Thomas Berry: To Create the Future
A Short Reflection for December
Dear Friends and Family,
On Wednesday of this upcoming week, an intimate circle amongst us will begin an in-person gathering at Valle Crucis Retreat Center in Banner Elk, NC. While preparing, I received a timely email from the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology containing rare archival footage of an interview with Thomas Berry. Today’s first-of-month passage captures a few moments of reflection from Thomas in that interview.
Since we will be on retreat next Sunday, next week’s letter come to you from the archives, and I will not hold the 12–12:15 pm ET vigil in Silence. Please carry on with this weekly vigil if you’re so inclined. I would love to receive word from you if you do.
May these early December days be kind to you and gentle.
With love,
Renée
Every atom declares itself as an atom. Even our knowledge of an atom is a communion process, and in that process, we do not exhaust the mystery of the atom, because the reality of things is changed by the knowing process. And so, the universe is this process of being known.
We are one of the knowing principles. It’s a self-knowing principle. The universe knows itself in each mode of consciousness. It knows itself in the stars. It knows itself in the whales. It knows itself in any reality, but there’s a special mode of knowing itself in the human, and it has communicated itself to the human in a special way.
. . .
Unless we recover our identity with this vast [communion] process and a feeling of being at home with it, I don’t think we’re going to be able to have the power—to have the energy—for this to be so . . . convincing to us that we will undertake the type of changes that we need, because we have to be assured that to create the future is not simply a human venture. It’s a universe venture. It’s an Earth venture. It’s a life venture. . . . We can’t invent it, but we have to feel sure that if we interact creatively with the planet, that the planet Earth, together, will be able to move into a new period of creativity.
A new human mode will begin as soon as we accept ourselves in this context and realize that the human and the natural world will go into the future as a single, sacred community, or we will both experience disaster on the way.
It’s just one community. It’s the sacred community.1
I will post the URL for the video after the retreat.
Sigh. I feel longing, even hopeful sadness as I read this. 🙏
This reflection puts our current predicament into an infinitely more spacious container. Thank you, Renee, for taking some of the pressure off.