October has come and nearly gone, and September was the same, dear Friends. I traveled with one son to Portugal in September to visit another son who lives there. And a joyful time we had! I became quite sick on this trip, but our family time was too precious for me to stay in bed. This insistence on my part to get out of bed as soon as the freight train of acute illness moved on surely had something to do with its lingering effect for the first several weeks of October after my return home. I am waylaid in sharing what’s on the horizon, which I had hoped to announce weeks ago.

I have received emails wondering whether there will be a winter gathering this year. In a word, Yes! We will return to Valle Crucis in January to begin the New Year on intentional footing. These winter immersions offer a wonderful gateway for anyone interested in becoming more intimate with this shared evolutionary work, especially anyone who may be standing at the threshold of participating. These are intimate silent gatherings with reflective conversation by the fire at the old stone hearth in the evenings and a spacious rhythm that allows for solo time, rest, and integration of our work.

I am most excited to share today what’s on the horizon.

Do read on, and I hope to see you soon.

“We Are the Abyss: Jean Gebser on Soul and the Numinosum”

Presentation and Conversation, Friday, December 4 at 6 pm ET

Consciousness Studies Salon, Sponsored by the California Institute of Integral Studies

Online via Zoom

On soul, we might begin by wondering what we really mean by the word, which meaning we seem to take for granted perhaps because it speaks to something of our deepest shared interiority. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology offers an ambivalent constellation of concepts: life, animate existence; spiritual or emotional part of man; disembodied spirit of man; vital principle; essential part.1 According to Jean Gebser, this ambivalence reveals that the word is imbued with its original numinous character of the experience of soul.

Gebser devoted a chapter in The Ever-Present Origin to distinguishing soul and spirit by introducing the numinosum—that felt potency in, for instance, a brooding night sky, dappled light on a forest floor, a dust storm across a desert plateau, a chance encounter with a spider’s web, the face of death. This potency elicits a vital experience of awe, fascination, shivers or trembling even, and renders a deep feeling of “holiness,” a wholly enfleshed feeling that long precedes religion and yet gives way to it. The numinosum is a potency of presence perceived.

“There are potencies inherent in the soul, [too],” Gebser writes, “efficacies which unleash the energies of life and death.”2 We see in this reflection on soul the face of the numinous. This is because, for Gebser, soul and the numinosum are interpenetrating. As one ambi-valent phenomenon, they reveal the unfathomable depths of the “imperishable core and germ” of the human and all that is.3

In this talk and conversation to follow, my hope is that we reconsider the soul and begin to see through the potencies of our deepest interiority and the current of life and existence itself down to the “pristine ground” that is the potency of originary presence radiating through us as Love.4

The presentation and conversation are free and open to anyone interested in consciousness studies. Please email me [reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com] for more information.

“Belonging to the Wild and the Sacred”

In-Person Immersion, Wednesday–Sunday, January 6–10, 2027

Valle Crucis Retreat Center, Banner Elk, NC

In these dark times, ecologically, culturally, geo-politically, and with the ever-hastening tilt toward a world corporatized by AI, never has the question “what makes us human?” been more necessary to not only contemplate but to live, wholly enfleshed, each one of us. We might, in fact, recall that we are born wild and we will die wild, and every moment in between is wildness we must reclaim. Thomas Berry writes that life’s “wild component” is the “creative spontaneity [that] is its deepest reality, its most profound mystery.”5 We hear in these words a spiritual dimension to the primordial nature of being.

Although we may be conditioned to think that wildness is chaotic, turbulent, destructive even, Berry tells us, we are mistaken if we do. For the creative wildness of the universe is imbued with a certain inner discipline. This discipline is the containing force inherent in the expansive force of the universe. We see it encompassing every mode of existence, even the fiercest storms. The arc of our lives is ever imbued with this mysterious balance. And we are mistaken if we believe our yen for control is inner discipline.

Could it be that inasmuch as we, humanity, have abandoned the intrinsically wild nature of our being for domesticity, security, and control, we have foregone the inner discipline interenveloping it? If this is so, how might we become again incarnate wildness, as the intimacy of being alive in a world that is everywhere alive, at once the open dynamic of creative spontaneity? In this way, then, how might we sense from our inmost flesh the inner discipline at work, calling from the wild depths of soul? For it is “our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world about us,” Berry writes, that “we become [once again] sacred.”6 The human becomes more fully human by recovering intimacy with the wild — in us and in the living world.

Gathering for four days at Valle Crucis Retreat Center in winter, we will immerse ourselves in the experience of belonging to the wild, that we might become again sacred, i.e., holy by the fact that we reclaim an essential attribute of wholeness. The rhythm of our days of inner- and inter-experiencing will be punctuated with the primordial elements of fire and (ice-cold mountain stream) water, silence, and the stillness that avails us to the creative spontaneities of being, the natural world all around us an ever-present mirror and guide.

This in-place immersion can accommodate up to 15 participants. Seven “seats” remain open. The donation range will depend on the number of participants there are to distribute the fixed base costs. Please email me [reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com] for more information and to register.

“Becoming Integral: Participating in the Great Unfolding”

A Long-Form Phenomenological Co-Study, Beginning Spring 2027

Immersions each season, online and in-person. Sessions recorded.

With echoes from Thomas Berry, that the Great Work of our era is the reinvention of the human at the species level, and relying on the insights of Jean Gebser and Teilhard de Chardin regarding the unfolding of consciousness in the human at this present epochal threshold, an intimate cohort will come together for a long-form co-study to become willing participants in the Great Unfolding toward what Gebser referred to as the emergent “integral” structure of consciousness.

When in January of this year, I polled you all about potential forthcoming offerings, the idea of a long-form phenomenological study of the unfolding of consciousness received by far the greatest interest. I set out to design this study. Very quickly, it became clear that if we were together to enter a study in the traditional sense, reading and talking about and trying to apply these insights into the direct experience of our lives, we would be engaging the study, however intentionally phenomenologically, by relying almost exclusively on the mental-rational structure and the ego’s will. Nothing would have changed except we would know more.

Questions surfaced. In what way would this shared work take place to effectuate the Great Work? What would be asked of each of us “to participate in the (co)-formation of the emerging new mutation?”7 In what way might we avail ourselves (i.e., be of use) to the intensification of presence that is itself the unfolding of consciousness? In brief, what would be necessary for the latent integral structure, its ever-present spiritual reality, to begin to shine through us?

What has emerged is a co-study of participation, which avails us to the unfolding. Later in life, Gebser characterized the emergent “mutation” as “pristine universal consciousness” that has become integral to itself “as executed by us.”8 We might go so far as to say that, for the first time in the timeless unfolding of consciousness, willing human participation is now required. Gebser was quite clear that participation is not integration, but it is a necessary condition. Teilhard urged that further evolution would be funded by intention. For the emergent integral structure is already in us — a quivering potentiation awaiting presentiation (making present). This co-study intends to provide the necessary condition of participation by which and through which we become available for the intensification of presence already shimmering within us, latent, as the radiant Origin itself. If these insights draw you toward the study, but the constellation of words makes little sense as yet, know that they will, through participation, not by striving toward comprehension.

Planning details for this co-study are still underway, and further details will be forthcoming. The duration, between eighteen months and two years, remains to be determined, with financial accessibility for all who are called to participate as a guiding consideration. Please email me [reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com] for more information, or to express your preliminary interest in participating. The application period will open December 15 and continue through January 30, 2027.

Ongoing

Gatherings in Silence take on the 1st and 3rd Sundays of each month and every Wednesday via Zoom. These contemplative gatherings bring us into Silence, the primordial ground of our inner work of participation in the unfolding of consciousness. Over time, they have become a circle of belonging to this shared work. They are open to everyone.

For information on these gatherings and one-to-one inner life work, please visit their individual pages on the website: Gatherings in Silence & One-to-One, or email me: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Support this work

Every donation received through “Support this work” makes possible not only this publication, but the six monthly Gatherings in Silence, seasonal participant day pilgrimages to St. Anthony’s Chapel, and financial assistance for ~25% of participants during online and in-person immersions.

With new offerings forthcoming, this work would very much benefit from your financial support.

Please offer what you can. No amount is too small.

Subscribe now

Notes & References

The camera quickly finds its place after the first half minute or so.3 So, do stay.

Lastly, permit me to offer, as I often do apropos the essays here, comprehension of every term and insight is not the aim so much as listening from that place within that already understands, letting the words meet you there.

Note: If you are receiving this via email, clicking the video will take you to my Substack website. Click “transcript” to read the text.

Events & Forthcoming

Gatherings in Silence take place twice monthly on Sundays and every Wednesday via Zoom. These contemplative gatherings provide a circle of belonging to the shared inner work of participation in the unfolding of consciousness at this present threshold of Earth and humanity. They are open to everyone.

For information on these gatherings and one-to-one inner life work, please visit their individual pages on the website: Gatherings in Silence & One-to-One, or email me: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Subscribe now

Support this work

Every donation received through “Support this work” makes possible not only this publication, but the six monthly Gatherings in Silence, seasonal participant day pilgrimages to St. Anthony’s Chapel, and financial assistance for ~25% of participants during online and in-person immersions.

With new offerings for 2027–2028 soon to be announced, this work would very much benefit from your financial support.

Please offer what you can. No amount is too small.

Notes & References

Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb — if not ultimately, at least essentially. Fuller being is closer union. . . . But let us emphasise the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say in vision.

– Teilhard de Chardin1

Entering a Phenomenology of Consciousness

How must we learn to see if consciousness is the subject of inquiry? To see what itself cannot be seen, we might first recognize, then set aside, the taken-for-grantedness of eyesight as our predominant way of sense-perceiving, its manner of watching and searching, of observing and focusing, and enter a phenomenology of seeing as fuller being. This is the task before us in these essays on consciousness and cardiagenesis.2 By these two, we mean the radiant sea of presence within and the evolutionary movement wherein the faculties of the human heart intensify with perceptual depth, respectively.3

From the earliest expressions of life on earth, to see or not to be signifies the essential condition.4 The single-celled infusoria evolved with a dot of pigment on its back, the pigment a rudiment of ocularity responding to light wholly absent a back-and-forth byway of nerves.5 The pigment gives the organism orientation toward light, in effect, positioning this primordial being toward elemental intentionality and directionality.

A houseplant placed on a windowsill will, in a matter of days, incline toward the radiance of the sun. Turn the pot, and the plant turns in response, again inclining toward the light. This tropism (turning) is orchestrated across the entire photo-sensing organism, the phototropic cells on the stem’s shaded side elongating in such a way as to curve toward the luminance. The whole plant beholds the sun. It ‘sees’ it, distinguishing not only the presence of light but its quality, directing the plant’s shape, orienting its movement, and schematizing its growth in response, yet without anything remotely resembling eyesight. A seed will remain dormant until a harmony of light and dark appears, indicating conditions favorable for life. A seed buried too deeply may lie dormant for ages if light is not sufficient to reach it. In a real sense, the seed is responding to an invisible world, already differentiated by the seasonal intensity of light that touches it.

In this regard, then, eyes are not the origin of seeing so much as an evolutionary expression of an ever-deepening relationship between life and world. At its most elemental, seeing is an embodied differentiation between conditions favorable and unfavorable to being. A world appears, disclosing itself as meaningful, to which a life becomes oriented. With the evolution of the eye, the world begins to appear as form, edges and thresholds, and movement. At still greater perceptual depths, seeing becomes recognition, not only of conditions favorable for being, but so, too, of bonds of intimacy, and of beauty. In the human, seeing becomes reflexive: the one who sees becomes aware of seeing. In the grand epic of evolution, the unfoldment of vision interpenetrates a cosmos in which there is ever more to be seen as disclosed.6 By disclosed, we mean etymologically that which is thrown open to perception.

While seeing in the human could be said to be, in no small way, the inner movement of consciousness itself, we shall come to see that we must learn to see differently and to see different things if consciousness is the subject of inquiry and vision is its intensification. In this regard, we shall not be confined to or content with seeing the outer covering of the world; observational eyesight alone won’t do. To see differently, we mean seeing with more than the eyes themselves. To see different things, we mean seeing into the unseen.

