Remembering a Jesuit friend who’ll soon be celebrating his 90th birthday (in heaven, I hope – he transferred “residence” in 2007), I was reminded of one of his favorite readings while still on earth: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Divine Milieu. Perhaps it was he who inspired me to take up this book and read it attentively.Let me share with you some of the lines which serve as food for my soul at the beginning of this New Year. On the value of human activity: The Divine Milieu explains that all human experience has divine undertones. Work, play, family, commerce – everything we do and everything that happens to us is all part of the whole of building God’s kingdom. In Chardin’s own words: “We serve to complete creation by the humblest work of our hands. (…) By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. (…) Our faith imposes on us the right and the duty to throw ourselves into the things of earth.”
Then, there is the chapter on the “things that are done to us” or what he calls “our passivities.” Chardin distinguishes between the passivities of growth and the passivities of diminishment. On the one hand, there are the “passivities of growth” referring to the things that are beyond our control but serve as friendly and favorable forces which shape who we become. Perhaps one example of this would be my present calling to serve my Congregation at the General level and have a wider view of the church and of religious life lived out in different cultures. “My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.”
On the other, there are the “passivities of diminishment” which signify the hostile powers that hamper our progress. There are several examples of this in daily life, when I meet “aggressive, destructive and pain-inflicting forces and persons” who bring out the worst in me. But even here, Chardin is confident that everything works for good. “By virtue of Christ’s rising again, nothing any longer kills inevitably, but everything is capable of becoming the blessed influence of God upon our lives. (…) God transfigures deaths by integrating them into a better plan – provided we lovingly trust in him.”
Synthesizing, I think the challenge that Chardin poses is this – the spiritualization of matter and the materialisation of spirit, or more simply put, how to divinize our world: “The task of each one of us is to divinize the whole world in an infinitesimal degree. The total divine milieu is formed by the confluence of our individual divine milieux. (…) Under the commonplace envelope of things and of all our purified and salvaged efforts, a new earth is being slowly engendered.”
Incidentally, or serendipitously, yesterday, I was given a chance to meet a living mystic, as if to confirm Chardin’s thesis that God is continuously at work in our world. I heeded a surprise last-minute invitation from the Ambassador of the Philippines to the Holy See, H.E. Madame Tuason, to listen to a testimonial of Mrs. Vassula Rydén, a lay woman, mother of 2 adult sons. She is Greek by blood, Egyptian by birth, raised in Switzerland, of Greek Orthodox religion, married to a Lutheran. Vassula enthusiastically shared the spiritual workings of God upon her, a woman of the world, who did not expect to be given such a calling and a mission. The center of her thesis is “True Life in God” received through locutions, visions and writings that went through a period of purification, gradually leading to a process of crystallization of the particular mission: to help in the “re-construction of Christ’s Church” meaning the unity of Christians. One of the visions she shared and which I bring with me in prayer today is the image of three rigid towers – the three Christian religions: Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant – who all need to be “converted” and to learn humility so that they can “bend” and meet and bow to each other.
A fitting spiritual experience at the conclusion of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity indeed and a confirmation that we should never lose hope that the Lord continues to work in our world, as Chardin attests!
