Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: A Man of Courage and Blessing

a sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss

Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, May 20, 2007

I love to speak about men and women who have lived meaningful and worthy lives. Those people of integrity who show all of us what is possible.
      Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is one of those kind of people.
      A man of courage who lived a life that was a blessing to others.

      He is a fascinating figure. He was a Catholic priest and a scientist. An intellectual, a devoted Christian, and a compassionate friend. He was a man who sacrificed greatly for the principle of freedom of thought. He stood firm for what he thought was right.

      Among all the words spoken about Teilhard, by friends and colleagues, the statement that touched me the most described him as;
"This man with the clear regard".

      Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born on May 1, 1881 in France. He died April 10, 1955 in New York City. In his 74 years he lived as a citizen of the world, exploring with thoroughness both the material world and the spiritual world. Born in a castle, he lived long months of his life in a tent...for he was a geologist and paleontologist who sought from the geologic record of the past, an understanding of the future of humanity.

      According to biographers, Teilhard's two passionate loves were God and the universe, and the whole of his thought and life sought to integrate the two. It was his mother who influenced his piety and his father who led him to a love of natural history. As a boy he was fascinated with rocks and iron and the material substance of the earth. He carried rocks and pieces of iron in his pockets.

      After earning a doctorate in Paleontology at the Sorbonne, he was sent to teach in Cairo, Egypt. His reputation as a scientist, was secured in 1923, when in his early 40s, he joined an expedition that founded the French Paleontological Mission in China. He joined the team that traveled to inner Mongolia and the Ordos Desert where they discovered "Peking Man", the first evidence that Paleolithic man had lived in North China.

      This man, this priest, with the clear regard, loved rocks and deserts, loved the sun rise and mountains, loved the comradeship of explorers and scientists...he was, I imagine comfortable with himself, sure of his place
under the skies of heaven with his hands in the earth.

      One of my favorite authors, Annie Dillard, weaves stories of Teilhard's China expeditions through her essay "For the Time Being".
Mixing quotes from his diaries with her own reflections Dillard writes:

      June 1923: The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on muleback in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of Peking. He saw it from a distance: the Ordos, the inner Mongolian desert. He saw from the mule what he had often seen in Egypt years before; "the burnt stones of the desert and the sand of the dunes in the dusk."

      The Ordos is a desert plateau, three thousand feet high, spreading thirty-five thousand square miles, from which mountains rise. The great Wall separates the Ordos from the fertile lands to the east and south.

      Teilhard was forty-two years old, tall and narrow, fine-featrued. He wore a big felt hat, like a cowboy, and heavy boots. Rough weather had cut lines on his face. His characteristic expression was simple and natural, according to one scientist who also noted that his eyes were "filled with intelligence and understanding."

      From the back of a trotting mule he could spot on stony ground a tiny rock that early man had chipped. In July in one red cliff he found the fossil remains of extinct pachyderms from the Pliocene.

      Imagine this scientist-priest-philosopher, riding a mule in the desert in China and finding this proof of the amazing age of the earth....the ancient earth, the pre-biblical earth...the earth of evolutionary time, not Biblical time. What are the chances of that...it must have seemed like a miracle.
He must have seemed like something of a saint...finding holy evidence...but evidence contrary to church doctrine.

      What deep faith he must have had to live in the paradox of his Catholic teachings and his knowledge of science.

      Dillard again; "In Auguest 1923, they pitched their tents I the desert, in a circle of cliffs in the southeast corner of the Ordos, there they camped for a month and here they found the first Neanderthal tools, ten meters down, scrapers, gravers, quartzite blades, then they dug through 164 feet of sand to reveal an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked over the fire...450,000 years before, 45 centuries before Genghis Khan crossed that same plain.

      How was Teilhard to integrate these facts with his faith? How was knowledge of the vast record of human history influencing this priest's thoughts about the future of humanity? How was his love of God and his love of the natural universe to be reconciled?

      Teilhard de Chardin was a man of courage because he insisted on holding on to the whole truth of what he found and what he believed...he committed his life to both science and religion and he held fast to both.

      And Teilhard de Chardin was a man who blessed the world, because he wrestled with the paradox and he studied and wrote and shared his ideas.
He didn't keep his questions, his struggle, his unique ideas to himself...he
Lived the courage of his convictions and that was a blessing to the world.

      Reflecting on his life and work, Teilhard wrote these words;
"throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within".

      I'm reminded of Lily Tomlin's one woman show, "The search for intelligent life in the universe" where she offers a beautiful description of awe...how it gives us goosebumps...how it makes us feel all connected...to each other and to something larger than ourselves...

I think, that awe and wonder might be THE thing that makes scientists and religious thinkers so similar, so simpatico...they have regular experiences of awe and wonder...I guess it's also what makes spiritual people and scientists so childlike sometimes....awe and wonder.

