“Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born this day, May1st, in1881 at the family estate in Sarcenat, France, to a devout and land holding family. His parents were Emmanuel and Berthe-Adele Teilhard de Chardin. His mother was the great grandniece of Voltaire.
Teilhard was the fourth of the couple’s eleven children.
Thank you for this beautiful memory…momeries of a man who was transformed into love. Also for Ilia’s effort in bringing his message renewed into consciousness.
In speaking with Jean Houston and the young boy, Teilhard, full of youthful vitality, enthusiasm and wonder, was also speaking to the future — that is, to us. And that future is now. Censored, silenced and refused publication of his works by both the Vatican and his Jesuit order, he was experiencing yet another exile, this time in America where he died alone. Because dogmatic religious patriarchy neither found place nor had truck with him, he found the kind of receptivity in the feminine and childlike as his Master, and was warmly at home doing same. In that regard, nothing has changed. In ancient times, Teilhard’s time, now and forever, divinity is always found where least expected, outside the walls of religious tradition and hegemony. “Beware of men wearing fancy robes,” said Jesus, “they will receive the greater condemnation” (Lk. 40:25-27). Men of their times, both Teilhard and Merton stayed true to the orders that stifled and fettered them. Sometimes its best to bite the hand that feeds you, particularly when it keeps you from feeding yourself, and others, more effectively.
This remembrance of Teilhard brought me to tears.