French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—theologian, mystic, scientist—once noted, “I should like to die on the day of the Resurrection.” So it happened. He died of a heart attack in New York on April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday.
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He sought to reconcile the cosmic mysticism of St Paul with insights of evolution and cosmology. He saw the universe in the widest perspective: the explosion of stars, the violent formation of land masses. He saw a similar process in the life of individuals.
In this process we are formed not only by our conscious choices but also by what we undergo—what he called the principle of “passive diminishment.” We are shaped and measured by our defeats as well as our achievements; our weakness and strengths: what we do and what we endure.
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That includes the “barrier that blocks our way, the wall that hems us in.” Failure for the saints “plays the part of the elevator for an aircraft or the pruning knife for a plant. It canalizes the sap of our inward life...in such a way as to make us shoot up higher, straighter.”
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Teilhard was forbidden by his Superiors to teach, lecture, or publish any writings during his life. “I begin to think that my function is that of St John the Baptist, one who presages what is to come...or simply to help in the birth of a new soul in that which already is.”
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