Why Are we using Elaine Prevallet’s book, “Making the Shift?”
Posted on November 20, 2024, by Mary Ellen McElroy SL

This piece is an excerpt from the Loretto Link Annual Meeting this past weekend.
For those of you who do not know anything about Elaine Prevallet, let me just tell you that she is well known in the Loretto Community as a spiritual writer, a mystic, a contemplative and one of the few of us who has been able to control her ego. Elaine speaks and writes from a humble and vulnerable heart.
She has been greatly influenced by the teachings and writings of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme regarding New Cosmology — the story of our evolving Universe. This book, “Making the Shift,” written in 2007, is from “a cosmological and evolutionary faith perspective.” The shift that Elaine is talking about is the transition that human beings are making as our collective consciousness expands. As this happens our perspective expands, broadens, so that we begin to see things differently. We don’t cause this, it just happens. Through this broader lens — this new perspective — things look different. We begin to see with new eyes.
That means many changes — much transformational work to be done in all phases of our lives. Elaine’s purpose is not to teach us anything. Through the stories of her own transformational experiences she hopes that we will be able to get in touch with our own transformational experiences.
In the first chapter called “Preliminary Reflections” Elaine begins with a statement and two questions: “The task we have set for ourselves is to probe this question: What might it mean for us humans to understand ourselves as the universe beginning to be conscious of itself as the universe, as an interconnected whole, trying to understand our past so that we can appropriately shape our future? And how might our faith help us shape that new self-understanding in meaningful ways?” That is our task, and the next several chapters deal with these questions.
In the final chapter entitled: “The Way Forward: What We Must Do?,” Elaine really challenges us. “We are in a transitional time … We have to integrate a new cosmological and evolutionary perspective into our spirituality. We have to rethink who God is and who we are, in a way that will open new vistas in our minds and heart. We have to learn to be the bridges that stretch out to connect the different paths. What attitudes, skills or practices will help us to develop inwardly so that we can be genuine bridge-builders in a divided world, genuine peacemakers in a world of chaos and violence? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we do all this together, so that we do not lose perspective and hope?”
Elaine ended the first chapter with a lovely prayer which is a heartfelt request to the Spirit of Wisdom to assist us as we take on this role of building bridges in our broken world. So let us pray:
“We pray that the Spirit of Wisdom may open our minds and hearts, and we place ourselves in a posture of humility, and even longing, to find our way in these uncharted waters. We ask for guidance, for faithfulness, for wisdom, acknowledging our un-knowing. We have been brought to this time in history when we are called to assist in the unfolding of God’s promise seeded within our planet. We seek truth, we seek to be faithful to the gospel and to our role as human species on planet Earth. We seek a deeper sense of oneness, and wider compassion. We know our God is with us. Amen.”