In a turn, then, vision reveals itself as diaphanous. That is to say, it is translucent. Vision, by its very nature, is never that which sees itself but its radiance. Like a ray of light shining through a crystal-clear prism, waking color through the medium the light shines through, and so, revealing light itself, learning to see renders visible the domain of the invisible.

Becoming Aware of Seeing

There are moments, time-free and fleeting, when something within becomes present to its own presence, when awareness becomes aware of awareness itself, moments when seeing sees itself seeing, or a silence appears, say, between one thought and another, and the silence becomes a perceptual ground of presence. In such moments, we find ourselves, if briefly but enduringly, arrested by this something that moments ago escaped our notice and will just as soon escape our notice again. So fundamental is this ground of being as to be endlessly taken for granted.

We are never not without consciousness. Even when we are presumably unconscious, something within is always already a wakeful presence — pulsing the heart, breathing the breath, transforming every sip and taste of the world into our very flesh and bones, providing the life impetus, élan vital, to wake up and walk through another day.7 Then someone you love leaves this plane, and you there, present, observe that even in dying, something within is orchestrating what a life already has before its first breath: the wherewithal of letting life go. And so, too, for some time after they pass, you are quite certain in the fullest feeling sense that their presence, just moments ago confined to the body, is now everywhere, including perceptibly within you.

This something unseen but never not perceived has awed the human since the dawn of humanity. It — the awe, not the something within — is perhaps what sets our evolutionary path as uniquely human, orienting us not only toward reflexivity but religio, the inner movement toward fuller union. It, the awe, is longing’s recollection of itself for itself as the gravitational pull toward fuller being as closer union, i.e., toward consciousness intensified by its own perceptual depth.

You, astute reader, will note that by describing consciousness as the radiant within of life, any hint at consciousness as an epiphenomenon emerging from the human brain, and hence belonging to the human alone, is put aside here. Even as our study will be centered, by and large, on consciousness unfolding through the human, we set out here to say that consciousness is not limited to the human. Its origin is not the human brain. It is, in essence, what in the eons of unfolding bears the human brain. Human consciousness emerges from and is a unique expression of the pristine universal or ‘cosmic’ consciousness.8

Not everyone will be inclined to concur with this understanding of consciousness; so committed is modernity to the universe as random, to matter as ‘dead’, to the body at best as mute extension of mind, at worst as machine to be hacked, and to centuries of anthropocentric inquiry into the nature of being, privileging the human intellect as commensurate with consciousness itself. This modernist view is the observational view, viewing from without. Seen from within, we cannot deny the essence of the inner impulse to be in all that is. That is, something within is ever oriented toward being. Notice a hapless bumblebee in the shadow of your nearing footstep change direction, and you will grasp without hesitation this inner esse (L. to be) of the smallest of creatures. Place a single-celled organism in a solution of sugar-water, and watch it move toward the greatest concentration of sugar. Add vinegar to this same solution, and watch it move, with haste, away. See in a grain of sand its latent potential to be your very own bones, first as the liquid-crystalline cellular milieu of the root or tuber or leaf of a plant. Behold eons of earth unfolding life itself from what was once a fragment of sidereal matter.

Consciousness, as it is understood here, is the psychic face of the universe intrinsic in its originary flaring forth.9 It is the golden thread of its deepest interiority. It radiates out from the Invisible Origin, the Godhead itself, and permeates all as an always already presence in the unfolding of the universe and each individual being. Consciousness is originary. It was never not here.

The (Taken-for-Granted) Miracle of Appearing

Consider the written page. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than black marks spread across a surface of white. Yet, what appears at first glance does not describe what transpires on the written page. For the strokes are rarely, if ever, encountered as lines and curves on an expanse of white, the meaning of which is the visual rhythm itself, the aesthetic of the shapes repeated at varying intervals, or even that the white is rendered more apparent by the fact that the black marks appear. Instead, already, the strokes hover above the page, each with a sound heard, uttered silently through one’s own mouth. Taken as a whole, each set of sounds, interrupted by rhythmic silences in sync with one’s breathing, is imbued already with meaning, and the meaning is undergirded by an unarticulated but assumed relation between writer and reader. The marks on the page never disappear. And yet, what appears to consciousness is the meaning the strokes disclose. The lines and shapes remain always what they are, even as they render visible what is beyond them.

That something appears at all is a wonder. When we are suddenly transmogrified out of the taken-for-granted, the appearing of what had not yet appeared is never without possible astonishment. The miracle — and by this we mean the Greek sense of the word thauma as the event evoking astonishment — may be said to be this: that the invisibility of being becomes visible as beings. But let us not be quick to reduce a being to a thing. The world ever appearing is not a constellation of objects; a “thing” is not a thing so much as it is an event. The event is relational dynamism. For that which appears is at once that which is perceived.

Appearing is inexhaustible. Out of the unseen infinitely appears that which can be seen. This is what the ancient Greeks understood and carried into the verb root φαίνω, phaínō, the making manifest of the unmanifest; formlessness pouring into form as the inexhaustible disclosure of the universe unfolding — giving and receiving, appearing and perceiving, in ceaseless relational participation. A phenomenon (Gr. φαινόμενον, phainómenon), then, is that which appears, not as a thing so much as the dynamism of appearing, subtended triadically by that which pours into appearance and that which perceives the appearing.

Seen in this light, a mountain is not first the concept of a mountain as a changeless solid state across the ages. It is the isness of a mountain appearing to the one who sees. Silence is not a momentary absence of sound. It is the dynamic primordial ground from which sound appears to the one who hears. The face of your beloved is not an arrangement of cells architecturally organized in recognizable form. It is presence disclosing itself in relation as the affinity of being with being.10

Hence, phenomena appear and they do more than appear. The prism through which light passes appears and it at once exceeds its crystal clarity, disclosing light’s colored radiance to the one who sees. The prism never disappears. It remains a prism. Neither does it compete with the light passing through it; nor does it appear as something else. It remains itself a crystal-clear form. One can see this crystal form completely unaltered by the light. At the same time, its very phenomenality renders visible what otherwise remains unseen, the shimmering radiance of light.

No phenomenon ceases to be itself. And yet, each uncovers more than what may be taken for granted. That is, phenomena seen through to their shimmering dynamism and source disclose themselves in such a way that another order of reality appears through them. To this order of reality, we give the name here, the Invisible, Ever-Present Origin; the Godhead itself.11

The ancient Greeks expressed this shining through from the same verb root, phaínō. If phaínō expresses the making manifest of the unmanifest, and phaínōmenon (phenomenon) names the appearance of that which comes into manifestation, diaphaínōn expresses the manifestation becoming translucent to a deeper order of Being. The Invisible Origin is ever-present, shining through all that is, as light shines through a prism. It remains unseen until a structure (or mode) of consciousness becomes capable of seeing it.

This turns us to the question, why this inquiry now?

The whole of existence is forever groping toward what is not yet expressive, reaching through the inside perils of the endless outpouring to be. Like coral toward light, building upon the accumulated minerality of innumerable polyps living and dying across vast stretches of time, battered by currents and storms that break in one day centuries of growth, bleached by warming seas wrought by the human enterprise, the unfolding of the universe is an unceasing seeing through the dark, inside the perils of existence, toward its radiance fully perceived.

Seen in evolutionary hindsight, moments come when the unfolding seems to reach an impasse: in the universe, on earth, in life, in the human. These “mutational periods” are thresholds of untold disturbance, even destruction, moments in the unfolding whereby chaotic upheavals of the existing give way to the not yet made manifest as novel expressivity of consciousness itself. Some say we are living at such an impasse today. Something latent is pressing forth as the ‘new’.12

It could be said that the movement toward intensifying perceptual depth is the reflexive role of the human. Whether or not this role is fulfilled in other beings of the universe is not yet ours to see. But it is plain to see that this role is our responsibility.13 And yet, it does not set us apart from the whole. Rather, it is the ground of relational participation with and as the world disclosing that which is its inexhaustible Source. This perceptual depth does not discard what came before it. It enfolds even the most rudimentary perceptivity within us, holding that primordial mode of perceiving and those modes that have followed together with what is emerging as ‘new’. The human role, then, is not a departure from elemental seeing but its fullest integration of all faculties of human perceptivity. This movement in evolution seems to echo what Teilhard, in the opening epigraph, means by fuller being is closer union, the human being unfolding toward perception of pristine consciousness shining through all that is.14 The Ever-Present Origin becoming diaphanously visible to itself is perhaps the decisive faculty by which the ‘new’ comes forth in us.15

What is at stake is neither loss nor gain. It is neither expansion nor compression, neither ascent nor descent. Nor is it evolutionary culmination. It is a mutative unfolding taking place from within the within of our being. This ‘core’ is that kernel of the presence of Origin, forming, shaping, and directing each and every one of us. Here, we come to the great work of our era: to become wholly participant with and transparent to the coming into being of the not yet already immanent in ourselves.16

Given the Great Work of Our Era, Why These Papers?

What is coming forth as the ‘new’ presses forth in the human as a particular faculty of perception now emerging.17 This series of papers aims to tend to this emerging, phenomenologically. That is, the hope is that each paper becomes a place of abiding long enough for perception itself to be altered, presenced recursively, and altered still more, until the world begins to disclose itself with more depth and transparency.

In this regard, these papers will not proceed by encouraging comprehension. Rather, they may be better understood as a sustained meditation — perhaps we may go so far as to say apprenticeship — in seeing. The series proceeds through Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness as elaborated in The Ever-Present Origin and a later essay, entitled “The Invisible Origin,” and they bring to bear cardiagenesis, in a Teilhardian sense, as an integrating, evolutionary movement wherein the faculties of the human heart intensify with perceptual depth, nurturing the ‘inner eye’ of seeing. Hence, Henri Corbin, too, is an essential companion. And we shall come to see that the unfolding of the religious experience in the human, as reflected on by Rudolf Otto, will find footing in our inquiry as well.

Late in his life, Gebser wrote of what perceiving asks of the one who perceives: an inner attitude able to set the self aside and an unconditioned trust and openness, all the while being of an “overwakeful brightness.”18 Whoever perceives the Origin, Gebser wrote, has thereby been perceived by the whole.19 Perception here is not an achievement or attainment by a knower over a known. It is not come by pursuit. It is mutual disclosure, the terms of which are never entirely the perceiver’s own. The perceiver is participant. For this to be so, an attitude of receptivity rather than achievement, of availability rather than attainment, of presence rather than pursuit becomes the inner orientation of being. A phenomenology of consciousness unfolding through us becomes fidelity to itself — freedom from and yet enfoldment of the egoic self toward the deepest interiority of the Itself.

The writing–reading will follow as a heuristic; that is to say, it will unfold by the abiding it aims to support, through perceiving, through contemplating perceiving, and, correspondingly then, by discovering. In this way, the writing–reading will be recursive, as this essay has been, iterating and then iterating again as an invocation of deepening perception, which in its deepening becomes a revealing, a diaphaneity — a shining through the writing–reading as a shared act of mutual participation.

We began this essay by wondering: how must we learn to see if consciousness is the subject of inquiry? Perhaps at this juncture, it has become apparent that the inquiry itself is already an instance of seeing in the way that Teilhard suggests: fuller being is closer union, and vision is its radiance. We do not arrive at a view of consciousness from the outside looking in; neither by observation nor analysis. We become the seeing that is itself transparent through ever-intensifying perceptual depth by receptivity to consciousness always already working through the human. In this way, we may fulfill the human role in the larger evolutionary process about which Thomas Berry spoke repeatedly, becoming prismatic radiance of the Origin ever present, coming to meet and shine through us moment by moment.20 As such, we become Origin perceiving Itself as the abiding expressivity of fuller being. We are seen as seeing.

Postscript.

Gatherings in Silence continue twice monthly on Sundays and every Wednesday, and are open to everyone.

