A Tribute to Teilhard
[“We need a new God.” This statement is attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1881-1955) by Georgetown University’s John Haught in the major bio documentary “Teilhard: Visionary Scientist” which appeared in May of 2024 and is now available on YouTube.]
O Lover,
Having recently watched the Teilhard film several times, I am focusing this prayer post on his quotation “We Need a New God” and how it aids my self-awareness regarding both the past and the future. Teilhard undoubtedly had a flare for startling language. Indeed, the above clause borders on brazen. After all, the notion of the creation of You via our agency and in our image, the inverting of the imágo Déi teaching, is the central thrust of idolatry. That many would view the quote as a bridge too far should surprise no one.
But, on the other hand, what if the context of our conversation were less about immutable dogma and more about Your relentless and unfolding Self-disclosure and our response to it? What if the spiritual journey were experienced as a life-long movement into ever less inadequate images of You? What if the impetus of the iconoclast (“image breaking”) impulse of Eastern Christianity’s 8th and 9th centuries were expanded beyond metal and stone to focus on dated theological depictions of You as well? Indeed, were the limitations of all finite representations of Infinite You embraced, would not a process of deconstruction segueing into reconstruction come to be seen as nonnegotiable? What if rather than being locked into doctrinal categories from some earlier century, we humans were equipped for and invited into a kaleidoscopic Mystérium for the understanding of which eternity itself would be too brief a duration? Such questions follow in the wake of Teilhard’s clause.
One of Jesus’ most weighty sayings remains “The one who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). This is a colossal claim. Rather than mere addendum to existing belief and cultic practice, whether Judaic or pagan, or counterweight to darkness and death giving rise to the ontological and cosmic duality of Manichaeism, the Fourth Gospel’s witness to the claim of Jesus revolutionarily invites us to embrace You, Reality Itself, principally and decisively as depicted via him. Such a declaration warrants either total rejection as megalomanic or deconstruction giving rise to (Christic) reconstruction. The latter is Teilhard’s road less taken, the way of growing openness to You, ever experienced as “new.”
O Lover, I am moved by Teilhard’s statement because I am now aware of how much of the confusion and stuckness of my spiritual journey has been the result of highly inadequate images of You. Draped as these images have been in immutability or infallibility, and as my “Christ” remained atrophied having to do principally with the individual Nazarene, there were decades of only limited theological space for growth. Repeatedly I experienced static depictions of You as “stoppers” leaving me confused as to how to correlate the Incarnate One (“good cop”) with You (perceived “bad cop”). Repeatedly I returned to this query: what if You were vastly more like the Christ, the Cosmic Christ, than I had ever imagined? Stated otherwise, what if the agápe he both embodied and pointed to was You through and through, THROUGH AND THROUGH? Only in my anecdotage have mystics more than theologians, experience more than cognition, freedom more than fear, begun to lay bare the vistas into which such questions might lead.
It is now increasingly clear that despite both the nature of finitude and my own waywardness, I have been being drawn farther into the ever-“new” You. I am not shirking the acceptance of what has become my all-encompassing vocation. I petition Your assistance lest anything distract me in what remains. After all of the fragments and the shards it is all coming together in the singular “Totality” (a la Hadewijch of Brabant) of Your “all in all” (I Cor 15:20-28). And in the wings continues to stand Teilhard, one of Your midwives.
