Meeting Uncertainty with Naked Intent

Dear Friends and Family,

Today’s reflections are a response to your reflections on the past few weeks’ letters.

You wrote of the human habit of forgetting, of forgotten wisdom; you shared that we think we should know, that we think we can unravel the mystery; and you touched upon our journey of remembering. One of you emailed me following a deep dive into linguistics on the word knowledge and asked for further reflections. One of you in the “Awaken Wonder” course asked if I would distinguish unknowing from uncertainty.

I saw in your reflections a theme for our further exploration, which recalled the setting I describe below that happened some years ago while on annual retreat with a Council of Educators from the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World.

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. A growing presence is felt here. . . .

Permit me one moment of housekeeping before moving to reflections. I have received a handful of inquiries about difficulty leaving a comment and how to make a contribution to Beyond the Comfort Zone in lieu of or in addition to a paid subscription. These inquiries make me wonder if others of you have the same or other questions. Y’all (she says with a bit of a southern drawl) email me: reneeeliphd@gmail.com. I gladly and gratefully accept contributions in any amount in support of this work, and I am here to help you with questions.

With love,

Renée

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Friday evening’s gorgeous nearly full moon rising over the Blue Ridge Mountains, as if on cue for the setting I had been writing about

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 upon, let alone quiet the uneasiness of walking in the dark, no path ahead of us. 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 ease 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.¹ 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).² It is life or death as yet undecided, the unknown a hovering, lived in every cell dutiful to the endeavor to be, and always—always—but a breath shy of not being.

This being–not being threshold is the ever-present reality of living.³ It is the limbeck of uncertainty in the human being given to the capacity to reflect on death and dying. Whether by hush or by shout, for the body, any uncertainty is perceived as that critical (critical = crisis = krisis) because the recognition of uncertainty as such is still relatively new to existence.

And so, if I were to ask you what certainty you grab for in times of uncertainty and where krisis lives in your body, what words would you say to me to share the inner feeling? And what would be their urgency?

And if I said to you that it is precisely the need to know so as to take control of the krisis of uncertainty that is the human Achilles heel, what might you reach for next?

Any certainty is come by the need to know. . . .

To come toward and meet these uncertain times, might we be so bold as to still ourselves in unknowing?

Permit me to offer some reflections on this way of being. To begin, let’s give a moment to not knowing because these two can get confused. They are not the same.

. . .

Not knowing allows for what can and cannot be known and what is not yet known. Not knowing bestows the freedom and wisdom to say I do not know.

I do not know what you had for dinner last night and whether you enjoyed it, but I can know by asking you. Even so, there is a limit to what I can know by what you tell me. I cannot know of my own body your experience of the colors and textures on your plate, the mouthfeel of each bite.

I do not know how to mend a broken heart, and I do not know that I ever will.

I do not know if, in a year, I will still be here because I cannot know.

I can know but not yet if when tomorrow comes you and I will meet on this page, sharing in these reflections.

Living with not knowing evokes the absence of complete knowing and softens us to absence’ sway. It humbles the human heart, leads us into iridescence of wonder, and can give us over to unknowing.

. . .

Unknowing asks us to come with naked intent to a moment, an encounter, an Other.⁴ This way asks us to suspend all we believe we know; urges us to empty ourselves of preconceptions and judgments, prejudices and beliefs, values and preferences; and come wholly present to meet this moment, this encounter, this Other in our midst. This meeting is humbled and holy I–Thou communion.⁵ We come pouring ourselves over to intimacy with, and so, we come naked and enlivened, and what comes to us is free to disclose its purity of being.

To unknow is to come to the mystery of a moment. It could be said that this is what we have forgotten—bearing naked the mystery of being—and in forgetting, we have given birth to uncertainty. As soon as we let live the mystery of a moment, all time, and hence all uncertainty, falls away. To unknow, then, is to unforget that we are living flecks of distant 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.  

When we willingly unknow, we unforget what we are. And when we unforget what we are, we recall the inner feeling of the lives of today and tomorrow who have bodies like we do. And when we recall what it is to be a body, we know again mercy shimmering through the dark like the dim light of the gold-foiled moon.

In the beginning is relation.⁶

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1. 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

2. Online Etymology Dictionary

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

4. 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).

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

6. Ibid., p. 31.