For information on these gatherings and one-to-one inner life work, please visit their individual pages on the updated website: Gatherings in Silence & One-to-One, or email me: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Subscribe now

Donate $10

Notes & References

ancient pond –
frog jumps in
sound of the water

–Matsuo Bashō

There are moments when attention, moving horizontally across the world, finds itself at once arrested by the immediacy of what, until then, had been at perception’s edge. In these moments, attention takes on doubled vision. This is Bashō’s “sound of water.”

Early on, the attention that sustained the writing in these Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and meditations moved horizontally upon “ancient pond— | frog jumps in.” It was what I have come to refer to as “pilgrimage writing,” reflecting on phenomenological encounter with world and self through displacement and disorientation, consciousness observing itself in motion, the displaced body the domain of inquiry. By pilgrimage, we mean here the Abrahamic sense of leaving the familiar as a sustained way of being. Go forth from your native land . . . to a land that I will show you.1 Abram has no idea where he is going, only that he must go.

This writing also focused on what sustains pilgrimage, reflecting on ancient contemplative practices from the Near East and Greece, the ground condition of Silence, the ripening of inner solitude and stillness, and the necessity of a life of simplicity.

When I began to see that evolution itself, from the first flaring forth, is a kind of pilgrimage, an existential displacement from Origin toward an ever-unfolding unknown,2 and that the escalation of collective disorientation in these transitional times is intrinsic to this unfolding, I began to see this publication through a kind of doubled vision. And I sensed a change in the unfolding of what was already becoming a shared work. While the pilgrimage writing that shaped earlier letters still feels true, it has become clear that a writing that traces movement through transformation can not reach what the movement itself discloses: the structure of transformation, the transmutation of perception, and the interior depth through which this transmutation takes place.

It is this second vision, what the movement discloses more so than what it traverses, which has now become the center of this work, its “sound of water.”

Teilhard intuited this movement of consciousness toward deepening interiority, naming it involution: the interior face of the same movement that, seen from the outside, appears as evolution. Gebser traced this movement in human consciousness as the becoming-transparent of what was always already present, an emerging reflexive interiority whereby perception becomes capable of attending to dimensions previously unreachable. By interiority, we are referring to perceptual depth, which is at once intrinsically relational with the world, with one another, and with the ever-present Origin. What I am referring to as cardiagenesis articulates where this movement emerges in the human being: in the heart, in its twofold faculties—physical–perceptual and spiritual–imaginal—as it becomes capable of the perceptual depth and participation that involution, in the Teilhardian sense, has always been pressing toward.3

This is what Savary has named the cardisphere, a radiant field of encoded emanation from and perceptivity by the human heart.4 We are in relation with one another and the ground of being by the participatory and perceptual faculties of the heart itself.

Forthcoming Beyond the Comfort Zone writing attempts to articulate the nature and structure of this unfolding, in echo of the classical sense of papers, which develop rather than reflect. The writing will continue to be accompanied by online and in-person immersions and, in the coming months, long-form phenomenological study on the unfolding of consciousness, as Gebser and Teilhard understood it.

This movement has practical implications. The inquiry now requires sustained attention of a quality that denies a rhythm of weekly publication. It must be developed to reach the depth it demands. Essays will become longer. Publication will become less frequent. Shorter pieces will still appear, as companion pieces within the larger body of work. Silence will remain foundational to this work as the ground condition upon which the participatory and perceptual faculties of the heart are availed.

The center of gravity is shifting. The work is demanding more of what appears on the page. This is, I sense, the right direction.

Postscript.

Gatherings in Silence continue twice monthly on Sundays and now weekly on Wednesdays, and are open to everyone.

One-to-one inner-life work continues, now oriented more explicitly toward the inquiry into transformation this work is developing.

For more information on both, you can now visit their individual pages on the updated website: Gatherings in Silence & One-to-One.

For further insight into these changes, please see the newly revised About page.

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Notes & References

In keeping with something of a tradition here on Mother’s Day, I offer you a poetic reflection on mother. Today’s passage is from Thomas Merton reflecting on Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, for our lives, for these times.1

What was unfinished last week will come to you next week, dear Friends. There is movement underway here beyond the comfort zone, and I look forward to sharing.

For today —

May the sweetness and wordless gentleness of the Mother of all keep you today and every day,

Renée

Sophia

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity,
a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden
wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is
Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is
in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a
silence that is the fount of action and joy. It rises up in
wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the 
unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me
tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. 
This is at once my own being, my own nature, and
the Gift of my Creator's Thought and Art within me, 
speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister,
Wisdom. 

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April is poetry month, I just realized. With our turning now from reflections on hope, today seems a good day for a poem about the art of poetry itself.

“Ars Poetica” was written by modernist American poet and writer, Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982). In this poem, MacLeish ushers us into the marrow of poetry. In doing so, line by line, word by word, he escorts us into the marrow of our own existence, indeed, into being itself.

It is said that the first poem was a song, not unlike the songs of the winged ones and the ancient moan of the whale. With the human, each intonation took on ever more meaning; each meaning, a word mirror of soul stirred to outward expression by inner feeling. Poetry was layering the world anew with the tissue of meaning-making oration. Thus, it is said that the birth of poetry signaled the beginning of a new epoch in consciousness.1

And here we are today, at what seems to be the threshold of a new epoch.

It is said that the art of poetry has something to offer this great unfolding. If this is so, what may we perceive from a slow reading of MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”?

As always, I welcome your reflections, dear Friends.

With love,

Renée

MacLeish’s reading of this poem is quite beautiful.

Listen to MacLeish read.

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown – 

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds. 

                 *

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind – 

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs. 

               *

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf. 

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea – 

A poem should not mean
But be. 

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Notes & References

Dear Friends,

I am on retreat this weekend with a small circle of participants amongst you, as we set aside philosophical reflections and endeavor toward phenomenological perception and participation in ontological hope, in the manner in which we have been exploring it over the past months.

The timing seems good for an Interlude of Images. In the morning hours of late, I have been revisiting the Arctic Trek of my 2022–2023 pilgrimage and have called this one up from the Archives.

Places of still nascent Earth, untouched, wild, and sacred, remind us of our own nascent innocence, and that we, too, are of the breath of this, our place of belonging.1 More, and to our recent reflections, the felt sense of Earth’s breath is not unlike the perceptual sense of hope—an everywhere radiance. We learn to perceive hope in the impetus of life.

This brings to completion our series of reflections on hope.

Ever humbled to share this journey with you,

Renée

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Since January, we have been inquiring about hope in the context of an unfinished world. In the company of Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Celan, Viktor Frankl, Emily Dickinson, and one another, we have come to see hope as given openness to the not yet, structured in the very nature of being. Such hope asks for fidelity through the inner tension of becoming. It asks for endurance. And so, we turned toward faith, not as belief but as this fidelity to the openness under pressure.

Today’s essay explores love, cosmologically. Drawing from Jakob Böhme’s account of Primordial Desire and the birth of being, and Teilhard de Chardin’s reflections on love and “the within of things,” it approaches love as a foundational principle of being.

This final essay in this series is in no way conclusive, but perhaps, together with the other essays, it reorients us and our participation in an unfinished world.

Thank you for your presence, care, honesty, and wonder in comments and in emails to me. Your reflections, especially the difficult ones, have shaped this series, which will come to completion next weekend when a small cohort convenes for an online immersion. A few “seats” remain, and I welcome you who wish to join us in this shared inner inquiry. Please see details below.

As always, I am grateful you are here.

With love,

Renée

. . .

In these warming days of spring, samaras twirling in the air, a cardinal, beak the color of a California apricot, whittling away at the paper covering of one; everywhere a blossom in epiphanic grandeur, the breath sipping a symphony of floral fragrance, the heart in musical syncope, I walk in the afternoon sun wondering, what is this inner lilt of bodily-being toward what has touched, already, the inner within?

. . .

If hope, if faith, what of love?

What can we say of a force so foundational to being that we endeavor to gather words around it, all the while searching for the indescribable? We pen poems about its intensities, sing ballads about its failures, utter epics about its infidelities. But do we speak of love?

Even to say “God is love” risks putting a human face on the Absolute and love within the confines of human sentimentality. We have pushed love too far downstream from its origin. In so doing, we mistake its magnitude and depth. For the love of which we must speak in triadic fold with hope and faith—as we have been exploring these since January in a noncanonical manner—has no conditions and does not end, not even with death.

If hope is a given openness structured in being itself and faith is fidelity to the hope, anticipating the not yet under pressure, then love, too, cannot be uniquely human. It, too, must appear much earlier, with being as such.

If this is so, we must begin in the beginning.

We must begin with Being, the ground of the not yet quivering at the threshold of becoming. Primordial Desire longs with such intensity to come into being that the longing turns inward upon itself, narrowing, pressing, until Being becomes being. The longing of Originary Desire is not directed toward another. There is not yet an “other” to move toward. This longing is pressing toward existence.

I was a hidden treasure, and I longed to be known,
And so, I created the world, both visible and invisible.

As it does so, hope (ontological) must not collapse under the inner tension.1 What we have named faith in the evolutionary sense must endure as fidelity to the hope in the longing for being not yet. And then—by then we lend a figure of speech to mean not time but depth—and then, the Desire turning through the agonies of as-yet unmet longing to be, enduring the friction of its own inner intensity, ignites:

Fire . . . and light!

The first flaring forth!

Being comes into being. The universe is born; and with it, differentiation.

And with being, immediately comes “being’s affinity with being”—one differentiated interiority drawn to another.2 This, Teilhard de Chardin tells us, is the movement of love. Love, Jakob Böhme tells us, is the first Principle of the universe.3

Love is longing become relational.

Love is the first activity of being.

It is affinitive, the first movement through which being enters into relation.

If there were no propensity to unite, then the most basic particles would be inert. At the quantum level, they are not. Nothing would be drawn toward another, neither particle with particle, nor cells with cells, and so on up to the most complex expressions of being drawn into union. Seen in this way, materiality is no longer a collection of objects. Matter, both visible and invisible, is a field of activity drawn to itself.

In the words of Thomas Berry, the universe is a communion process.4 What draws being toward being is movement from the already present interiority of existence. Teilhard de Chardin refers to this interiority as “the within of things.”5

In the human, this affinity becomes apparent to itself. When we are drawn toward another—a beauty, a shaft of light cast across eternity, one another, the Unseen—we are drawn into love as its own disclosure. And when we wonder about such moments, we are that expression of being in whom the affinity of being with being reflects on itself. Thomas Berry tells us this is our uniquely human role on Earth, if not the entire universe.6

For us, love renders the universe, and this world, relationally intelligible. When we witness human acts in opposition to this principial ground of relational intelligibility, the universe, indeed, life itself loses intelligibility and gives way to feelings of despair, what we have recognized in this series as occluded hope.

Love is not sentiment. Nor is it consummation. It is the principial movement of the universe, the dynamic by which Being, once come into being, enters into relation. It is the dynamic force that moves the universe.

Love has been here all along, dear Friends. The magnitude and depth of our experience of love are its disclosure.

Let us pause to articulate what we have been tracing during these weeks:

Hope: the given openness to the not yet borne within primordial longing
Faith: the fidelity to that hope persisting through compressure (inner tension)
Love: the affinity of being with being once existence flares forth

So what? you might wonder. How does this understanding change how I live?

In these few months of exploring this triad on the page here, some of you have shared with tender honesty your resistance to hope in these times, your moments of collapse into despair. You have expressed the fragility of faith, especially in humanity. You have wondered about hate. If this series has offered anything, including today’s reflections on love, may it be that these three—(ontological) hope, (evolutionary) faith, and (cosmological) love—do not belong uniquely to the human. They are activated in us through that eternal Originary Desire to be, which finds expression in and is intensified through the human heart. Hence, we culminate this series on hope by reflecting on love as the longing for relation intrinsic in being itself.

Our participation in this triad does not eliminate despair. It does not set aside the fragility of faith, nor resolve division. But it alters how we understand them, how we bear the immense tension of these uniquely uncertain times, and how we engage at this present-moment evolutionary threshold of the not yet. And love, we come to realize, is that affinitive force in which we are always already held.

One of you asked early on in this series: Am I willing?

