Meeting the Moment with Naked Intent

Unknowing in Uncertainty

Dear Friends and Family,

I thought we might visit the archives while I catch my breath on a brief writing pause. I dug up some earlier reflections on unknowing, twisted them around, fleshed them further by stripping them bare, then dove in deeper in light of your comments to last week’s essay, Eaten by God. In other words, I did not not write this week!

In comments, you touched on opening to direct experience instead of grasping at control.¹ You brought us into the labyrinthine trail of sorrow as a way of the heart interpreting its sacred contract with the Unknown.² You were captured by Simone Weil’s elevation of attention as Love.³ Several of you were pulled into the Weil’s labyrinth through the unceasing paradox of being.⁴

We could leave this week’s reflections with these intimations into naked intent from you, and we would surely have enough to contemplate in the days ahead. But I’m inclined to keep going: let naked intent take our hand today as a way of being in these in-between times that, while wildly uncertain, seem certainly no accident when viewed through the diaphaneity of Presence. . . .

To you who bring questions and reflections to these weekly letters, please accept my unending gratitude for what you give to the whole.

To you who read and linger in quietude, please accept my unending gratitude for what you give to the whole.

Felt presence is amongst us.

With love,

Renée

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Meeting the Moment with Naked Intent

With a gibbous moon punctuating a cloud-scattered sky, it seemed easy enough to see shadows cast by the trees and thick brush. But the milky light did little to reveal leaf-filled furrows on the forest floor or the chance meandering vine we might stumble over, let alone quiet the uneasiness of walking in the dark, no path ahead. One had to feel into the night with the whole of the body—to see with skin and hair; to listen for the smell of the mist, to taste the fragrance of every footstep with musty leaf layer. And for every muscular itch to seize a fistful of night air, there was the equal and opposite necessary easing whole-boded into each next step, letting loose the grip of the sight-sense we otherwise relied on and opening to the night’s guiding hand.

We, an intimate group, had convened for an annual retreat to wonder in silence what was coming toward the work we gathered on behalf of. For some years, we had been coming together, exploring imaginal, intuitive, and contemplative ways of knowing in communion with the living Earth. Guided by reflections put forth by visionary cultural historian and ecotheologian, Thomas Berry, we endeavored this night to belong to a living question we took to the dark forest, awaiting in the woods what word would come to guide our way.⁵ The still point of each moment was emptying ourselves of steadfast faith in the need to know and becoming present with Presence itself. This still point, I believe, can shine a light on how we humans may walk together, holding hands through these dim, uncertain times.

. . .

It was once said that to be uncertain is to travail at a critical turning point in which change must come, for better or for worse. In the most ancient whispers of the word, to be uncertain is to straddle krisis (Greek).⁶ Krisis is life or death as yet undecided, the unknown a hovering, lived in every cell dutiful to the endeavor to be, and always but a breath shy of not being. This being–not being threshold is the every-moment reality of existence.⁷ We are biologically endowed with the inner intent to escape the not-being threshold. The limbeck of uncertainty is given through the human, however, in the impulse to anticipate and reflect on this threshold, namely on death and dying. But what actually dies gets abstract: this moment of inner calm, that comfort in the steady presence of a loved one, pennies from last week’s paycheck, the world as we know it. In other words, the angst of uncertainty is uniquely human. This angst we experience gives us phenomenological material to explore.

If you and I were sitting face-to-face, knee-to-knee, and I were to ask you what certainty you grab for in times of uncertainty, what would you say?

And if I were to ask you where krisis lives in your flesh and marrow and fluid interstices, what words would come to evoke the inner feeling?

What would be their urgency?

Can you get there, to the inner experience, that is?

Or does thought hijack you at every turn? If so, where do the thoughts go?

