|
COMPLEXIFICATION:
Finding a Spiritual Fit
One Size Does Not Fit All.
INTRODUCTION:
In 1962, from the Roman Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith (which used to be known as the Holy Office of the
Inquisition), came these words regarding the publications and books
of a deceased Jesuit priest, scholar and paleontologist. It read:
"The works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin abound
in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend
Catholic doctrine... For this reason, the most eminent and most revered
Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the
superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents
of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the
youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. de Chardin and
of his followers."
That was in 1962: The ban remains in effect to this day,
though tempered by wisdom, time and Vatican Council II.
Born on May 1st, 1881, this
theologian/paleontologist, who was such a potential threat to the faith
of youth, was ordained a priest in 1911. Shortly afterwards he was
drafted into the French army. He did not carry a gun, but was a
stretcher-bearer, what he called a “soldier-priest.” He went through
five years of some of the most rugged battles of the French Army during
World War 1. Afterwards, in 1919, he was given the French Legion of
Honor.
In 1922, he received his doctorate in
geology from the Sorbonne in Paris. As a lecturer in geology, his
presentations on “evolutionary thought” caused students to pack his
classrooms to attend his lectures, causing a firestorm of resentment
from his French bishops, who opposed Darwinian evolution. In 1924,
because of a paper he had written on “original sin,” he was removed from
his teaching job, ordered to sign a document repudiating his own
writings, forbidden to teach, and banned from ever living and working in
France.
(Lest as Americans, we be too
self-righteous, it’s appropriate to remember that the ban was issued the
same week as the “Scopes monkey trials” in Kentucky, America, rejecting
Darwinian evolution.)
Though hugely conflicted, de Chardin,
after a week’s Jesuit retreat, and upon the advice of many, signed the
document, agreed to leave France, and sailed for China to conduct
scientific work in his chosen field of paleontology, which he now
pursued with a passion.
On the way to China, he
stopped to travel and dig in Somaliland and Ethiopia. Once in China, he
played a major role in the find and interpretation of "Peking Man";
later, at the invitation of the American Museum of Natural History, he
joined Ray Chapman Andrew's Central Mongolian Expedition. The following
year he made a trip across America which inspired him to write The
Spirit of the Earth. In 1931 and 1932 he traveled into Central Asia
with the famous Yellow Expedition sponsored by the Citroen automobile
company. In 1934, with George Barbour he traveled up the Yangtze River
and into the mountainous regions of Szechuan. A year later he joined the
Yale-Cambridge expedition under Helmut de Terra in India and afterwards
von Koenigswald's expedition in Java. In 1937 he was awarded the Gregor
Mendel medal at a Philadelphia Conference for his scientific
accomplishments. That same year he went with the Harvard-Carnegie
Expedition to Burma and then to Java with Helmut de Terra. As a result
of this extensive field work Teilhard became recognized as one of the
foremost geologists of the earth's terrain.
During this period, he
also completed his major work, The Phenomenon of Man in May of
1940. But there was a world-wide conflagration going on in the world;
which meant he waited until after World War II, reworked a version of it
and sent it to Rome, requesting permission from the Holy Office for it
to be published. Permission was never given.
At the same time, he was
also asked to stand as a candidate for a pre-history chair at the
College de France. That doesn’t sound too daunting to a scholar as
informed as he. But presenting his ideas to anti-clerical French history
scholars, knowing that he would then in turn have to defend those same
ideas to super-clerical bishops in Rome, so exhausted him, that he had a
heart attack in 1947.
While recovering he was
awarded the rank of officer in the French Legion. He was invited to give
a series of lectures at Columbia University in New York City in 1948. He
sailed across the Atlantic, planning to do so. Upon arriving, he was
informed that the local Jesuit Superior in New York had refused to give
him permission to speak.
He was also notified to
appear in Rome to defend his theological and scientific views, which he
described as being something like “stroking the whiskers of a tiger.” He
realized that the future of his life’s work was at stake, as indeed it
was.
In Rome, after several meetings with the
Jesuit Superior General, de Chardin accepted that he would never be
allowed to publish any of his past work nor any future work for the rest
of his lifetime; furthermore, that he would not be granted permission to
accept a teaching position at the College de France.
Those who spoke with him at this time, said
it was easy to recognize the sense of frustration that enveloped him as
he groped to understand the forces, against which, he was so powerless.
But they never heard any bitterness, only his single-minded scientific
focus.
During the next two years he traveled
extensively in England, Africa and the United States; he was trying to
determine an appropriate place to live and work.
In December of 1951, he accepted a research
position with the Wenner-Gren foundation in New York. He moved in with
the Jesuit fathers at the Church of Saint Ignatius on Park Avenue in New
York City.
Three years later, he made one last visit to
France, visiting his childhood home; while there, at age 73, he applied
to the Church for permission to return to France to die at his
homestead. Permission denied. He returned to New York City and died the
following year.
de Chardin ON
EVOLUTION.