From these reflections, what we experience as love is already underway, prior to us: the movement of primordial longing within us by which being unceasingly draws itself into relation through us. Our willingness is remaining open to this movement.

Hence, we might now wonder: Am I willing to open where I might be inclined to close, to endure where I might withdraw, to remain in anticipation without resolution, and to allow myself to move closer from within, even in the slightest way?

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Living in Hope: An Online Weekend Retreat & Immersion

April 18–19

We live within hope as an abiding openness to the future in us.

Since the beginning of this year, we have been reflecting on what we have referred to as ontological hope—an objectless hope intrinsic to the universe, a given openness in life itself. During the weekend of April 18–19, a small cohort will gather for a two-day online immersion to bring these reflections into lived perception.

Together, we will wander into a shared living inquiry: When the world feels so broken, how do we let the impressure of inner feeling guide us out of clouds of despair into the harbor of hope? How do we abide in hope that is objectless and free from the demands of optimism? How do we live in hope at the threshold of what is not yet?

Drawing on contemplative and experiential practices, we will explore these questions together, with Jean Gebser and Valentin Tomberg as philosophical and spiritual companions.

Beginning with an honest encounter with the riven world, we will make a clearing within ourselves for resistance, longing, and despair, approaching them as invitational; discover the generative pressure within this moment; see hope in life all around us; and orient ourselves to the future in us.

Our practices will usher us from disorientation to an abiding sense of an originary hope we indwell.

Register by email: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Essays in this Series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope”

– Toward a Phenomenology of Hope

– Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World

– Something Shall Be

– Compressure and the Labor of Hope

– And the Light Shineth in the Darkness

– Everything is Riven, But All Is Not Lost

– Let us. Am I? All is. – Amen.

– This Story Is Not Fully Told

– Hope in the Gale

References & Notes

Today, the intrinsic unity of seasonal and sacred is revealed: spring in the Northern Hemisphere, the fifth day of Passover, and Easter Sunday, each bearing the mark of hope. Our reflection, a poem by Emily Dickinson, set to music by composer Christopher Tin,1 gives our inquiry on hope a body, seen and heard as much as read, a gesture in lived form of what we have been tracing since early January. Dickinson’s hope dwells in life’s deepest impulse, sings its sweetest song in “the Gale” of the stormiest seas, never ceasing, and asks nothing of us but that we let it be—no object, no outcome, no optimism. Tin describes the piece as “beat[ing] a warm heart of hope, like the song of a small bird in a storm.” Hope is not sentimentalized here; it is realized where it is most tested: in the pressures and tensions of life itself.

We will bring this series on hope to its close next week, weaving love into the Pauline triad of faith, hope, and love from within a cosmological orientation.

For you who feel this inquiry is not yet complete, we will continue this work more directly in the upcoming weekend online immersion, Living in Hope, April 18–19. Registration closes April 12. If you find yourself on the threshold of participating and have questions, please do reach out directly.

With a heart steadied in hope,

Renée

“Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers

poem: Emily Dickinson || music & video: Christopher Tin

"Hope" is the thing with feathers – 
That perches in the soul – 
And sings the tune without words – 
And never stops – at all – 

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – 
And sore must be the storm – 
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm – 

I've heard it in the chillest land – 
And on the strangest Sea – 
Yet – never – in Extremity, 
It asked a crumb – of me. 

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Living in Hope: An Online Weekend Retreat & Immersion

April 18–19

We live within hope as an abiding openness to the future in us.

Since the beginning of this year, we have been reflecting on what we have referred to as ontological hope—an objectless hope intrinsic to the universe, a given openness in life itself. During the weekend of April 18–19, a small cohort will gather for a two-day online immersion to bring these reflections into lived perception.

Together, we will wander into a shared living inquiry: When the world feels so broken, how do we let the impressure of inner feeling guide us out of clouds of despair into the harbor of hope? How do we abide in hope that is objectless and free from the demands of optimism? How do we live in hope at the threshold of what is not yet?

Drawing on contemplative and experiential practices, we will explore these questions together, with Jean Gebser and Valentin Tomberg as philosophical and spiritual companions.

Beginning with an honest encounter with the riven world, we will make a clearing within ourselves for resistance, longing, and despair, approaching them as invitational; discover the generative pressure within this moment; see hope in life all around us; and orient ourselves to the future in us.

Our practices will usher us from disorientation to an abiding sense of an originary hope we indwell.

Register by email: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Essays in this Series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope”

– Toward a Phenomenology of Hope

– Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World

– Something Shall Be

– Compressure and the Labor of Hope

– And the Light Shineth in the Darkness

– Everything is Riven, But All Is Not Lost

– Let us. Am I? All is. – Amen.

– This Story Is Not Fully Told

Notes & References

Dear Friends,

During this winter-spring series on hope, I have also been circling the question of faith, wondering: What is the relationship between hope and faith? What does it mean to have faith in the world today, as precariously unfinished as it is?

Today’s essay continues our inquiry into hope, turning to faith as its necessary complement. It draws on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, particularly as interpreted by theologian John F. Haught in a lecture he gave to the American Teilhard Society, titled “Teilhard and the Future of Faith.”1

I welcome your reflections.

A brief note on the upcoming online retreat, Living in Hope: it is now about half full. The inner work of this retreat moves into the lived experience of hope and faith as we have been exploring in this series. If you find yourself resistant to hope, if you are uneasy with the idea of faith, you are well-suited for this experience. If you have considered participating in these inner-work offerings but are unsure where to begin, this retreat is an opening. With the ideas already put forth in these essays, we will be focused on the lived experience of hope and faith as evolutionary in these uncertain times.

As always, please email me if you have questions: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

For now, the essay. . .

Renée

This Story Is Not Fully Told: Faith as Fidelity to the Not Yet

Weeks ago, the days still cloaked in winter’s grey, though lengthening, a bulge appeared overnight in the main stem of the fiddle-leaf philodendron, leaves draping over the Buddha behind my sofa. Day by day, the bulge has grown, pressing from within against the green stem like a body carrying new life. What is coming? A flower? A new leaf? I cannot yet know. This plant is new to me. But something gathering beneath the thinning skin of green stem reveals this plant is no longer what it was in the dead of winter. Weeks on, something shall be moves from within. What is most pressing here, the inner sap of life, cannot be seen.2

Nothing in the philodendron stem reveals—or even guarantees—what is coming. Yet, something has begun to form. We cannot deny the movement. This movement is not incidental. It belongs to the process of life, not its outcome. It belongs to the unfolding of the cosmos. And so, it belongs to the structure of this world, and to us.

We have said before, in echo of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that we live in an unfinished world. 3 Everywhere around us, in springtime especially, unfinishedness is apparent in the pressing forth of the still unseen—in buds, in birds changing their tune, in air warming to Earth’s tilt. But it is an altogether different reckoning to bear this process in the world as it is at this moment. It would seem naïve. But stay with me here.

Two questions come for us to reflect on today: Can the human proceed true to the unfolding of life? Can we go forth bearing the unknown within us as humanity in such precarity?

More pointedly: Can we be faithful to the not yet? If so, what is asked of us?

For Teilhard, these questions are as crucial to the exquisite uncertainty of these times as they are to the unfolding of the universe. These two—these times and the unfolding of the universe—are not separate processes. They cannot be teased apart. The human is the universe unfolding in its reflexive mode. Without a sense that something is coming into being from within the depths of the cosmos—something not yet apparent—human action falters.

Imagine a world already done, what’s up ahead already known, a world already perfected. The thought may bring comfort, relief amidst uncertainty, which any one of us would welcome. But the reality of a finished world would soon become tainted with immense sorrow and longing. What would life do if the world were finished? What would be the point of what life does? What would be the meaning of what we do? Would there, in fact, be life if life is, by definition, always coming into being?

We participate in the becoming of the world. The ever-present not yet relies on a certain fidelity to its unfinishedness, already present in life. Life is structured by anticipatory tension; this tension, an adherence to becoming. Can we grant to this fidelity the word, faith, without retreating into religious dogma?

We do not mean by this quality of faith a belief in this or that. Belief can persist in illusion. Nor are we referring to a placating confidence. Confidence can be fabricated. Nor are we pointing to a thought process that buys us comfort from doubt. Certainty can exist where nothing is real.

It would be easy to call these—belief, confidence, certainty—faith. Doing so would be premature. These arise in the intellect and emotion. They do not reach into the depths of what is at stake, existentially or cosmologically.

The faith we are reaching into is not cultivated by the human intellect, neither by reasoning nor by evidence. The faith we are referring to is not psychological. It sits at the threshold of not yet.

Valentin Tomberg says of faith that it is the divine breath.4 If it is divine breath, it must be life’s participation with the ground of being. Echoing Henri Bergson, Tomberg offers that faith is experienced in the human through creative intuition, a sense-feeling mode imbued in the human reflecting on that which has gathered awareness. Through human intuition, faith, as a participatory quality in life itself, becomes conscious.5 Faith precedes the human, but it requires the human to become conscious.

We said earlier in this series that hope is a given openness to the unfolding not yet. Faith is life’s fidelity to this openness.

It is adherence to the ongoing process of becoming. The human is the expression of being in which faith becomes intensified in its reflexivity. And in this way, the way of openness (ontological hope) further opens. Hope needs and is intimately intertwined with faith.

. . .

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's
shore
Lay like folds of a bright girdle furled
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. 

– Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”6

. . .

The crisis of modernity lays bare the plenitude at the heart of the universe, and with it, faith. We are conditioned to trust only what can be seen. Earlier in this series, we referred to substance ontology—a reality constructed by the human on the basis of materiality. Substance ontology erodes fidelity to the unseen. But Teilhard—who insisted that the whole of life lies in the verb, seeing, i.e., how we see “within a cosmos in which there is always something more to see”7—helps us envision a world in which that which is not yet can appear to a deeper mode of seeing. Only the human, given to a certain doubt about the unseen, refuses the irrefutable not yet by the fact that we abandon fidelity to it.

If the philodendron draping the bust of the Buddha in my little studio does not see and so, does not possess, what it becomes but stays instead true to, faithful to, the always unfinished nature of becoming, can we?

Life is not outcome but anticipation. It is not so much what appears already; it is oriented toward what is coming into being. For living is activity and activity is imbued with faith.

If the given openness in life is ontological hope, fidelity to anticipation of the not yet is evolutionary faith.

Evolutionary faith is a condition for action. It depends on what life anticipates but cannot yet apprehend—and in the case of the human, cannot yet comprehend, an expression of action in reflection. Action’s antecedent is faith. Knowledge comes later—after the fact (L. factum: a thing done), not before.

The cosmos, as cosmogenesis, is itself anticipatory. The not yet is not elsewhere. It is constituted in the present, and not as an extension but a depth. What we may be inclined to call the ‘future’ is the not yet already active, pressing into the present. It is a freedom from time—what Jean Gebser refers to as the concretion of time.8 This means the ‘future’ is not something we move toward across the linear march of time. It is already at work within what is.

Teilhard asks us to begin with anticipation. We need not be enthusiastic about it. We need not like it. We might even suffer it. But we do not turn our back on it. Faith, like hope, is forward-facing.

If faith is anticipatory in the evolutionary sense, it cannot be limited to thought. It must have its expression in the will, the primordial will that breathes life into us. To begin with anticipation, then, insists on a reversal of the will, an inversion from the ego’s willful need for comfort and security, power and control, to the inner posture of am I willing? We come into the world with this primordial will. It never leaves the tether to the Ever-Present Origin within us. It is, in essence, not my will but Thy will be done.

There is a certain potency in waiting in faith for the not yet to bulge from within the main stem of life, in not becoming impatient by our need for resolution.9 This is not passivity in waiting. It is active participation at the felt-edge of not yet, allowing for what can emerge when we do not collapse into action prematurely. This fiercely attentive waiting is an intensification of presence that transmutes our perceptivity from space-time to that which is hovering in the field of possibility we did not retreat from.

