Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
Teilhard de Chardin
Today we commemorate the anniversary of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s death.
He died April 10th, 1955, in New York City. It was Easter Sunday.
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What Would Teilhard Say Today?
Excerpt from “The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic: What Would Teilhard Say?”
by Ilia Delio
“Teilhard would view [the] pandemic as an opportunity to harness the energies of love in new ways. Every act of suffering in his view is an invitation to a new creative moment, a wake-up call that something old is breaking down and something new is taking place in our midst. Our global pandemic is marked by the reality that information is no longer local. Our lines of complexity have created a global world. Whatever takes place from now on will affect the entire world. In this respect, returning to “business as usual” shows a blind eye to the evolutionary moment we are in. Teilhard was aware that the energies of creativity bring with them a certain terror, a not-knowing what the outcome will be. Hence he advocated radical trust in the inner presence of God and the holiness of the world. In his “Mass on the World,” he wrote:
Whether we like it or not by power and by right you are incarnate in the world. . . My God, I prostrate myself before your presence in the universe which has now become living flame. . . It is a terrifying thing to have been born: I mean, to find oneself, without having willed it, swept irrevocably along on a torrent of fearful energy which seems as thought it wished to destroy everything it carries with it [Mass on the World, 29] …
The whole earth is a Eucharistic field of Christ’s body and blood. Teilhard wrote:
What I want, my God, is that by a reversal of forces which you alone can bring about, my terror in face of the nameless changes destined to renew my being may be turned into an overflowing joy at being transformed into you. I wonder anxiously where life is leading me. . . May this communion of bread with the Christ clothed in the powers which dilate the world, free me from my timidities and my heedlessness. In the whirlpool of conflicts and energies out of which must develop my power to apprehend and experience your presence, I throw myself, my God, on your word. [Mass on the World, 30]
In the face of terror, darkness and the unknown, Teilhard had consummate trust in the presence of God’s absolute love, a love that would not fail us because God is creating us in this moment, a creative tension that hovers between suffering, death and new life. Read more>
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