The Rev. Jamie Parsley
Revelation 21.1-6
Let us pray.
These words
we just prayed together were adapted from a prayer written of one my personal heroes,
a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
The reason I
chose that prayer this morning is because I find it difficult to hear the
scripture reading from the book of Revelation we just heard without thinking of
Teilhard.
My attraction
to Teilhard is one that has puzzled me over the years.
Oftentimes I
have had to ask myself: why am I so drawn to this man?
Certainly I’m
no scientist and have never made any claim to be.
In fact, many
of his scientific concepts are simply lost on me.
I am a poet
and a priest, not a scientist.
But I think
it is those two parts of myself—the poet and the priest—that are drawn to
Teilhard because he too was a poet and a priest.
In the reading
from Revelation, we hear Christ say,
I am the Alpha
and the Omega.
Talk about
poetic language.
Teilhard
understood this concept in ways few others have.
This concept
of Christ as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, is at the very
heart of everything Teilhard believed.
Teilhard was,
by all standards, a dualistic Christian, as we all should be, to some extent.
Yes, on one
hand he was a priest—whose personal piety was deep and profound. Teilhard—seen
in his day as the rebel anti-Thomist priest known for his unorthodox writing
which edged on heresy, had a deep and abiding devotion to the Sacred Heart of
Jesus and prayed the Rosary every day of his adult life.
On the other
hand he was a scientist—the paleontogist trained in secular instructions, who was
on the team that found the remains of the renown Peking Man. One of my favorite
stories of Teilard is how, as a boy, he would collect pieces of iron so that he
could take them out and adore them like a
“God of iron.” One day however he threw himself on the ground when he
discovered a spot of rust on one of the pieces and cried at the “unreliability
of a physical world of which he was a part…”[1]
In Teilhard
we find a wonderful webbing of these two aspects that could very easily
conflict with each other. And they have conflicted with each other.
Christians
are still struggling with this whole concept of evolution.
There are
still Christians in the world who have not been able to wed the holy in their
life with the scientific.
Teilhard,
however, was one of those few people who could not only do so effectively, but
could, in the process, do something extraordinary.
In Teilhard,
when his spirituality and his scientific thinking came together, poetry was
born.
Teilhard saw
the history of our natural world as a gradual unfolding. Inanimate matter
evolved into living matter.
Simple
life-forms evolved into more complex forms.
The epitome
was human consciousness—or more precisely the spirit.
So, where was
creation headed, Teilhard wondered?
The end point
was a place in which matter and spirit converged. He called this point the
Omega point.
As priest,
who believed wholeheartedly in the Incarnation, this seemed to fall perfectly
into the realm of the possible.
Teilhard defined
the Incarnation as the “passing of God through matter.”
There alone
we see it. The priest and the scientist coming together and making something we
can grasp, something we can wrap our minds around.
God passing
through matter.
God becoming
matter and making matter holy.
Teilhard was
able to see our existence in relation to God from a very unique perspective.
God was not
just the distant creator of all matter, off in some metaphysical or
supernatural heaven.
God came among
matter and became matter.
This
convergence of God and matter was Christ and in Christ we saw in a superbly
perfect way this coming together of the two.
His
perspective of in other areas was unique as well.
For example,
he objected to the term “post-Christian.”
We are not
living in a post-Christian time, Teilhard said. “Trans-Christian would be a
better term.”
And evil, for
Teilhard, was not “catastrophic—or the fruit of some cosmic accident—but the inevitable
side effect of the process of the cosmos unifying into God.”
When I first
read all of this I was overwhelmed and stunned.
It all seemed
too much for me even begin to comprehend.
At the same
time, however, it spoke to a place deep within me, the same place I find
scripture speaking to me and moving me.
I can relate
to Teilhard because I see in him what I want for myself as a Christian.
I strive to
be, like him, a spiritual seeker—one who strives to find God—one who longs for
the reality and presence of God in my life.
I strive also
to be a bit of the scientist as well—the one who observes creation around me,
but is not only to content to be awed and amazed by it. I want to know it and I want to partake of it as
fully as I can. I want to understand it.
I want to
echo Teilhard when he said “Less and less do I see a difference between [scientific]
research and adoration.”
I want to be a
poet who can bring these two sometimes divergent parts together in my life into
an exquisite harmony.
The one part
can cast light on the other and when it can’t, that’s when poetry can take
over.
This is the
message of Teilhard de Chardin for me and, I think, for all of us.
Only when we
take his concepts and apply them to our lives do they truly matter.
Teilhard’s
“big picture” of creation can help us to put our own existence in this created
world and in our relationship with God into perspective as well.
This humble
priest and scientist and poet is a guide.
He point the
way forward not only to our collective omega point—that goal we as humans are
moving toward—but toward our own individual omega points.
And this
perspective is very much in keeping with what we heard earlier in Revelation.
In
“The home of
God is among mortals.”
Matter and
spirit converge and a new earth is formed.
Isn’t this
really the goal?
Isn’t this
what we as Christians are working toward?
The Omega
point is that place in which the so-called “kingdom” comes—it is the time and
the place in which we will be fulfilled and made beautifully and perfectly
whole.
“The day will
come,” Teilhard said,” when the, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the
tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on
that day, for the second time in the history of the world, humankind will have
discovered fire.”
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