Here, we are abiding in what Gebser refers to as a-waring—an intensification of presence lived from within the depths of wholeness in anticipatory participation with all that is and yearns to be. It can only be come by in the presence of faith we are calling evolutionary faith, radically surrendered to the primordial Desire to become through the human.

This present moment on Earth is not apart from that primordial Desire. The universe needs faith in the human now more than ever, needs for us to be a conscious enactment of anticipatory presence to the not yet. This quality of human faith fortifies hope (the originary openness) to becoming. Without faith, Teilhard tells us, the not yet collapses. In this sense, human faith is not for the human alone. It is the reflective, anticipatory fidelity in becoming that allows for the future to be possible. What is coming depends on us.

In the days since I began meditating on and drafting this essay, the thinning green stem of the philodendron split in the dark of night, the bulge now bearing a leaf, pink as tender flesh, tightly wound around a new unfurling stem. The plant is coming into fuller being. Whether we do so remains open.

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Living in Hope: An Online Weekend Retreat & Immersion

April 18–19

We live within hope as an abiding openness to the future in us.

Since the beginning of this year, we have been reflecting on what we have referred to as ontological hope—an objectless hope intrinsic to the universe, a given openness in life itself. During the weekend of April 18–19, a small cohort will gather for a two-day online immersion to bring these reflections into lived perception.

Together, we will wander into a shared living inquiry: When the world feels so broken, how do we let the impressure of inner feeling guide us out of clouds of despair into the harbor of hope? How do we abide in hope that is objectless and free from the demands of optimism? How do we live in hope at the threshold of what is not yet?

Drawing on contemplative and experiential practices, we will explore these questions together, with Jean Gebser and Valentin Tomberg as philosophical and spiritual companions.

Beginning with an honest encounter with the riven world, we will make a clearing within ourselves for resistance, longing, and despair, approaching them as invitational; discover the generative pressure within this moment; see hope in life all around us; and orient ourselves to the future in us.

Our practices will usher us from disorientation to an abiding sense of an originary hope we indwell.

Register by email: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Essays in this Series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope”

– Toward a Phenomenology of Hope

– Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World

– Something Shall Be

– Compressure and the Labor of Hope

– And the Light Shineth in the Darkness

– Everything is Riven, But All Is Not Lost

– Let us. Am I? All is. – Amen.

References & Notes

Dear Friends,

It’s been a while since I compiled your comments into a collage. Your reflections on hope over the past several months have inspired me to do so today.

I have collected your words, phrases, and passages, and one by one, woven them with your refrains. What has formed is at once a poem, a prayer, and a plea—toward a phenomenology of hope, the arc of this series.

Other than changing verb tense here and there, for the most part, what follows are direct quotes from your comments since early January, which flow a-chronologically one into the other, woven with words from Martin Luther King Jr., Viktor Frankl, and Paul Celan from essays in this series. The brackets are my additions and poetic license.

Each footnote denotes your words, which I reference below. Italics denote passages from King, a biblical phrase, Frankl, and Celan. Quotations denote passages from me in the essays to which you referred in your comments. You’ll find reference to each contributor in the References & Notes section.1 (This compilation does not include reflections from personal emails to me.)

To all of you who have read these essays on ontological hope, reflected on them in solitude or with me on the page, I offer my deepest appreciation.

We’re not done with hope. But we will change direction a bit next weekend. . . .

Ever in gratitude,

Renée

Let us. Am I? All is. — Amen.

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All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Living in Hope: An Online Weekend Retreat & Immersion

April 18–19

We live within hope as an abiding openness to the future in us.2

Since the beginning of this year, we have been reflecting on what we have referred to as ontological hope—an objectless hope intrinsic to the universe, a given openness in life itself. During the weekend of April 18–19, a small cohort will gather for a two-day online immersion to bring these reflections into lived perception.

Together, we will wander into a shared living inquiry: When the world feels so broken, how do we let the impressure of inner feeling guide us out of clouds of despair into the harbor of hope? How do we abide in hope that is objectless and free from the demands of optimism? How do we live in hope at the threshold of what is not yet?

Drawing on contemplative and experiential practices, we will explore these questions together, with Jean Gebser and Valentin Tomberg as philosophical and spiritual companions.

Beginning with an honest encounter with the riven world, we will make a clearing within ourselves for resistance, longing, and despair, approaching them as invitational; discover the generative pressure within this moment; see hope in life all around us; and orient ourselves to the future in us.

Our practices will usher us from disorientation to an abiding sense of an originary hope we indwell.

Register by email: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Essays in this Series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope”

– Toward a Phenomenology of Hope

– Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World

– Something Shall Be

– Compressure and the Labor of Hope

– And the Light Shineth in the Darkness

– Everything is Riven, But All Is Not Lost

References & Notes

AN OBJECTIVE FORCE IN THE EMERGING NOT-YET

Weekend Online Retreat & Immersion

April 18–19 || via Zoom

Hope is not something subjective due to an optimistic or sanguine temperament, or to a desire for compensation in the [psychological sense]. It is a light-force which radiates objectively and which directs creative evolution towards the world’s future.

It is the celestial and spiritual counterpart of the terrestrial and natural instinct of biological reproduction—which, with mutation, produces natural selection, which latter, in its turn, produces with time biological progress.

In other words, hope is what moves and directs spiritual evolution in the world.1

Dear Friends,

Plunged as we seem to be into a warp-speed crescendo of uncertainty—ecological devastation, wars, AI outpacing wisdom, technologies crowding the sidereal night, erosion of meaning—there is everywhere a sense that we are living in an atmosphere of civilizational rupture. Not only is there a yearning for the radiance of hope to rest in, the future of our world pleads for our participation in hope as an objective force.

Yet, in a world made more unintelligible by the day, our earnest efforts to have hope are surely clouded, if not completely occluded in the dark tower of despair. This is because we cannot have hope. Nor do we cultivate it. To feel hope is to perceive it—a spiritual intensity always present within the unfolding of life.

We live in hope as an abiding openness to the future in us.2

Since the beginning of this year, we have been reflecting on what we have referred to as ontological hope—an objectless hope intrinsic to the universe, a given openness in life itself. During the weekend of April 18–19, a small cohort will gather for a two-day online immersion to bring these reflections into lived perception.

Together, we will wander into a shared living inquiry: When the world feels so broken, how do we let the impressure of inner feeling guide us out of clouds of despair into the harbor of hope? How do we abide in hope that is objectless and free from the demands of optimism? How do we live in hope at the threshold of what is not yet?

Drawing on contemplative and experiential practices, we will explore these questions together, with Jean Gebser and Valentin Tomberg as philosophical and spiritual companions.

Beginning with an honest encounter with the riven world, we will make a clearing within ourselves for resistance, longing, and despair, approaching them as invitational; discover the generative pressure within this moment; see hope in life all around us; and orient ourselves to the future in us.

Our practices will usher us from disorientation to an abiding sense of an originary hope we indwell.

The seasonal timing could not be more suitable. Given springtime budding in the Northern Hemisphere, the natural world will be our participatory ally, a living study in hope, which we both witness and participate in.

During this immersion, we will not endeavor to adopt new beliefs about nor compel ourselves to have hope. Rather, we will come to our own direct perception of this spiritual intensity already present within life.

The following are tentative session themes for our two-day immersion:

Saturday: Seeing – Recognizing Hope in the Forces of Becoming

– The Riven World: Despair, the Collapse of Meaning, and the Feeling Tone of Hidden Longing
– Gestation and Compressure: Where What is Not-Yet Gathers Force
– The Inner Sap of Life, the Light-Force of Hope: Growth & Evolution
– “Only That Which Is New Under the Sun”: Emergence, Novelty, and Mutation

Sunday: Something Shall Be – Living in Hope within the Forces of Becoming

– Silence as the Milieu for Perceiving Hope
– Orienting toward Emergence, with Hope as a Guiding Force
– Faith, Hope, and Love: Fidelity, Openness, and Affinity as Participation in the Forces of Becoming
– Abiding at the Threshold, Becoming Hope-imbued with the Future in Us

Registration + Details

Registration is by email. You may reply to this email to register. Please note that sometimes direct replies get lost between Substack and my email server. If you do not hear from me within a few days, please email me directly: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Registration is limited to 15 participants to foster intimacy in the Zoom setting.

This Online Retreat is offered on a Suggested Donation Basis.

Suggested Donation: $110–160. ($95–135 for paid subscribers)

If this amount is a stretch, contributions of $60–85 are welcome. For you who wish to provide additional support, donations of $165–200+ support the Scholarship fund for this and future offerings, which provides financial assistance to approximately 25% of participants.

Please choose the amount that aligns with your means and intention.

No one will be turned away for financial reasons. Payment plan is available to ease the burden of cost. Please do not hesitate to ask.

Meeting Times

Meeting times will be finalized once participants’ time zones become clear so that we can most easily accommodate all participants. Anticipate a full day Saturday and ¾ day on Sunday, with plenty of spaciousness and ample breaks to sustain our bodies and presence.

This online weekend immersion is an invitation to enter hope together. It is a lived exploration of the reflections on hope in the current Beyond the Comfort Zone series and is intended for you who wish to engage hope deeply in these uncertain times.

These times elicit in us depths of feeling—despair, longing, lament, sorrow. At the same time, they may be signaling an epochal threshold. Rather than turning from these depths, we will approach them as invitations illuminating a pathway to perceiving hope.

If there is in you an inner impulse to immerse yourself in hope, please do join me in April.

In hope and with love,

Renée

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All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Essays in this Series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope”

– Toward a Phenomenology of Hope

– Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World

– Something Shall Be

– Compressure and the Labor of Hope

– And the Light Shineth in the Darkness

– Everything is Riven, But All Is Not Lost

Notes & References

Such trying times, such heartache and sorrow, such shock and horror.

May today’s meditation, continuing our series, Toward a Phenomenology of Hope, offer a glimmer.

Following last week’s “Save the Date” announcement for the online weekend retreat, Living in Hope (April 18–19), next week’s letter will offer more details of this intimate gathering.

Wishing you the sustaining comfort that comes in moments of hope,

Renée

Everything is Riven, But All Is Not Lost—A Meditation on Despair, Hope, and the Unfolding of Life

A black strap of freeway cuts across a flat midland stretch of I-40, row upon row of corn sown today for a season reaped tomorrow. Not one row is out of line. Not one stalk falters across a landscape that, from the highway, looks like a military formation in motion, a geometry of obedience, each stalk standing like a soldier drilled from seed to stalk, cropped-even under the August sun.

One by one they will fall.

Long forgotten is the majesty of outstretched plains, tall grasses bending as one body with the whistling rub of wind, thundering hooves, blue sky draping the earth, an openness once wide enough for sound to travel miles. Every mile to my left and my right is a betrayal. Some say more is yet to come if they take the remaining wildlands, too. This is not sweet corn for the dinner table. It is flint corn for feedlots and engine fuel. It will feed human forgottenness, and I, driving this stretch, am complicit, an unwitting participant in the alienation that drives these dynamics. The rows in their obedience stretch toward the horizon as though only one way of ordering this world were imaginable.

And the crude oil not moving through the Strait of Hormuz, in this, too, I am complicit. And the displaced and the wounded, if I perceive or believe their pain and their suffering is not my own, I am complicit, not in the way of that could be me but in the very truth of if one of us is not free, none of us is free. And the young daughters—165 of them at last count—who died on Saturday at school, eyes wide on a blackboard, learning the ligatures of new words, fat pencils in their child hands, as much as I cannot bear it, their last breath under the crushing weight of rubble permeates this world forevermore in its finality. And here I sit in the comfort in my quiet home writing to you, a love song between two cardinals making the melody of a morning, while somewhere not far from here a mother whose skin not the color of this freckled tone prays to God her door will not be pounded down by the blunt barrel of a gun.

Everything is riven.1

Despair would be a natural response. Despair would in some way sidestep for a moment the opacity of a world made by the day more calamitous and unbearable, being that despair has a way of collapsing in on itself, being that despair becomes its own weight to bear, being that it strangely shutters for a time the weight that gave way to it. We are meaning-making beings, after all, and despair is a natural response to that which is abjectly unintelligible. We live in a world that has become abjectly unintelligible.

