Thursday, April 11, 2013

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Always trust life"

Yesterday was "Teilhard de Chardin Day" for Spirituality & Practice's Naming the Days feature. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and geologist was born 1 May 1881 and died 10 April, 1955.

According to S&P, one of Teilhard's tenets was "Always trust life." The site's book review of Christ in All Things: Exploring Spirituality with Teilhard de Chardin includes, "Seeing Christ in all things enabled Teilhard to sense the presence of God as a process moving life forward with meaning. The spiritualization of the world was underway. Nourished by enthusiastic devotion and practice, Teilhard challenged us to combine our love of God with an ardent faith in the world." He has been a major influence on Thomas Moore's writings.

Quotes attributed to Teilhard:
"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."

"The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others."

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."