is woven upon an unseen un(and so all)dimensional fabric of quivering potentia. This unseen, the implicate order of things, spans not time, not space, but the ever-present Origin,8 the beginningless beginning always and everywhere blooming into the explicate, into existence—infinite particles collapsing out of and returning to infinite unseen waves, the unique unfolding of life day-by-day.9 Hope effectuates what blooms.
Hope effectuates what blooms not because hope dwells in the human will but because it does not. We tap into hope.
Hope’s home is at the innermost point in us, and in all things. It is a quality of aliveness. It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth. When our innermost being is attuned to this pulse it will send us forth in hope, regardless of the physical circumstances of our lives. Hope fills us with the strength to stay present, to abide in the flow of the Mercy no matter what outer storms assail us. It is entered always and only through surrender; that is, through the willingness to let go of everything we are presently clinging to. And yet when we enter it, it enters us and fills us with its own life—a quiet strength beyond anything we have ever known.10
Gathering in Hope on Election Day
For weeks, I’ve wondered what it would be to gather in hope on Election Day. . . .
Please join me, everyone, on Tuesday, November 5, in a 15-minute silent vigil, calling from and abiding in the shimmering light of shared mystical hope. These 15-minute “gatherings in hope” will take place at 9 am, noon, 3 pm, 6 pm, 9 pm ET. Feel free to join in one or all.
As with our recent 15-minute Sunday vigils in Silence, these are not Zoom gatherings but will take place in the quietude of wherever you are. I will keep a candle burning on Tuesday. As with those Sunday vigils, at the opening of each “gathering of hope,” I will invite the sound of the singing bowl and will do so again at quarter past the hour.
If you do join, I would so appreciate you letting me know: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail or DM here on Substack.
If there is interest in gathering during one of these times on Zoom, I will arrange that. Let me know in comments or by reply to this email.
Election Day Wisdom Sit
Cynthia Bourgeault’s Wisdom Waypoints group is hosting an Election Day Wisdom Sit from 9:30 am – 9:30 pm ET with the invitation to drop in any time.
Forthcoming
If you would like to make a one-time donation to Beyond the Comfort Zone, you can do so at “Buy Me a Coffee.”
In Southern Appalachian parlance, a holler is a hollow between two ridges.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope: Trusting the Mercy of God (Lanham, MD: Cowley, 2001), p. 20.
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985), p. 412.
Jean Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis McKunas (Ohio University Press, 1984)
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). I have taken significant imagistic liberties in offering such an abbreviated glimpse at Bohm’s extraordinary contributions to our understanding of Reality.
*This passage on Bohm comes from my earlier letter, “Hope for Hope’s Sake.”
Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, pp. 86–87.
Kimberly Warner sent me here -- and I'm so glad she did! I'm grateful for your moving and cogent thoughts on hope, a subject dear to me. My original name for my newsletter was Building Hope -- and it featured the environmentally visionary master's thesis work of our university's graduate architecture students. Reading this has given me new insights into why hope resonates so strongly with me. 💚
The concept of hope is very interesting. We all know what it means to be filled with hope. Usually, hope means is that we wish something to be realized that we want. So, it that sense hope is a form of attachment. That's why the Buddhists say that you must surrender everything, including hope, to be fully unattached, as any form of attachment brings suffering. Pema Chodron said that we need to give up hope because it gives us a ground to stand on, when in reality there is no ground, and that what is called for is complete surrender to the groundlessness of our being. I had trouble with that when I read it years ago. But I do understand it in the sense that Buddhist thought is that we must surrender everything that causes suffering, including hope, which keeps us attached to an outcome. I think that the trick is to be unattached to hope, so that any outcome is accepted and surrendered to. When Cynthia Bourgeault says, " It (hope) is entered always and only through surrender; that is, through the willingness to let go of everything we are presently clinging to.", I would add, being willing to give up clinging to hope as well. Right now, most of us, I imagine, want to hope that ultimately something good will emerge from the chaos of the next 4 years. I certainly feel that. What I don't want for myself is to be crushed if that doesn't happen, at least not in my lifetime. So I want to hold that hope lightly, knowing that we have no idea how things will play out. As much as I want that outcome, I want to prepare myself to surrender to whatever unfolds. I want to try and reduce and minimize any suffering that I might create for myself or others. So, perhaps this poem by Rumi says something about all this in his way. "Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make sense."