At certain moments in the unfolding of the human, the world becomes unintelligible by the fact that the way we are conditioned to see it is no longer sufficient for what is emerging.

But hope is not lost. Neither is hope in opposition to despair. We might say that despair is hope occluded. Despair is not the absence of hope. It is hope buried beneath the rubble of meaning that has collapsed—a momentary, if not lengthy, eschatological terminality closed in on itself. Despair seeks to interpret what cannot be interpreted as meaningful. It pleads the pointlessness of the oppressive and interminable weight of it all. It searches the dark convinced that all light has been extinguished.

Too, I sometimes wonder if despair deepens by the fact that we are woefully inept in modernity at allowing inner feeling, at opening our deepest interiority to the pain and sorrow and lamentation of and in service to our aching world.2 This is not a criticism of you and me. It is a recognition of how we are, a glimpse into how we got here, and an invitation: What if we become intimate with what we cannot bear? What if we become beings of conscience?3

We have been reflecting on hope as a spiritual essence always already here, a given openness in the originary Desire to be, which is ever-present across the cosmological and evolutionary arc.4 It precedes us. It is intrinsic to the unfolding of life itself. We have referred to this as ontological hope, hope borne through the compressure by which Being gives birth to being—to existence and life and you and me.5 We have said that this compressure is a narrowing, an inner turning of the Desire to be that remains open to itself. We have said that through this narrowing flares forth the universe, life, we humans. We have also said that through the birth canal of becoming something from nothing, there was anguish, anguish that came long before you and me, and it was the given openness to what is not yet, what we are calling ontological hope, that allowed for the process to continue.

As such, hope is not cultivated in the human so much as it is turned to in our anguish as an essence, a quality of openness to what is not yet, interpenetrating the creative processes of the universe ever-unfolding. We live in hope, as if within the air we breathe.

Who amongst us has not turned to hope in times of sorrow, uncertainty, the unbearable? Even in despair?

We live in an always unfinished world.6 We live in a world endlessly unfolding, a world groping through the dark not yet toward what it is always yet to become. The whole of life forever reaches through the inside perils of its ongoing endeavor to be, risking, like a tree, the outside hazards—the broken branches, the wind-thrown blossoms, and battered leaves. That this is so does not in any way dismiss the immensity of suffering in this world. It asks us to become intimate with it so that such suffering is not for naught but in service to the becoming of all. What we see from these reflections on becoming is that in an evolutionary world, Being is a process of always coming into being—and hope is an intrinsic openness that fortifies the way.

Seen in evolutionary hindsight, it is when the universe, life itself, hence, the human, too, seem to reach an impasse that the process leaps forward. It leaps forward in no small way because there is within existence itself this intrinsic openness, always facing toward what is not yet. Some say the living Earth and human have come to such an impasse, and the task before us now is “making manifest the future which is immanent in ourselves.”7

At such impasse moments, when the prevailing mode of being can no longer bear the pressures placed upon it, something latent begins to break through. Twentieth-century Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser referred to these moments in the human unfolding as mutations of consciousness. Mutational leaps appear when the structure of consciousness itself is no longer adequate.8 What might be named “mutational periods” are thresholds of untold disturbance and destruction. These are moments in the unfolding whereby chaotic upheavals of the existing give way to the latent not yet.9

What we experience today as despair may actually be a signal of a mutation under way.

Something deeper is at work here. What seeks to come into being will establish itself. We are, at most, participants in the unfolding.10 We must not abandon the hope that always already awaits our presence to it.

Living in hope is not unlike the bell in the bell tower of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, passages of which I shared at the Winter Solstice 2025: Let this darkness be a bell tower | and you the bell.11 Here, darkness is transfigured into that which sounds the bell; the bell is you and me, sounded by the tension between what is disordered and destructive and what is latent—the “immanent future in ourselves” sounding invisible currents, like wind bending tall grasses of ancient plains, traveling across hill and dale, over horizons not yet seen.

Our task is a humble one, and difficult: to endure the compressive tensions that are becoming evermore acute, without retreating into despair, but bearing the depths of sorrow and lament on behalf of. If we can stay steady, persevering within the pressure as willing participants in the evolutionary unfolding, not as fugitives, the not yet may yet find expression in and through us as vessels of the unfolding.12 For this task, we must sense, feel, and know that we are cared for in the harbor of hope itself.13

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All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Essays in this Series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope”

– Toward a Phenomenology of Hope

– Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World

– Something Shall Be

– Compressure and the Labor of Hope

– And the Light Shineth in the Darkness

Notes & References

It is late Saturday night that I begin this brief letter to you, on this day of the US–Israeli strikes on Iran. I have, as I imagine you have, stayed close to the developments. I did so from an Emergency Room, where I spent the afternoon and evening with a family member. Fortunately, everything is fine now in our family, but at last count, over 100 children are dead at a girls’ school targeted in the strikes, and countless other human lives have been lost today, and countless more are at risk in the foreseeable future in Iran and throughout the Middle East, if not in the fallout across the world.

It is not a time to bypass the depth and manifold layers of feeling. And they are manifold.

It is also not a time to abandon hope, even in the face of despair.

I offer words from Viktor Frankl today, who bore the worst horrors of war in Auschwitz, and an invitation to hold a few moments of vigil after you read.

With a heavy heart,

Renée

The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces.

I was again conversing silently with my [unknowingly dead] wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying.

I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious ‘Yes’ in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.

At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria.

Et lux in tenebris lucet — and the light shineth in the darkness.1

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All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Notes & References

Today’s meditation continues our series on hope. In last week’s essay, “Something Shall Be,” Paul Celan’s poem “Komm. . .” opened a view toward what we are naming ontological hope—hope intrinsic to existence itself.

This week, drawing on the cosmology of Jakob Böhme, we begin sketching a map of inner orientation necessary to live within ontological hope.1 Here, experience is not merely psychological. It belongs to Being, already imbued with desire, with hope, and the labor of becoming.

Please save the date for the online retreat, “Living in Hope,” April 18–19, following Passover and Easter as spring becomes most vibrant here in the Northern Hemisphere, a living tableau of hope, which we can abide in. More details will follow in March.

I am in the early stages of developing the longer-form phenomenological (lived experience) study on the unfolding of consciousness at this epochal threshold, drawing from Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. This proposed study has elicited a thoughtful and substantive response.

Thank you to everyone who shared your preferences and reflections regarding the proposed gatherings and this unfolding work.

In hope,

Renée

PS. Links to all the essays in this series at the bottom of this page.

Compressure and the Labor of Hope

It is not yet spring, and already the air is redolent as if it might be. You catch the scent in birdsong, early mating calls permeating the blue light of dawn, the subtle perfume of soon-to-bloom dogwood buds everywhere reaching into this song-fecund air. You can smell life forcing its way through the dark belly of the underworld. It’s there on grassy lawns, still frost-laden in the morning, marked by the inner turning of what shall be. Hope presses into the not yet.

Last week, we said of hope that it is ontological, meaning, it is an attribute of the very structure of existence, an intrinsic openness to something shall be pressing into the immediacy of the present. It is not optimism. Nor does it stake a claim on outcome.

We said that hope must be a qualitative intensity, intrinsic to the manifest expression of being, altogether imbued in the desire to be. We recognized how hard it is to imagine that a quality such as hope can exist before the human, much less in the invisibility of formlessness. So conditioned are we to understand existence as bound to materiality. And we offered that if we are to live in hope, we must flip substance ontology on its head, realizing that essence is as fundamental to existence as substance itself.

Essence is given in the inner turning of formlessness into form.

Formlessness is permeated with feeling.

This “unthought known”—that which “we know but may never be able to think”—came as a felt insistence a few years ago.2 I had no words then and acknowledge that today they are still not fully formed. This felt insistence came while I was weeks-at-a-time alone in the silence of the desert, in the pre-dawn vapors of quietude amongst the ancient redwoods, and deeper still in the undeniable presence of a primordial Presence in the Arctic tundra, a presence which today still brings me to my knees in awe.

It came as a crescendo—a growing sense and insistent, as if pulling my presence to it—of the desire imbued in the coming into being of the universe. It pressed itself into me day and night, especially in the tundra still so nascent. Even in its felt primordial innocence, there was no less the pronounced sense of life bearing the intensity of its own being. I watched as a young caribou walked circles around her injured mother. The pack had left them days ago on their annual autumn inland run to fatten up on cotton grass before winter. Even in the very real possibility of not being, life endured in the conditions given, staying with its own continuation, hope enacted one with the other.

Jakob Böhme, the seventeenth-century cobbler–philosopher–mystic, offered a compelling image of the process of the universe coming into being, what today we refer to as the first flaring forth. The image reflects a frictional intensity of Being bearing the anguish of coming into being. Böhme’s telling recalls the words of the hadith of Sūfī theology: I was a hidden treasure, and I longed [loved by some translations] to be known, and so I created the world, both visible and invisible.

As a young man, Böhme had a mystical vision while concentrating on a beam of sunlight reflected in a pewter dish. The vision was revelatory in that it unfolded in great detail the spiritual structure of Being birthing into being. Wholly deprived of words for what he saw, he would not write about it for another twelve years, and only then to himself at first. I might do well to follow Böhme’s lead and not speak of any of this just yet, but these times are rife with the unfinished and call us to hold steady within what is pressing toward us. These meditations on hope are offered in that spirit.

The first property [of the Eternal Nature] is a desirousnesse; like that of a Magnet; viz. the Compression of the will, the will desireth to be something, and yet it hath nothing of which it may make something to it selfe: and therefore it bringeth it selfe into a Receivingnesse of it selfe, and compresseth it selfe to something: and that something is nothing but a Magneticall Hunger, a harshnesse [an astringency, which is akin to attracting], like a hardnesse, whence even hardnesse, cold, and substance ariseth.3

Without getting too tripped up in trying to modernize the Old English translation of Böhme, we can sense from the depths of our own being this inner desire pulled moment-by-moment into the unfolding of our own life. The first property of Being, says Böhme, is the desire to be something. And yet, the desire has nothing of which to make itself something.

The as-yet-unanswered desire builds. As it builds, it generates motion, the second property of the Eternal Nature. Within that motion comes “compressure,” an inner turning.

You might imagine the originary desire as the womb and the inner turning as the birth canal, exerting a compressive force on the dynamic of coming into being. The contractive pressure is at once an attracting and narrowing quality. It gives way to an aching, the third property, without which there is no frictional spark of the first flaring forth, no universe, no you and me. Compressure is the gravitas of manifestation, which the desire must endure. There is anguish in the process.

While Böhme does not explicitly name hope in this birthing process—which is not only the first flaring forth but the eternal coming into being of all that is—it is not hard to see that hope pervades the pregnant originary desire and enduring labor. It appears to be an essential condition by which these dynamics [properties] are generative. It is as if originary desire is being drawn to itself in the way that a magnet draws something toward it. It must be open to itself, or desire would lack the potency to carry forth.

If we let ourselves sink a little into the inner orientation of our own life, we can sense that already in the originary desire is the interpenetrating hope that something shall be. If desire were not already open to its own fulfillment, nothing would come to be at all. In other words, there must be an openness in the originary desire to be for being to appear. We are calling this intrinsic openness to what is not yet ontological hope.

And of the inner turning, exerting a magnetical force not unlike the way an infant is pulled headlong through the birth canal into life by life, we must see this through the lens of essence, not yet substance. The closest we can come to “seeing” this is the recognition that we cannot see air moving, only the effects of its movement; we cannot see light itself, only its effects of illuminating that upon which it shines. This is our way of “seeing” essence as fundamental to existence as is substance.

In the same way, our phenomenology of hope does not “discover” hope so much as recognize it from within our lived experience. We feel within ourselves the inner orientation of generative openness in the face of what is not yet, even while enduring the narrowing.

As with last week, we might now ask: what does this philosophical reflection mean for living in hope in these unequivocally uncertain times?

Hope presses forward as openness to what can be and shall be. It does not turn its back on the tension of becoming. It stays open to what is not yet.