First, he
believed the whole Universe is evolving and has been from its inception.
To him, every stage of evolution is a complexification…it becomes less
simple, more complex. So, 300,000 years after the beginning, what we
call the Big Bang, came the galaxies; then the stars in those galaxies
began exploding, and out of those came the planets. Complexification on
the planets brought life.
Some 220 million
years ago, bonding in a species between the mother and its offspring
began. Until that time, bonding between mothers and offspring didn’t
exist. But the complexification that exists in evolution brought it
about, and in so doing increased the likelihood of the offspring
surviving. The same thing occurred when siblings began to bond…their
survival was much more likely…ditto for clans.
That bonding is
what we call love and it’s rooted in our evolutionary past.
Another
complexification is now occurring. In his book of earth care, Al Gore
utilized de Chardin’s writings in making this point:
It’s
seeing the
evolutionary journey of the universe
as also our journey,
and shifting from seeing ourselves as separate individuals to
identifying with the universe itself as the greater Self. It might be
called a divinization of the Universe…a forerunner of the Gaia
Hypothesis. It’s learning to love the world of which we’re a part.
APPLICATION.
From
the struggles of his life experience, beginning as a young scholar in
Paris, de
Chardin says:
n
In
the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good
people transmutes itself into some very different questions, where we no
longer ask why something happened; rather, we ask, how will we
respond…what do we intend to do now that it happened? De Chardin shook
the dust of Paris off his feet and sailed to the East, where he had some
of his greatest scientific accomplishments.
o
One of the most destructive, time-consuming and unproductive practice
we can engage in is, “What if,” and “If only….”
o
Our choice must be to make the most of this moment and its
opportunities.
o
Sometimes it takes a little tap on the head to make us realize how much
we have, even though there are those who have more. Big deal.
o
That’s where gratitude and giving thanks comes in. I was reared never to
have a meal without giving thanks. It’s not a bad habit. Sometime,
several times a day, we ought to give thanks for everything from the
breath we breathe to the earth on which we stand, and those whose breath
we exchange and Earth we share.
§
de Chardin had much he could have been bitter about, but he refused to
give in to bitterness.
n
The
most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part
of one's self to others.
o
De Chardin spent his life giving it to others, from being a priest, a
stretcher-bearer in the army, a teacher, a scholar, a paleontologist…all
of which were developing the human experience. It anchored him in the
life that he chose to live. Despite all the unreasonableness, he chose
to submit to the authority of the church, and he lived with it and was
content in it.
o
A lot of mothers have done that; a lot of spouses. It’s a great gift.
But it has to be a choice, not an imposition.
n
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual
beings having a human experience.
o
None of us is sure about this, and it’s because the spiritual is so
foreign to us. That’s one of the reasons we’re going to begin adding
more of it to the services, as something of a laboratory in spiritual
experiences.
n
Love
is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the
world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
What makes us human beings is love. Love
is a synthesis of our physical, with our spiritual, which expresses
itself in human compassion. As de Chardin taught, it roots back to our
evolutionary evolvement of bonding between mother and offspring, then
spreading to siblings, to clans, and to others beyond.
Finally, three major
transformations occur in human existence:
One, is when we cease to be totally
self-centered…we lose that core of selfishness…me and mine, us four and
no more. Many spiritual traditions
speak about transcending self-centeredness.
Two is when we
move to expressing profound care for others as being the whole point of
the spiritual path. Changing our fundamental motivations and making the
leap from fundamental self-concern to a condition in which one’s life is
based on genuine care and concern for the whole of life.
A third step is an embrace of the cosmic evolutionary journey of the
universe
as our own
and a shift from seeing ourselves as separate individuals to identifying
with the universe itself as the greater Self.
CONCLUSION.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a priest and
a member of the Order of the Society of Jesus…a world-renowned
paleontologist:
…Who was awarded the
Gregor Mendel medal for scientific accomplishments.
…Hailed as one of the
foremost geologists of the earth's terrain.
…Awarded the rank of
officer in the French Legion
…Once invited to join the
College de France and to give a prestigious lecture series at Columbia
University
…author of many important
books,
…an author whom the church
would not allow to write
…the son of a grandniece
of Voltaire.
In early April 1955,
Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said a few days before he died, “If
in my life I haven't been wrong, I beg God to allow me to die on
Easter.” On Easter Sunday April 10, 1955, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
died at 6 p.m.
The next day,
Monday, his funeral
was attended by a few friends. The ministering priest from St. Ignatius
accompanied his body some sixty miles upstate from New York City where
he was buried at St. Andrews-on-the-Hudson, then the Jesuit novitiate.
It later became the site of the Culinary Institute of America, although
the cemetery of St. Ignatius remains.
No longer do his books
remain as manuscripts…they are quoted, recognized and treasured for
their groundbreaking insight into life on this planet.
Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And
blessed be.
|
