Lenten Day Sixteen:  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

February 29, 2024

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.  We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

One might be tempted to think of someone as an overachiever if he had been a Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher and teacher.  Such were the roles of French priest and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  The man was an exceptionally brilliant spiritual thinker, proven by the fact that he was often chastised by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, a department of the Roman Catholic Church in charge of religious discipline.  A devoted Darwinist, he wrote two books, The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu.  If anyone wants to read those and explain them to me, I am all ears.

But on this sixteenth day of Lent, I sit with the above quotation only.   We humans, I believe, tend to compartmentalize our lives.  If we have a relationship with the Divine, it often fits into one of those compartments.  Perhaps we pray each morning.  Check, and move on.  Or we meditate.  Check, and move on.  Or we go to weekly worship.  Check, and move on.  Spiritual experiences (if they can be called that) accomplished.  Now we can get back to “life,” to all those important things we need to do. Yet, according to how I read/feel this quotation, we are doing it all backwards.  We have mis-identified ourselves.  Yes, we have human bodies, thoughts, feelings, needs, emotions.  But we tend to forget that it is the spirit within each of us that defines us, that gives us our true identity.

We are all born in the image of God—of the Divine, of Love, of the Universe—of the one who “merely spoke, and the heavens were created.  God breathed the word, and the stars were born” (Psalm 33:6-7).  Or, as William Wordsworth so eloquently wrote:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
(from Ode on Intimations of Immortality)

We bring our spiritual selves into this world just as God breathed Godself into Adam, into all humanity.  It was Jesus of Nazareth who assured us that “the kingdom of God is within you.” The entire kingdom. If we could remember this, if we didn’t stick our spiritual selves in a drawer, our response to this human life would come from the wellspring of that spirit, which I believe to be Love.  And the world would be a different place.

You are a tough one, Pierre.  Thank you for the reminder.

Blessings ~ Rosemary