Carolyn Toben: In Memoriam

In her book, Recovering a Sense of the Sacred: Conversations With Thomas Berry, Carolyn Toben engaged in an intimate communion of thought with Thomas Berry during the last 10 years of his life. With her questions and personal responses born of a lifetime of teaching and spiritual seeking and practice, Carolyn opened a space for Thomas Berry to offer, in particular, his reflections on children and the future of the earth.

It seems, then, a fitting Memoriam to Carolyn to share excerpts from her last conversation with Thomas Berry, a conversation that also captured the deepest understandings of her own life. The chapter is entitled “Seeds of the Future”:

Thomas: “We need to talk about what to tell future generations, don’t we?

Carolyn: “Yes…When our time was over last week, we were talking about our transition now into the Ecozoic Era. I asked you what can we tell succeeding generations…about the way into the future…

Thomas paused for a long time and finally began:

“Tell them something new is happening, a new vision, a new energy, a new sacred story is coming into being in the transition from one era to another.

Tell them in the darkness of this time, a vast transformation is occurring in the depths of human consciousness, which is leading to the recovery of the soul, the earth, the universe and a sense of the sacred.

Tell them that the Powerful Loving Voice that spoke through every cosmic activity is speaking again now through voices all over the earth – voices who recognize that loving the earth as their common origin unifies all. In the sacred, all opposites are reconciled.

This Loving Voice is also speaking through every bird, leaf and star, and through the polar bear, the wolf and every threatened species, awakening humanity to see all living forms as a single sacred community that lives or dies together.

Tell them that the concern now must be for the preservation of the whole earth, a bio-spiritual planet; tell them that they must participate in mutual presence with the whole human venture in this perilous course of the future.

Tell them that they must also develop the inner vision that we need if we are to make the adjustments required for a viable future. Our existential questions must now be: ‘How do we relate to the earth and to the universe? Our most basic issue is how we bond with the earth.’

Tell them they will meet great companions along the way, including those that burrow in the soil, fly in the air and swim in the sea.

Tell them that each of them has a unique part to play in this period of great transition and that each of them brings specialized emotions and imagination to this time and very different ways of knowing.

Tell them that they can find their own story within the sacred story of the universe. Tell them that the journey of the universe is a journey of each one of them that can give meaning and purpose for their lives and guide them in the evolutionary process. Tell them to realize that the series of physical and psychic-spiritual transformations of the universe parallel their own individual transformations.

Tell them they can learn to honor all processes of life, even the most difficult.

Tell them to remember as they grope forward to create a new century of life in the twenty-first century, that the universe is still expanding and they are part of that emergence as the direction of the universe moves always toward greater and greater life.

Tell them that we live in a contingent, not a determinative universe: that we must create a new way of being as we transition from a period of devastating the earth to a mutually enhancing relationship with it.

Tell them to seek their own role in the larger evolutionary process; tell them that humans are always in the process of becoming, always ‘opening to greater life.’ If they can learn to see it. Tell them the greatest need is to develop a sensitivity to recognize the inner promptings that emerge from the depths of one’s own being where the sacred reality resides.

Above all, tell them to practice an intimate presence to the beauty and wonder of the natural world through their intuitive awareness that recognizes the oneness of all life; tell them to stop and enlarge moments throughout their days to become aware of the mysteries and miracles of creation all around them – the movement of a squirrel, the sound of a bird, the pattern of a leaf, changing patterns of light, the sun, the rain, the stars, dawn and sunset. Tell them we are not ourselves without everything and everyone else.

Tell them to remember the great seasons and cycles of life. In moments of intimacy with the natural world they will recover the lost sense of the sacred in the human-earth relationship. And they will be participating in the evolution of a new consciousness on earth that can overcome the mental fixations of our times expressed in radical division between humans and the natural world. A mutually enhancing relationship will then become possible as the communion of all things is understood.

Finally, tell them that it is of utmost importance that they become aware of the numinous sacred values that have been present in an expanding sequence over four and half billion years of the earth’s existence, and let them know that they will always be guided by ‘the same Divine Power that spun the galaxies into space, lit the sun and brought the moon into orbit.’