Daily Reflection Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

It was, admittedly, a strange itinerary for our annual trek north to see the fall foliage – this time lunch followed by a short pilgrimage to a cemetery.  Italian cuisine and a chat with student chefs at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, and then the walk to find the unassuming gravesite of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit mystic and scientist. The clash of venues?  Property now owned by the CIA was once Saint Andrew-on-Hudson, the Jesuit Novitiate of the New York Province. (Fr. Tom Marciniak told me recently that one of his assignments early in his formation there was to tend to the gravesite!)



Finding himself isolated in a kind of exile in rural New York was a common pattern for this French Jesuit who died seventy years ago today.  As Robert Elsberg describes him in his book All Saints, Tielhard was a scientist of the first order who probed a magnificent integration with his life of faith, engaging the world and its deepest questions. Other labels:  A visionary behind many of the most creative movements in contemporary theology and spirituality; a prophet who labored to reconcile the language of science and the language of religion; a mystic afire with divine Mystery at the heart of the cosmos. 



Little of Fr. Teilhard’s work was appreciated, or even read, in his lifetime. He was not allowed to publish or to lecture. But no wonder the steady stream of visitors now who pay homage to his legacy – the life of the mind as a continuing source of Incarnation and Revelation; finding God in all things, including the extension and consecration of God’s creation (“I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and suffering of the world.”); Mystery as a divine invitation, not a stop sign.



Tielhard’s wish was that he might die on the day of the Resurrection, and so it came to pass.  He died of a fatal heart attack on Easter Sunday,1955. How appropriate that the reading today from John’s Gospel is Jesus’ astounding claim as the great I Am. Before Abraham came to be, before the formation of all the rocks and fossils found in the volcanic hills of his boyhood home in Auvergne, France, that had intrigued the young Tielhard, even while the breathtaking majesty of the Cosmos was still in the mind of God, Jesus the Christ was present.  And Jesus’ promise as the Word – that those who believe in Him will never see death –  was one claimed in faith by Tielhard, his redeemed and glorified body now the converging of matter and spirit as his own eternal Omega Point.



Perhaps we might spend time today in prayer, prayers of both praise and surrender to the Mystery and Majesty – that the God of the Cosmos who knew Pierre’s name knows ours as well.



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“I want to teach people how to see God everywhere, to see Him in all that is most hidden, most solid, and most ultimate in the world.” ~ Pierre Tielhard de Chardin