We live in an unfinished world.4 This, too, we endure. From the perspective of Teilhard de Chardin, to endure is to bear the ceaseless process of coming into being, of becoming itself. Becoming proceeds under tension, often costly yet intrinsically necessary for generativity.

As unbearable as it may seem, we can assume endurance as an existential posture:

I will bear what is unfinished on behalf of what is coming into being.

This is ontological hope enacted day by day, moment by moment. It refuses premature conclusions. It bears the tension. Which does not mean it is passive.

Thus, we understand that the Desire is the ground of somethingnesse, so that something may come out of Nothing: and thus we may also conceive that the Desire hath been the Beginning of this world, by which God hath brought all things into substance and being: for the Desire is that by which God said Let there be. The Desire is that Be it, which hath made something, where nothing was, but onely a Spirit: it hath made the Mysterium Magnum (which is spirituall,) visible and substantiall, as we may see by the Elements, Starres and other Creatures.5

In the beginning is desire. Hope is the eternal openness to “Let there be.” Without these two interpenetrating qualities, that which is not yet cannot come into being.

Hope steady, dear Friends, even through the narrowing.

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All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Essays in this Series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope”

– Toward a Phenomenology of Hope

– Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World

– Something Shall Be

Notes & References

In today’s meditation, we continue our series, “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope.” Guided by philosopher Asif Rahammim’s hermeneutics,1 we will encounter objectless hope in Paul Celan’s poem, “Komm. . .”. From objectless hope, we’ll press further, opening our purview wide and deep at once, toward ontological hope, a quality imbued in reality itself. The meditation comes to completion with a hope we can live within.

Many of you have written to me in response to the 2026 offerings I outlined in “On Becoming a Shared Work.” If you wish to contribute, please email me: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com. Thank you to you who have already written. It is a joy to imagine our forthcoming online and in-person gatherings.

In hope,

Renée

Something Shall Be

In December 1969, not long after returning to Paris from Israel, Paul Celan—born Paul Antschel—sent the following poem to Ilana Shmueli. They had been childhood friends. Both grew up in Bukovina, Ukraine, before the last World War and “Das, was geschah” (“that which happened”). This is how Celan referred to the Holocaust. It was deliberate circumlocution, walking words around the unspeakable.

In 1944, when Shmueli was twenty, her family escaped to Palestine, but not before her sister, two years older, ended her life. Fleeing the post-war Soviet influence in Bukovina, Celan finally settled in Paris in 1948. He had survived eighteen months of forced labor in a concentration camp. His parents did not.

Celan’s trip to Israel sparked an affair between the two long-time friends, which continued in letters to one another in their native tongue, German, until Celan ended his life in April 1970, four months after penning this poem.2

“Komm. . .”

Es wird etwas sein, später,
das füllt sich mit dir
und hebt sich
an einen Mund
Aus dem zerscherbten
Wahn
steh ich auf
und seh meiner Hand zu,
wie sie den einen
einzigen
Kreis zieht

Something shall be, later,
that fills itself with you
and lifts itself
to a mouth
Out of shattered
madness
I raise myself
and watch my hand
as it draws the one
single
circle

Spare as it is in splintered anguish, this poem is clothed in hope: something shall be.

That this something is not yet namable means that no object has been imaged in Celan’s mind. No claims on outcome have been staked. There is no willed optimism in this something shall be. No practiced positive mindset to lift him from the inner tumult of a world completely shattered; a world collapsed of comprehensibility; a dark abyss absent intelligibility. This is hope before all else, rife with abysses, crevices, and impasses in existence. It is precisely because it rises out of shattered madness, post-catastrophe, that we might linger with Celan’s poem, word by word, line by line, for what it reveals to us today, tremoring as we may be with angst, if not wholly despair.

The poem seems to gesture forward with shall be. But the future tense of shall be may be more about potency than the linear march of time. The something is not known. It cannot be known because it is not yet. The unknown something exerts the pressure of ever-present possibility, while holding the promise of the world in a state of becoming. What is incomprehensible for Celan gives rise to the fundamentally unfinished in the first line of this poem.

So the forward gesture of Celan’s opening line, while it suggests a later event, seems to point toward pressure in the present. The something is latent. And yet, later is already imbued in the immediacy of now. Despite the ominous clouds of uncertainty about what this something shall be, implicit in this poem is not anticipation in the ordinary sense of waiting for what will come. Rather, it seems to be an inner tensile orientation toward what is underway. You can feel it. Shall be is pressing into the immediacy of now, so much so that it fortifies the narrator.

Albeit splintered from himself inasmuch as he can only watch from the outside looking in, now he rises from the shattered madness—from the fragmentation of incomprehensible catastrophe. Something shifts. Reference to a mouth now turns to my hand, even if the narrator is still distant enough that he can only watch. The hand lifting is not experienced so much as it is watched.

The gesture of drawing a circle might be seen as the likeness of a long journey that completes itself. It is not a forward line, which would promise progress. Nor is it even a spiral, which would suggest development. It is a circle, emblematic of neither, a stand-in motion for the journey of not yet. The single circle is a symbol of wholeness drawn out of the shards of fragmentation. It is an ingathering. It signals coherence.

Rising out of shattered madness, the first act is not speech in Celan’s poem. The first act is a gesture of form.

We can feel the abysmal depths of inner agony, the despair searching restlessly for the lantern of later. The narrator is groping through the dark not yet for the promise of the something that shall be. The arrival of this something already fills itself with you. This is the most ambiguous line of the poem. For the you is not yet known to the reader. Perhaps the you is the beloved; perhaps you is the reader; maybe you is God. Indeterminacy is as much in the you as in the something that shall be.

What will come may be a beginning. It may be an end. We don’t know. But hope persists. Hope persists because it already is. Hope was here before something shall be.

Rahamim refers to this as objectless hope: an “incessant striving towards something that has not yet become.”3 Rahamim’s objectless hope seems to suggest a dynamic that is as much ontological (structured in reality) as it is psychological. We read in his words those of Teilhard de Chardin, who writes in The Human Phenomenon that the nature of cosmogenesis is itself the ceaseless groping toward what is not yet.4

Do you see? If hope can arise without image, without object, without even a conceivable outcome, as it does in Celan’s poem, then it cannot be reduced to a purely psychological phenomenon unique to the human. It must be ontological, meaning, it must belong to the structure of reality, not a psychological construction superimposed onto reality. It must be a qualitative property, an essence, which is dynamic prior to being itself.

It is hard for us to imagine that a quality such as hope can exist before substance because we are so conditioned to understand existence as necessarily material. And with this comes the notion that qualities of existence are emergent faculties of material manifestations. We are flipping substance ontology on its head here, realizing essence before form.

Several weeks ago, when I introduced this series, I wrote:

“It began rather presciently with a few lines scribbled in my journal on the cusp of the New Year:

There must be hope intrinsic in the first flaring forth
There must be hope already in the birth of the universe.”

Was this ontological hope revealing itself before the long dark night?

Why would the infinite freedom of formlessness enter into the delimitations of form? Why would form arise at all unless something was already at work within the unformed? Some qualitative potency, what we might be inclined to call an originary Desire, must be ever pressing toward expression: something shall be.

And ontological hope is originary Desire tested through the travails of becoming, the ceaseless process of Being’s coming into being, in, through, and as the world.

What does this philosophical abstraction mean?

Simply put, we are saying that hope has been here all along. It does not emerge with the human. Nor is it a psyche-spiritual virtue endowed singularly to the human. We are suggesting that hope is intrinsic to cosmogenesis itself, an originary essence—a fragrance permeating the entire process of becoming. Hope is an intensity always already present.

It does not pass us by, dear Friends, even in the abysmal depths. It’s right here, always right here. And it does seem to require us as participants in human evolution. It needs to act through us and so needs our own enactment. Its anticipatory tension becomes taut in the agonies and sorrows of human existence. What we bear with ontological hope, we bestow our participation on behalf of becoming.

Perhaps the something that shall be is a trace of that deeper intensity, that potency which gives rise to the single circle we are here to draw out of fragmentation.

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Notes & References

As much as I regret doing so, I am postponing this week’s promised meditation on hope. I have been battling a head cold for two days, muddled mind and all, and I want to sit with this essay longer to flesh out what is emerging.

Or, to echo Meister Eckhart,1

I need to be silent for a while; words are forming in my heart.

For now, I wish to express my gratitude for your generous response to last week’s letter, “On Becoming a Shared Work.” Thank you.

I did discover that some email replies with your input did not make it to me. If you replied to last week’s email and did not receive a response from me, it is because your email is whirling in the ethers—not in my inbox and not in my “junk” folder either. Also, if you have not yet responded but wish to share your reflections as we co-imagine the year ahead, please do so. It is not too late.

This time, dear Friends, please email me directly, not by reply from this email: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Some possibilities include:

– Living in Hope, an online weekend retreat, indwelling hope as a forward-facing force, ever-present and always already here, to which we can turn in the darkest hour, even in the grip of despair (Spring 2026)

– An onsite pilgrimage steeped in listening presence to the Silence in the desert, where Silence is most deep, recognizing that it is in listening through the “ear of the heart” that we hear what cannot be spoken (TBD)

– A longer-form online phenomenological (lived experience) study on the unfolding of consciousness at this epochal threshold, drawing from Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and culminating in an in-person retreat (TBD)

– A new cohort of Awakening to the Heart, and/or an opportunity for prior participants to revisit and deepen the work (TBD)

If other possibilities are coming to you, please do share. This is an occasion for imagining together.

Importantly, interest is growing in the Gatherings in Silence, which speaks to what is forming here and prompts perhaps the formation of a new circle and gathering time. If you are interested in joining a Gathering in Silence, please do let me know.

I’ll be back next week with another meditation on hope, this time, calling upon Paul Celan’s poem, “Komm,” written while in the throes of despair.

I leave you with an image that came while I was driving through Hope, Alaska, on the upper Kenai Peninsula, while on pilgrimage. I was awestruck by the snowy peaks and snowy white-capped flowers, opening, like hope, to the ever-present possibility of what is not yet.

Ever in gratitude,

Renée

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All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Notes & References

Dear Friends,

What began in late 2022 as a weekly letter to twelve loved ones back home was never imagined to reach all of you. These letters arose from a certain fidelity to the inner life while I was on pilgrimage. The writing was an embodied gesture, a practice of iterative presence to what was transpiring within as I entered extended stretches of solitude and silence while traversing the North American landscape.

Over those thirteen months of seeking wild reaches of North America, I began to weave into these letters reflections I had been contemplating for years about the unfolding of consciousness in the human. Some of you began commenting, wondering, offering your own experiences for reflection. Gradually, there was a felt sense that this journey was becoming a shared pilgrimage. By the end of 2023, Beyond the Comfort Zone was reaching readers on six continents, in no small part because many of you encouraged its recognition as a 2023 Featured Substack Publication.

I returned home in December 2023. I would soon learn that pilgrimage does not end when the journey ends. The deeper pilgrimage begins at home. It begins when the old patterned ways of being tug at the tender shoots of what unfolds out there, beyond the comfort zone of the familiar and known. As with each day of the journey, this inner pilgrimage became a lived practice of meeting each moment, each familiar person and place, as a surrendered act of unknowing.

And so came the first offering of this work, Awakening to Wonder, in the winter of 2024, gathering two cohorts for an 8-week experiential exploration. Together, we would discover a twofold nature of wonder: as that which breaches the membrane of ordinary awareness and, by that very fact, draws us closer to it. Wonder revealed itself as an inner movement of intimacy with the world, inspired by the world.

By then, what had begun as a letter was becoming an online grove of shared inner-life inquiry.

In spring 2024, amidst an ever more worrisome world, I began reflecting in these letters on states of being that wisdom traditions, East and West, recognize as essential conditions for self-transformation—silence, solitude, stillness, simplicity, and surrender. I wrote several essays on silence, both as a quieting of inner noise and as a spiritual medium of presence: the Silence.

