Sunday Prayer

I've come across some really excellent examples of prayer in my research, and I'd like to introduce them to the blog as a weekly ritual. This week's prayer is from Teilhard de Chardin, circa 1937

Teilhard the Adventurer

For some of your servants, Lord, the World, our New World – the world of nuclei, of atoms and genes – has become a source of constant anxiety: because it seems to us now to so mobile, so irresistible, and so big! The increasing probability (to which we conspire to close our eyes) of other thinking planets in the firmament … the unmistakable rebound of an evolution that has become capable, through planetary effort, of governing its own direction and speed … all this seems frightening to a man who, as he still shrinks from flinging himself into the great ocean of Matter, is afraid that he may see his God burst asunder in the acquisition of a new dimension…

Yet can anything, Lord, in fact do more for my understanding and my soul to make you an object of love, the only object of love, than to see that you – the Centre ever opened into your own deepest core – continue to grow in intensity, that there is an added glow to your luster, at the same pace as you plemorize yourself by gathering together the Universe and subjecting it ever more fully to the heart of your being…?

… Lord of consistence and union, you whose distinguishing mark and essence is the power indefinitely to grow greater, without distortion or loss of continuity, to the measure of the mysterious Matter whose Heart you fill and all whose movements you ultimately control – Lord of my childhood and Lord of my last days – God, complete in relation to yourself and yet, for us, continually being born – God, who, because you offer yourself to our worship as ‘evolver’ and ‘evolving’, are henceforth the only being that can satisfy us – sweep away at last the clouds that still hide you – the clouds of hostile prejudice and those, too, of false creeds.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Heart of Matter