What is the connection between The Beatles and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? Strange as it may seem whilst reflecting on the Sunday Gospel reading, Matthew 22:34-40, the Greatest Commandment I realised the Liverpool poet and the theologian and mystic ponder the human desire for deep peace and a love which describes the essence of the sacredness of humanity. They both proclaim all you need is love, Love is all you need!
Teresa White FCJ in her article, Love only Love, expressed the core Christan teaching in a most elegant way. I thought it worth sharing an extract with you.
. . . Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, mystic, theologian and scientist, kept a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on his desk. Believing that God dwells at the heart of existence, Teilhard sees Jesus, God in human form, as God’s love made manifest. He believed that God’s intimate presence, love, burning in ‘the heart of God’, embraces the whole of creation, and this means that all of matter and all of life is touched by the divine. ‘Love alone,’ he wrote, ‘is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.’ His point is that all the sentient creatures of the earth instinctively seek unity, and it is the energy of love that propels them towards it. Teilhard is highlighting here the relational character of all reality, and hence the key importance of love in the life of the cosmos and in our own lives. Each act of love, he held, no matter how small or hidden, moves all of reality closer to full union. His deepest desire was that we humans, by the way we live, should ‘harness for God the energies of love’ and in doing so, discover healing and wholeness. For Teilhard, love is quite literally what makes the world go round, and a universal love is not only humanly possible, but is the only true expression of love. Through love, the world must be transformed, and that is what Jesus came to do. Interestingly, in 1881, the year of Teilhard’s birth, Gerard Manley Hopkins said something very similar in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges: ‘All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and, if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him’. These words of the poet find an echo in The Phenomenon of Man, where Teilhard writes: ‘Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being’. . .
As I listen to the local and international news today, I pray we be inspired by the simple sentiment from the lads from Liverpool or the eloquent words of de Chardin, ‘Love alone, is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.’
by Virginia Ryan