Wednesday the 11th of April was the usual Eucharist service 9:15 am, held at St Paul’s Anglican Church in San Miguel Allende. Fr Jeff Sells celebrated the life of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin using Eucharistic Prayer form C which is appropriate yet not usual. All of us present recognized and appreciate the importance of great Mystics and their perspective on the divine.
The Collect of the Day
Eternal God, the whole cosmos sings of your glory, from the dividing of a single cell to the vast expanse of interstellar space: We bless you for your theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who perceived the divine in the evolving creation. Enable us to become faithful stewards of your divine works and heirs of your eternal kingdom.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a ground-breaking paleontologist and Christian mystic whose vision encompassed the evolution of all matter toward a final goal in which material and spiritual shall coincide and God shall be all in all.
Teilhard was born in 1881. In 1899, he entered the Jesuit novitiate, moving to England in 1902when French law nationalized the properties of religious orders. After taking a degree in literature in 1902, he went to Egypt to teach chemistry in the Jesuit College in Cairo. There he fell in love with the east. Teilhard moved back to England in 1908 and began to synthesize his already vast knowledge of evolution, philosophy and theology. He was ordained priest in 1911.Teilhard did research at the Natural History Museum in Paris, leading to the Sorbonne (University of Paris) where he completed his doctorate in paleontology. He went to China where, with other researchers, he made public the famous Peking Man hominid in 1926. Teilhard developed a vision of creation which held that evolution was the process by which matter inexorably arranges itself toward greater complexity until recognizable consciousness emerges.
For Teilhard, this described a continuing process of human evolution that moves toward a new level of consciousness in which the universe will come to perfect unity and find itself one with God.
God, then, is the highest point of pure consciousness,
always pulling the evolutionary process towards its promised destiny.
Teilhard called it the Omega Point.
Teilhard struggled with the Roman Church that was suspicious of his seemingly radical and heterodox writings. He was forbidden to teach and had to defend himself against charges of heresy. Teilhard remained loyal. After his death, many came to recognize his vision as a deeply Christian one that sought to reconcile the Biblical vision of Gods final triumph over sin and disunity with the undeniable discoveries of evolutionary science. Shortly before he died, he prayed: O God, if in my life I have not been wrong, allow me to die on Easter Sunday. He died on April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday. God does not offer himself to our finite beings as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us he is eternal discovery and eternal growth. The more we think we understand him, the more he reveals himself as otherwise. The more we think we hold him, the further he withdraws, drawing us into the depths of himself.
