Reading Teilhard’s life story has taught me a lot about the importance of being faithful to one’s insights. Although much of his writing was censored by the Church during his lifetime he is now accepted and is an influence in the spirituality of our day. As I reflect on his writings I can pray Louis Bautain’s prayer for a ‘world healed, unified and restored through the saving wisdom of Christianity’ and am grateful that he too had a sense and desire for the unity of this world.

When Teilhard speaks of the cosmos emerging into being and growing gradually to its final completeness as it loses those boundaries which to our eyes seem so immense, I am reminded of the interconnectedness of all creation and encouraged to move beyond the separation and divisions that exist at all levels of our understanding of life, boundaries of mind and heart that result in what Teilhard calls the fragmentation of creatures and the clash of their atoms. It is this fragmentation which stops us seeing, as Teilhard puts it, that everything is being; everywhere there is being and nothing but being. This brings me to reflections on our motto, Sint Unum, and the exhortations of our last two Chapters to live in right relationship with the whole community of life. And I pray that the boundaries, of prejudice, and hatred so prevalent in our fragmented world may melt into tolerance, compassion and love.

Teilhard feels the burden of his humanity, and it is consoling to read of his struggles:

Instinctively, like all humankind, I would rather set up my tent here below on some hill-top of my own choosing. I am afraid, too, like all my fellow-humans, of the future too heavy with mystery and too wholly new, towards which time is driving me. Then like these people 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!

As we accept change through the ageing process I am aware of my own resistance to loss and possible discomfort, and I pray with Teilhard that I may live mindfully and with courage. Like him I would like to settle for the safe places. However, I hope that time would not so much drive us, as he suggests it might, but that we would engage with it in a creative and productive way.

Teilhard shakes us out of worrying about the particular and the minutiae of everyday when he prays:

Lord, show us the true nature of charity: not a sterile fear of doing wrong but a vigorous determination that all of us together shall break open the doors of life; and give it finally - give it above all - through an ever-increasing awareness of your omnipresence, a blessed desire to go on advancing, discovering, fashioning and experiencing the world so as to penetrate ever further and further into yourself.

by Marion Reynolds SSL