Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In my senior year of high school, I took a religion class, taught by a man who studied to be a priest. We were required to turn in weekly papers that summarized an article from a Catholic theological journal. My friend Kathy Murphy and I shared papers. She would turn in her paper, then a couple of weeks later I would copy hers and turn it in as my assignment. And she did the same with mine. We never got caught. I’m presuming the instructor didn’t read the papers. Cheating in religion class must be some special category of sin. I remember almost nothing from the class except the irony of being taught about being chaste and saving ourselves for marriage when there were girls in the class whose pregnancies were busting the buttons on our Catholic school girl uniforms. I vaguely remember being taught about Vatican II, and I remember the words aggiornamento, eschatological, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

I knew nothing about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin except that he wrote about Catholic theology and he had a very sexy French name. But recently I came across a quote credited to him and wished that I had paid more attention in Religion IV in high school. Now I know one iota more than I knew in 1965. Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and philosopher who died in 1955. He wrote about the struggle to be patient while waiting for God to work. He used the term “the slow work of God,” a phrase that resonates with me.

 

Enough of my words—here is a poem/prayer he wrote about trusting in the slow work of God:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
-- that is to say, grace --
and circumstances
-- acting on your own good will --
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser. Amen.