This morning, about forty minutes ago, I finished The Phenomenon of Man. To say it left an impression is an understatement. My encounter with Teilhard, yesterday, when I read the bulk of the book (all but about 50 pages of it), had the urgency and forcefulness of a revelation. All the while, it was as if my mind were being forced open, as if key missing pieces of this puzzle I've been assembling were being given me, and as if my own vision, which I saw anticipated (in far greater detail) in Teilhard's pages, were being confirmed and bestowed its inheritance.
That encounter had the uncanny aura of something long in the preparation and making. I've encountered Teilhard twice before. First, some years ago, those earliest enthusiasms reading his prayers in high school. I remember the excited conversation with Mr. Holm, his unwavering smile, his unwavering dismissive laughter--"Noosphere! How ridiculous is that" I don't know what of the whole vision I saw then, nor how clearly; I also don't know how it would have confirmed its truth to me then, save as an exciting curiosity which blew open the confining walls of my high school Catholicism. Evidently, it wasn't enough to make a terribly lasting impression, at least not one capable of surviving my move out of faith in college. When I began to return, Teilhard was not on my mind. If anything, I remember reading mentions of him in Rahner with dismissal (Mr. Holm internalized?), assured that in Rahner I had finally found "serious theology," quite distinct from the exuberant, almost New Age enthusiasms of a man who was by then "so high school." Meticulous rational justification, existential depth (both in unexpected abundance in Rahner), the twin makings (I thought) of theological seriousness--far from it! And in any case, Teilhard was surely too far removed from orthodoxy to be regarded as "Real Christianity" (! Yes! I thought this! Then again, so did Roberto Unger).
The second encounter, however, came evidently in early March of this last year, when for a reason I don't quite remember I'd picked up the prayer book (Spiritual Masters series) one morning and found myself, to my surprise, overwhelmingly moved by Teilhard's prayer of eucharistic offering for the world. The passion of his words crackled with an all-consuming fire, sparks of which I found rising up to answer within myself. There was a deep bond, suddenly discovered, all at once. When I began to read, a week later, The Phenomenon of Man, it was no longer from the dull sense of obligation ("I should probably read this, because he's an important modern thinker) with which I'd picked up a tattered copy for $6.00 two falls before; it was with excitement. My excitement did not go unrewarded: I remember the animation which grew and carried me forward as I began to move, then pore, through the pages, the awakenings of new awareness as I started to "see" Teilhard's vision and become convinced that it must be true. I remember the afternoon at Cafe Algiers, with Marisa, at the table overlooking the first floor, where I patted the book and said "Yo, Teilhard's got it!" and began to explain the possible connections I saw to our infant attempt at eco-theology.
Yet for some reason, I didn't finish; I stopped about halfway through. I remember thinking several times afterwards that I should pick it up again, yet resisting doing so, or putting it in my bag as my "book for the day" only if accompanied by another book (which I always read instead). Perhaps I got bogged down in the technical (and probably outdated) paleo-biology of the "Tree of Life" section, and feared the rest of the book would be like that. That inertia may have led me to add the further rationalization that I'd caught my glimpse the vision already, absorbed it, and now knew what was coming--and besides, there were so many other things to read! (I can't remember now what they were). In any case, I did not open it again until two days ago. I now realize that, still, something must have not sunken into me all the way through on even that reading. Or else, something did, and I was not yet ready to receive it.
How much has changed since then, it seems! In the span of two months, I've moved from having a growing sense of direction to actually having, in rough form, the beginnings of the vision I want to put together, and realize in my writing. I can now bring to my reading not merely a curiosity--however hungry and consuming (even insatiable)--but a purpose, the directed need to find in it the materials with which to realize the work that is gathering itself into articulate form somewhere deep in my mind. Before I read, and thought, and conversed, with a vague feeling of orientation, increasingly confident in a general intellectual "vocation" ("to be a programmatic thinker for the community of the Church"--Dec. 2009; --"to work out a new vision of reason" (somewhere all the way back to 2008; --"to create a paradigm of 'transformational theology'"--March 2011; "to create a work of integration"). What's new is that now the material itself has started to assemble into a structure, as, through the mere application of focus, presence, and patience--and, I might add, the permission of abandonment--I watch. I can now see what I read fitting into it, and direct my mind and my pursuit accordingly.
What's clear already is that Teilhard has given me a very sizable piece of the puzzle. I had to pause several times while reading yesterday and allow myself to think, with wonder "This man teaches one not just what to think, but how, and shows that the two are, in a subtle but inescapable way, quite tightly interconnected. Only a certain way of thinking--the "organicist" way I am trying, with great but reducing inarticulacy, to describe--allows the whole of the reality we experience, and are situated, enmeshed, within, to be grasped, and "seen." The method finds its validation in the content, in precisely the ability to contain all, and order it. What's more, the vision, once glimpsed, is not only intellectually opening and clarifying (two essential, but different qualities), but calls forth an answer deeper within ourselves, from our hearts and wills. It is impossible, having grasped the fullness and soundness of Teilhard's vision, not to find oneself deeply moved. And not just diffusely moved ("I know not how"--as in many works of art), but specifically moved to hope, to love, and to profound affirmation--of oneself and the universe to which one belongs, with a startling new self-awareness and clarity. The mind finds it can believe the vision is true, the heart finds it desperately wants to believe the vision is true, the will finds it can, and is moved, to choose to believe the vision is true, and to love it. In other words, an assent not just with the mind, with the whole of our being--a "spiritual" assent.
The humbling, exalting, terrifying thought: if Teilhard's vision is taken as it is offered, this act of assent is not merely mine. It is the assent of the universe to its own existence, its own awareness, and its own purpose. In those thoroughly mundane afternoon minutes, as I sat and wondered over a book at small windowside table in the Danish Pastry House, sipping a cooling coffee and trying not to get distracted by the buzzing conversation of lunch hour, the universe was saying "Yes" to itself! To the whole of its existence across all of space-time, and to that immense whole reflected in this single, tiny, flawed, swiftly and pitifully dying vessel that I am. What a wonder is that! Is there any way not to feel the pull to find the appropriate summit and proclaim it to the world with all of one's being?
Is that not the experience of the Gospel in the 21st Century? Does it deserve any less?
"I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well." -Psalm 139: 14
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