This inquiry is not intended to be rhetorical but to flicker a glimmer of light on the force of uncertainty in the disposition of mentation so that you and I might wonder together how to call upon this disposition in the experience of moment-by-moment existence to come naked to the phenomenon of these uncertain times phenomenologically and dive in headlong unknowing—actively penetrating the automaton nature of a certain kind of thought, the kind of thought that needs to know in a certain kind of way, and then what? (It is my every intention to discombobulate with words here, to unsettle thought, to push you into the labyrinth and hope you lose your way, to riddle you out of the mentations you and I so rely on that separate us from Reality, which, if it is to be certain must be (w)holy uncertain—as sure as the Tao cannot be named.)

. . .

Unknowing asks us to come with naked intent to a moment, an encounter, an Other.⁸ To come naked is to come stripped bare, uncovered, freed from artifice, from the figleaf blanketing originary innocence . . . and to let the moment, the encounter, the Other be so bare, too.

To practice this wayless way, this pathless path, is to suspend all we believe we know of the moment, encounter, Other; empty ourselves of preconceptions and judgments, prejudices and beliefs, values and preferences; and come (w)holy present to meet What/Who is in our midst and let all the inner feeling such meeting enlivens. This meeting is humbled and (w)holy I–Thou communion.⁹ We come pouring ourselves over to intimacy with. And in pouring ourselves over to intimacy with, what comes to us is free to disclose Its purity of being. We, in naked intent, open to the potentia in Mystery, actively surrendering to Its unfolding. All time and so, all uncertainty falls away. So precious and tender is our presence of/to being in its purity.

To unknow, then, is to unforget that we are living flecks of originary stars—primordial being of the Earth that bodies us, the Earth a body borne of the Cosmos, the Cosmos infinite radiance of an indescribable Mystery—every utterance of being an always unfolding relation with all that is beyond the bounds of space and time.

To unknow, then, is to say yes to our role in the unfolding of a 14.5 billion+ year Mystery.

When we unknow, we unforget what we are. When we unforget what we are, we recall the inner feeling of the lives of today and tomorrow who have bodies like we do.¹⁰ Lives you and I will never meet in the flesh, but of our meeting the purity of being now, we call forth the possibility of—all of them through all yesterdays and tomorrows given in this moment to which we come with naked intent. And when we recall, thus, what it is to be so, we know again mercy shimmering through this infinite Mystery in the dim light of the gold-foiled moon.

In the beginning is relation.¹¹

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1.

Kimberly Warner

2.

Mark Malinak

3.

Megan Burt

4.

Veronika Bond

,

Tara Penry

,

Julie Schmidt

5. This group in reference is the Educator Council of the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World, a work closely mentored by Thomas Berry. “Through our programs, we began to make ourselves deeply available to a sacred universe by offering loving attention to the natural world and bringing ourselves into the deeper Presence that surrounds us.  Unlike many mindfulness practices in which “attention” is a goal in itself, in our practices the intention has been “relationship” and “resonance”.  We behold the natural world in a deeply listening and receptive way.  We behold with a loving eye and an open heart.  Our practices might be viewed as “holding at bay” our habitual ways of “knowing about” and accumulating information. Through these practices, we awaken the unitive imagination, that more subtle faculty which unifies and moves us beyond the dualism of an I-It relationship [into an I-Thou relationship] with the world.”

Thomas Berry’s “Foreword to Thomas Merton’s When the Trees Say Nothing . . . [became] a guiding quote for the Center’s work”:

There is a certain futility in the efforts being made – truly sincere, dedicated, and intelligent efforts – to remedy our environmental devastation simply by activating renewable sources of energy and by reducing the deleterious impact of the industrial world. The difficulty is that the natural world is seen primarily for human use, not as a mode of sacred presence primarily to be communed with in wonder, beauty and intimacy. In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated.  A deep psychic shift is needed to withdraw us from the fascination of the industrial world and the deceptive gifts that it gives us. . . Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us. https://www.beholdnature.org/our-story

6. Online Etymology Dictionary

7. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1966).

8. To come to unknowing with “naked intent”: Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counsel, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boulder: Shambala, 2018).

9. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. (New York: NY, Scribner Classics, 1958).

10. Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: Toward an Erotic Ecology (Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017).

11. Buber, I and Thou, p. 31.