Hold Fast the Goodness in Our Hearts

Come What May

Dear Friends and Family,

I write today, holding now in our hearts the events of the past week and in their wake, surely a haze of feeling. It is quite possible to give ourselves over to feeling what is behind the surface feeling. Courage can be found there in the deep hollows, and so, too, reverie, a state of being “open to daydreaming, imaginative contemplation, and a receptive engagement with the world.”¹ I suspect we need both, courage and reverie.

To you who gathered in the 15-minute vigils on US election day, thank you for joining me. There was a tender, felt presence amongst us, steadying no doubt, and surely grounding our tomorrow. I received an email from one of you who gathered in Europe, saying “We must hold fast the goodness in our hearts. And so we will.”

And so, indeed, we will, come what may.

It seems to me that to hold fast the goodness in our hearts, we must have faith in the goodness in our hearts. By what means do we come by that faith?

Faith is not an idea. It is not belief. It is an embodied act of surrendered trust that lifts us, if momentarily, from the gravity of being. We are born into faith. A fledgling in first flight must, by the fact of being a bird, have faith in the “carrying capacity of air,” or the bird would never leap from a limb.² Every plant that bears flower and fruit must surely have faith in the soil when casting seeds to the wind.

On Monday, I held an infant so fresh to this world it was as if she was tethered still by the primordial cord to cosmic innocence, wide-eyed with wonder. When she was in the arms of her mother and I leaned in and looked into her eyes with a smile that widened across my face because how could a smile not widen across my face looking so softly into the soul of the still Unseen through her eyes reaching into mine, she did the same. She smiled. She grinned. And when her mother placed her in my arms, and I held her, and she who did not know me in the way that we who are conditioned to know and so, to trust someone, dropped her head down upon my breast and rested there with the full weight of her, syncing, perhaps, with the beating of my heart, I melted with her into untouched goodness. We, all of us, come into the world with such goodness, such innocence.

And the next day, Tuesday, election day, when in those hours of vigil, endeavoring to hold hope for hope’s sake, and at every turn of awareness seeking to un-know the taken-for-granted perspective on politics given by my particular conditioning, it came to me: all of us, not one side or the other but all of us, have been dragged along like dogs on a rope, goodness of being abandoned to learned belief.

We have gotten off track believing faith is reserved for the pious. And somewhere along the way, we gave away our faith in human goodness to a strange piety in the almighty power in politics, to letting the socio-corporate-political climate decide how we are to be as a humanity on this our earthly home and if we are to be saved or destroyed, all the while, all of us on all sides, hoping against all hope we will be saved from our own undoing.

But little can we seem to take up the inner task to one-by-one play in the ripening field of the transmutation of human being.

On days like today, we say, “Surely this is the thing that will finally wake us up.” Then, tomorrow comes and we keep at our sleepwalk through the dogged pursuit of comfort and security, surreptitiously surrendering yesterday’s hope to a fight today for policy, if not, regime change. This is no fault of any single one of us. We are, each of us, cells in the body of humanity.

And yet, within each of us is the change we seek. This statement is not a platitude. It is not an echo we’ve heard time and again. It is a call into the Great Work³ of our time to take to heart the inner work of human becoming. Which is not human betterment, by the way. Human becoming is intensification of presence to our essential being, a practiced integration of the faculties of body, heart, and intellect enacting our life interpenetrated with the world as one dynamic whole.

. . .

There is a tendency, understandable, to read this moment as an historical moment. It is. It is also an ahistorical moment, a moment cosmological and evolutionary, woven through and beyond human history. To this, some say we are “between worlds.” What they mean is that we are, today, the imaginal cells of transmutation between one mode of being and another, between one structure of consciousness and another.

If we can let our imaginations rest on the image of imaginal cells, we can see that every cell has a role to play in the unfolding. We are dying as we are waking. Take heart, dear friends. May the soupy inner Unseen of the chrysalis be a living meditation that guides us out of the dark as newly created.

I wish to take this reflection just a bit further, especially in the wake of recent climate devastations and more, surely, to come. Throughout human history and prehistory, transmutations of consciousness have corresponded with dramatic perturbations in earth systems. One example is the transition from hunter–gatherer ways of being to farming, which took place across the duration of retreat of an ice age. With this transition in ways of being, a new structure of consciousness formed (namely, the neocortex), unfolding more complexity in the biology of the human. Across evolution, as consciousness intensifies, biological structures complexify.⁴

What makes today’s climate perturbation unique is that it is human-mediated. It could be said that what makes this moment in the human unfolding unique is that the transition toward a next mode of being now requires our intentional participation. Today, consciousness needs our help to further unfold. This, I believe, is what Thomas Berry urged as the Great Work of our time: the willing participation in the transmutation of human being.

Some might say we initiate this work at the level of soul, which is to say, we come to this inner work, dwelling in the perceptivity of the organ of the heart. The heart—real not figurative—is the portal through which we become.

The upcoming in-person gathering December 4–8 will be an embodied “field study” in this Great Work. Three spots remain. It is not too late to register. If you feel called into this inner journey, I hope you will join us.

For more details, email me reneeeliphd [AT] gmail 
To register, email Doreen Tanenbaum: tanenbaumd [AT] gmail

The days ahead may seem dark and scary. There is in you and me a light that no darkness can extinguish. The goodness in us is the primordial force of consciousness itself, unfolding. About this, we can have faith and hold fast to.

With love,

Renée

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1. Megan Burt, “A Hermeneutic Alchemical Journey Towards a Deepening Ethic of Care,” Society of Rogerian Scholars (SRS), 37th Annual Conference 2024.

2. Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2014).

3. Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Harmony/Bell Tower, 1999)

4. Jean Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis McKunas (Ohio University Press, 1984)