Some of you began wondering about this sacred Silence, and the thought came to begin gathering once monthly online in Silence. We soon recognized that we had entered into a shared experiment. Would the felt presence of Silence transcend the perceived limitations of intimacy in a virtual setting? If so, what would emerge within each of us, and amongst us as a circle, by our shared presence to the Silence? These gatherings, now held twice monthly, have become a sanctuary of soul presence and a steady ground of deep listening to that which is “always right here and infinitely far away.”1

Indeed, we came to reflect on not only the shared presence of Silence but also an abiding intimacy and profound sense of belonging. Threads from our reflective conversations began to reveal a deepening presence to the relational field and a capacity to remain present with what is unresolved. It was becoming clear that our practices in Silence are not in service to ourselves alone. Our practices in Silence are formative movements of consciousness itself, re-forming our patterns of being.

In December 2024, a small circle gathered at Valle Crucis Retreat Center for a pilgrimage-in-place with the theme, Entering Unknowing: An Inner Pilgrimage for a Time between Worlds. It was during this retreat that I began to sense-feel a subtle albeit unmistakable shift in the arc of this unintended “work.” A living body of work was forming, nurtured by a small circle. What began as a weekly letter written on pilgrimage was becoming a shared work, ushering us into the depths of human becoming in increasingly complex times.

Then came 2025. These Sunday letters, and conversations unfolding with some of you, began reflecting on the theme of living in an unfinished world. We began to willingly bestow our own participation in the evolutionary unfolding of consciousness, what the late visionary cultural historian Thomas Berry referred to as the Great Work of our time.2 To nurture this deep psychic shift, we were beginning to turn toward what twentieth-century paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin intimated as cardiogenesis: the evolutionary becoming of the human heart as an organ of perceptivity and imaginal receptivity, spiritual cave of inner feeling, interstitium of communion, and foyer of divine Love.3 Dear Friend, please know that you need not be familiar with Berry or Teilhard to enter this work.

By late summer 2025, a cohort of fifteen of us embarked on a twelve-week online journey of Awakening to the Heart, culminating in a second in-person gathering at Valle Crucis in December. This work of evolutionary cardiogenesis is transforming each of us and the cohort collectively, in ways indescribable but unmistakably lived and felt and rippling outward. Now members of this circle begin to refer to this as our work.

At the beginning of 2026, two cohorts entered into a living study of Robert Sardello’s Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness, recognizing that Silence is the very ground of cardiogenesis. Our work in Silence may be understood, in esotericist Valentin Tomberg’s terms, as an “essential condition” for the work of cardiogenesis, as itself a foundational work of human becoming.4 For it is through the organ of the heart that Silence is sense-felt, and it is in cultivating these sense-feeling capacities that we begin to serve as stewards of human wholeness on behalf of evolution itself.

Today’s letter is an interlude in the ongoing Phenomenology of Hope series that began with “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope” and “Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World.” At this still-young hour of the New Year, already calling us into our deepest work on behalf of the Great Work, it seemed important to take a breath and wonder together: what is being asked for in 2026, and how might this shared work take form? Some possibilities that have come forth include:

– Living in Hope, an online weekend retreat, indwelling hope as a forward-facing force, ever-present and always already here, to which we can turn in the darkest hour, even in the grip of despair (Spring 2026)

– An onsite pilgrimage steeped in listening presence to the Silence in the desert, where Silence is most deep, recognizing that it is in listening through the “ear of the heart” that we hear what cannot be spoken (TBD)

– A longer-form phenomenological (lived experience) study on the unfolding of consciousness at this epochal threshold, drawing from Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin (TBD)

– A new cohort of Awakening to the Heart, and/or an opportunity for prior participants to revisit and deepen the work (TBD)

I wholeheartedly welcome your reflections in the comments or by replying directly to this email. Even a brief response is helpful.

Before closing, I wish to reflect on an essential dimension of how this work is sustained. Approximately twenty-five percent of participants in Beyond the Comfort Zone offerings receive a full or partial scholarship to participate. In 2025, every request for financial assistance was fully met, made possible entirely through the generosity of paid subscribers to this publication and participants who gave above the baseline donation range. This participant-supported model sustains a shared field of accessibility. As importantly, it serves as a recognition that this work is, indeed, now our work.

And so, I close in echo of the beginning: what began in late 2022 as a weekly letter to twelve loved ones back home has become, with your heartful presence and participation, a collective work of inner pilgrimage on behalf of our human evolution, right on time.

I look forward to hearing from you, dear Friends.

In gratitude and with love,

Renée

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All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Notes & References

Over the past days, I have been asked a question that is lingering: Are you hopeful right now? The question, in the manner uttered, seems to carry two impulses at once. On the one hand, it is imbued with a certain incredulity: how can you be hopeful? On the other, it seems to touch something close to hope-by-contagion: if you are, perhaps I can be too.

My sense is that we cannot not turn to hope. But we must not let wishing parade as hope. For wishing is waiting, and hope is fiercely active participation in the unseen not yet. True hope is tested at midnight, not at dawn. It is come to in the dark hour of affliction.

Tomorrow, we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, on August 28, 1963, stood before a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. In his eloquent cadence, King urged, It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.1 Uttering hope without naming it, he insisted, 1963 is not an end, but a beginning—a beginning reaffirmed today.2 The speech will fill the air tomorrow and in the days to come, with the reminder that we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.3

Ours, too, is a midnight hour.

To his dying day, even when confessing profound discouragement—and exhaustion from the fear of being killed—King nevertheless urged that humanity must “cling to the infinite hope.”4 In a sermon delivered some five years before the “Dream” speech, King situates hope in the promise of dawn, turned to and clung to long before any glint of light can be seen.

His message is manifold. While the sermon emphasizes the church’s role in meeting the social challenges and spiritual needs of his time, deeply embedded in his message is a poetics of hope.

What follows are excerpts from that sermon.

In hope,

Renée

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Midnight in Our World . . . and Hope in the Dawn

Excerpts from the transcript of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1958 sermon, “A Knock at Midnight.”5

He begins with a reading from the Gospel of St. Luke (11:5,6):

Which of you has a friend who will go to him at midnight and say to him, Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him. 

It is midnight in the social order. As we look out on the international horizon we see the nations of the world engaged in a colossal and bitter contest for supremacy.

It is midnight in the psychological order. Everywhere there are people who are harrowed by day and haunted by night with paralyzing fears. Deep clouds of anxiety and depression are floating in so many of our mental skies.

It is also midnight in the moral order. . . . Midnight [in the moral order] is a time when everyone is desperately seeking to avoid getting caught.

. . .

Like the man in the parable, [people today] are asking for three loaves of bread. They want the bread of faith. Living through a generation of so many colossal disappointments, with one towering frustration piled on another, so many men have lost faith in God, faith in man, and faith in the future.

There is also a deep longing for the bread of hope. Many who lived in the early days of [the twentieth] century did not feel the need of seeking this bread. Living in the days of the first telephones, the first automobiles, and the first airplanes caused them to grow up with radiant optimism. They worshipped at the shrine of Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of inevitable progress. . . . But then came a series of tragic developments which revealed the selfishness and corruption of man, and pointed out with frightening clarity the truth of Lord Acton’s dictum: “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”6

Then there is the deep longing for the bread of love. Everybody wants to love and be loved. He who feels that he isn’t loved feels that he is nobody, that he doesn’t count.

. . .

The weary traveller by midnight who is asking for bread is really asking for the dawn.7

Our eternal message of hope is that dawn will come. Midnight is only a temporary development in the cycle of life’s day. Our slave foreparents realized this. They were never unmindful of the fact of midnight, for there was always the rawhide whip of the overseer and the auction block where families were torn asunder to remind them of its reality. So when they thought of midnight with all its agonizing darkness they sang:8

Oh, Nobody knows de trouble I’ve seen;
Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down
Oh, yes, Lord,
Sometimes, I'm almost to de groun';
Oh, yes, Lord.
Oh, nobody knows de trouble I've seen,
Glory Hallelujah.

But even though encompassed by a staggering midnight, they had faith to believe that morning would come. When thinking of this they would sing:9

I’m so glad trouble don’t last alway.
O my Lord, Oh my Lord, what shall I do?

Here we see a positive belief in the dawn which uses the midnight of life as the raw material out of which it creates its own strength. This was the growing edge of hope that kept the slaves going amid the most barren and tragic circumstance.

. . .

Yes, the dawn will come. Disappointment, sorrow and despair are all born in midnight, but we may be consoled by the fact that morning will come.

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Donate $10

All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible for everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Gatherings in Silence

These gatherings are an invitation into the shared presence of Silence, and an online sanctuary from the noise of the world.

1st & 3rd Sundays
12–1:30 pm ET
Next Gathering: February 1

All are welcome.

If you would like to join or have questions, please email me: reneeeliphd[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

Notes & References

Dear Friends,

in silence, 
wordless whispers of hope
resuscitations – 
hope for hope’s sake, nothing more

I wrote those words in July 2024, during a crescendo of uncertainty and anxiety in the US about the future of American democracy. I wrote those words on waking after the fourth of July sky exploded into the wee hours in celebration of a hope born 250 years ago, even as the thundering flashes of light in the night shook me into imagining what war would be like. I wrote those words, back when political conflict already touched an alarming portion of humanity. Then 2025 happened. I need not rehearse it here. And, God bless humanity, how many of us woke with hope after the clock struck midnight and the sky exploded into the wee hours in celebration of a new year, 2026?

I write today convinced—by hope itself—that we must not abandon hope, even after the horrifying, heartbreaking events of the past week. I confess I am still wondering what hope is asking of us. The past days have been an inner pilgrimage into the phenomenology of hope, endeavoring to give language to that which engenders it, to uncover that which nurtures it, and to recognize that which sustains it, on behalf of us all as one human corpus.

It began rather presciently with a few lines scribbled in my journal on the cusp of the New Year:

There must be hope intrinsic in the first flaring forth
There must be hope already in the birth of the universe
Why else would formlessness flower ceaselessly into form?

While reflecting on Advent and winter solstice, I began diving into the context in which the historical Jesus was born. I have barely come up for air in these weeks since. One cannot help but recognize apocalyptic parallels in the Herodian impulse with that which we see in power today. The parallels are not singularly historical. They are atmospheric—a repetition of conditions of soul—generating an inner climate of existential tumult, long felt before it can be understood.

Then there is Saul, who, on his way to Damascus (c. 34 CE) to persecute the Jesus movement—not yet called Christianity—was thrown to the ground by a blinding light from heaven; then given eyes to see: visio Dei. The moment marks a dramatic spiritual transformation and conversion into Paul, an apostle of Christ. It was Paul who would later write, in the first Letter to the Corinthians, of faith, hope, and love—a threefold cord. Paul’s conversion is not merely about a change of belief; it is a perceptual border crossing. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would later echo this insight regarding the unfolding of humanity, “Fuller being is closer union. . . . [U]nion increases only through an increase in consciousness, this is to say in vision.”1

In the weeks ahead, I hope to offer meditations that deepen and expand upon what I wrote in July 2024, “Hope for Hope’s Sake,” because I sense there is more, which may help us become aware of, and tend, the invisible weather patterns of the soul.

Here are reflections from that 2024 essay salient to what we will explore in the coming weeks:

We get caught in hope for something. We mistake hope for a wish—if you wish upon a star. But hope is not in a wish. Hope emanates from the star.

We sense hope in a bird’s nest. We hold it in a seed. Hope is in a child’s first breath.

Hope is the spiritual (unseen) companion to the biological (seen) continuation of being. It is a light-force in life itself—élan vital.2 Ours is the task of inner orienting to this force as vital participants at this uniquely uncertain time.

We abide in hope not because we believe our hope will make what we hope for be so, but because we know that without hope it cannot be so.

Subscribe now

Donate $10

All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and help keep all offerings accessible for everyone.

If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.

Gatherings in Silence

These gatherings are an invitation into the shared presence of Silence, an online sanctuary from the noise of the world.

1st & 3rd Sundays
12–1:30 pm ET
Next Gathering: January 18

All are welcome.

If you would like to join or have questions, please email me: reneeeliphd[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

Notes & References