      Let me encourage you to pursue and enjoy experiences of awe and wonder on a regular basis. Living in Maryland, we are blessed with access to the blazing life that Teilhard is describing...We don't have to go to China to explore the combustion of the material and the spiritual...we are surrounded by evidence of ancient life...go to Great Falls or Harpers Ferry...the world aflame surrounds us and can light us from within...if we but open to awe and wonder.

      Teilhard entered the Jesuit novitiate at the age of 18 in France. In 1902 Catholic religious orders were expelled from France as a means of separating church and state. Teilhard completed his religious education in England, he was ordained in 1911.

      When war broke out in 1914, he chose to be a stretcher-bearer so he could be close to the men who were in harms way. He served throughout the war and was decorated three times at the request of those with whom he served. On the battlefield his courage was honed and his compassion deepened. Certainly a priest serving at the front had a lot to think about.

      While on his scientific expeditions in China, Teilhard began to write of his mystical and philosophical theories. He published "Hymn of the Universe" and within it an article titled "Mass of the World". He returned to France in 1924 to find his superiors in the Society of Jesus, concerned about the boldness and seeming heterodoxy of his philosophical and theological views. They believed him to be overly optimistic about the problem of evil and he was accused of having pantheistic tendencies.

      Teilhard was barred from teaching in France. And none of his writings were published until after his death.
His works include "The Phenomenon of Man" (1959), "The Divine Milieu" (1960) "Man's Place in Nature" "the Future of Man" "Science and Christ" and more.

      Teilhard returned to China, to the cosmopolitan city of Peking, where he had friends and colleagues, but his banishment by the Church was very painful to him. He refused to retract his ideas, or to teach according to doctrine... Each year he applied to Rome to publish his works. Every year they refused. Every year he applied to Rome to return to France. Every year he was refused.

      His friends encouraged him to give up the priesthood, but he refused.
He lived courageously the truth of his convictions, the dictates of his conscience.

      Teilhard de Chardin's views were unique, his use of language even more unique. His world view evoked Emersonian ideas along with Darwin's theory, even as it presaged New Agism and Ken Wilber and others who theorized a cosmic consciousness.

Teilhard saw the whole universe as an evolutionary process...what he called comosgenesis. He posited that everything in the universe, including man, was bound together in complete organic interconnection and unity. Matter and spirit were not two separate things, but rather two dimensions of one reality.

      He proposed that the evolution of the cosmos was the progressive spiritualization or personalization of matter, with God as the Omega Point- the fulfillment of the cosmic process and that Christ was the incarnation in time of this ultimate cosmic purpose. Divinity going both ways...an evolutionary trajectory up to God and down to man through Christ.

      Teilhard imagined a unified theory of human consciousness which he called noosphere. ...and that all would converge through this shared consciousness.

      With the eyes of a geologist, he looked at human consciousness as another layer of evolving life...and as a priest, he also believed that spirit was evolving...Teilhard said, "We live surrounded by ideas and objects infinitely more ancient than we imagine and yet, at the same time everything is in motion."

      Influenced by his travels and living in different cultures, he wrote;
"we keep moving toward recognition of our common humanity."

      Flux, change, chaos, evolution...all this was central to his thinking, you can see why the Catholic church was not pleased.

      But through all of this, through all of his life, he held to his faith.
He refused to choose either the sacred over the secular, or science over religion...he insisted on holding onto to both. That was a stand of courage.
He sacrificed a great deal, his love of France, proximity to his family, his place in the church, the acceptance of his Catholic brothers, and the publication of his life's work.
He followed the discipline of the church, and he held fast to his own truth. It might have been easier to leave the church. He might have been a happier man. But he was a priest. He was a man with clear regard.

      He had many friends all over the world. He left a great deal of correspondence. He was loved and respected by many.
Who doesn't love a person who stands firm for what they believe.
Who confronts authority and doesn't waver. Who lives with such integrity.

      He wrote often of the power of love. His words at times seem to echo the Jewish or the Buddhist traditions.
He wrote; "Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so the world may come into being."

He wrote: "We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate one another". His was a consistent message of hope and unity and process of becoming.

Speaking to the dualism of the body and spirit he wrote:
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience".

      How was it for such a man as this? To have sacrificed so much...
I think he must have been incredibly clear. Grounded in his ordination and his vows. Experiencing awe and wonder illumination of the world every single day. And knowing that only by staying in the church, could he hope to liberate its outmoded doctrines.

      Separated from the church, far from the sacred symbols of his faith tradition....he wrote that the world was his altar, that his mass would be offered on the altar of the world...
"To divinize the new day, My Lord, I have neither bread nor wine, no altar ...thus, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the alter of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world"
What a man of courage, what a blessing to the world.

Amen