“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.” Teilhard de Chardin

 “Lord, by every innate impulse and through all the hazards of my life, I have been driven ceaselessly to search for you and to set you in the heart of the universe of matter. Thus I shall have the joy, when death comes, of closing my eyes amidst the splendor of a universal transparency aglow with fire.”¹

Under your influence and your alone, the sheath of organic isolation and of wilfull egoism which separates us into tiny individuals is rend asunder and dissolves, and the multitude of lives rush on towards that union which is necessary for the maturity of the world.

Only love can bring individual beings to their perfect completion, as individuals, by uniting them one with another, because only loves take possession of them and unites them by what lie deepest within them.

Lord once again I ask: which is the more precious of these two beatitudes, that all things are means through which I can touch you, or that you yourself are so ‘universal’ that I can experience you and lay hold on you in every creature? Let us then establish ourselves in the divine milieu. There we shall be within the inmost depths of our being and the greatest consistency of matter.  There where all forms of beauty come together we shall discover the ultra-vital, ultraperceptible, ultra-active point of the universe and we shall also experience in the depths of our own being the fullness of our powers of action and of adoration – for this world is indeed full of You O God.

Let us leave the surface, and, without leaving the world, plunge into God.

There and from there, in God and through God, we shall hold all things and find again the essence and the splendor of all the flowers, the lights, we have had to surrender here and now in order to be faithful to life.

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Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Notes:

¹ Teilhard de Chardin