Loree and Patient Trust
Teilhard de Chardin was a french geologist and paleontologist whose life work included taking part in the discovery of the Peking Man. Born in 1881, he entered the Jesuit Noviciate and subsequently became a priest. In his many years traveling as both paleontologist and priest, Chardin worked to understand the intersection of evolution and faith. Both became part of the way Chardin saw the world, particularly as he worked as a stretcher bearer in World War I. Chardin saw such horrors in the the war that at first his faith was shaken. Yet in the midst of this human tragedy, he began to see that the Crucified Christ was within the evolving flow of history - not making the evil things happen, but present, broken, loving to all.
His writings didn't make his superiors in the Jesuit order happy. They were much happier having him explore China as a paleontologist than as a philosophical writer trying to intersect the then-controversial idea of evolution with Catholic faith. But Chardin had many followers, and as the years have gone by since his death in 1955, many people have turned to his writings for comfort and help understanding God's work in the world.
Today I have included a piece of writing from Chardin, that some consider a prayer. It was written to someone he was mentoring, to encourage him in a difficult time. Bishop Sutton read this as a prayer in our weekly Clergy meeting with him on Wednesday. Since I began to study Jesuit prayer, this prayer, or prose, has meant a great deal to me.
We are all going through difficult times. As the numbers of those who have the virus increase, illness is affecting more and more people in our county, our state, our nation, our world. People are coping, and some of that coping includes bad behavior like hoarding. It is a challenge for all of us not to turn to whatever comforts us in difficult times - alcohol or food, for example. I hope that you are gentle with yourselves, and that this prayer helps you to focus on how God may be working in the midst of frustration, and disappointment, boredom, and stress. Trust, my friends, in the slow work of God.
-- Loree
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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.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
excerpted from Hearts on Fire
