THE DIVINE MILIEU
Pierre Teilhard deChardin
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"It is perfectly right to exalt the role of a good intention as the necessary start and foundation of all else; - it is the golden key which unlocks our inward personal world to God's presence."
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| 2 |
"We must try to penetrate our most secret self, and examine our being from all sides. Let us try, patiently, to perceive the ocean of forces to which we are subjected and in which our growth is, as it were, steeped. This is a salutary exercise."
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| 3 |
"Will not the work itself of our minds, of our hearts, and of our hands – that is to say, our achievements, what we bring into being, our opus – will not this in some sense be 'eternalised' and saved? Indeed, Lord, it will be – by virtue of a claim which you yourself have implanted at the very centre of my will! I desire and need that it should be."
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| 4 |
"Throughout my life, by means of my life, the world has become almost completely luminous from within…Such has been my experience in contact with the earth – the diaphany of the Divine at the heart of the universe on fire….Christ; his heart; a fire: capable of penetrating everywhere and, gradually, spreading everywhere."
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| 5 |
"We always find ourselves at the exact point where the whole sum of the forces of the universe meet together to work in us the effect which God desires."
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| 6 |
"All-embracing providence shows me at each moment, by the day's events, the next step to take and the next rung to climb."
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"Grant, O God, that the light of your countenance may shine for me in the life of that 'other'….Grant that I may see you, even and above all, in the souls of my brothers, at their most personal, and most true, and most distant."
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| 8 |
"The world with all its riches, life with its astounding achievements, man with the constant prodigy of his inventive powers, all are organically integrated in one single growth and one historical process, and all share the same upward progress towards an era of fulfilment." Pierre Leroy, S.J., foreword
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| 9 |
"The more I examine myself, the more I discover this psychological truth: that no one lifts his little finger to do the smallest task unless moved, however obscurely, by the conviction that he is contributing infinitesimally (at least indirectly) to the building of something definite – that is to say, to your work, my God."
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| 10 |
"The action by which God maintains us in the field of his presence is a unitive transformation."
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"However vast the divine milieu may be, it is in reality a centre. It therefore has the properties of a centre, and above all the absolute and final power to unite (and consequently to complete) all beings within its breast."
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| 12 |
"You must let the clear spring water of purity of intention flow into your work, as if it were its very substance. Cleanse your intention, and the least of your actions will be filled with God."
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"Like a huge fire that is fed by what should normally extinguish it, or like a mighty torrent which is swelled by the very obstacles placed to stem it, so the tension engendered by the encounter between man and God dissolves, bears along and volatilises created things and makes them all, equally, serve the cause of union."
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| 14 |
"May the time come when people, having been awakened to a sense of the close bond linking all the movements of this owrld in the single, all-embracing work of the Incarnation, shall be unable to give themselves to any one of their tasks without illuminating it with the clear vision that their work – however elementary it may be – is received and put to good use by a Centre of the universe."
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| 15 |
"This is what I have learnt from my contact with the earth – the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe, the divine radiating from the depths of matter a-flame."
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| 16 |
"The day is not far distant when humanity will realise that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration."
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| 17 |
"The enrichment and ferment of religious thought in our time has undoubtedly been caused by the revelation of the size and the unity of the world all around us and within us. All around us the physical sciences are endlessly extending the abysses of time and space, and cleaselessly discerning new relationships between the elements of the universe. Within us a whole world of affinities and interrelated sympathies, as old as the human soul, is being awakened by the stimulus of these great discoveries, and what has hitherto been dreamed rather than experienced is at last taking shape and consistency. Scholarly and discriminating among serious thinkers, simple or didactic among the half-educated, the aspirations towards a vaster and more organic One, and the premonitions of unknown forces and their application in new fields, are the same, and are emerging simultaneously on all sides. It is almost a commonplace today to find people who, quote naturally and unaffectedly, live in the explicit consciousness of being an atom or a cititzen of the universe."
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"Everything can be taken up again and recast in God, even one's faults."
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"We find ourselves at every moment situated at the exact point at which the whole bundle of inward and outward forces of the world converge providentially upon us, that is to say at the one point where the divine milieu can, at a given moment, be made real for us."
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| 20 |
"No object can influence us by its essence without our being touched by the radiance of the focus of the universe…..In the divine milieu all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them."
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| 21 |
"Your essential duty and desire is to be united with God. But in order to be united, you must first of all Be – be yourself as completely as possible."
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| 22 |
"Give me the strength to rise above the remaining illusions which tend to make me think of Your touch as circumscribed and momentary."
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"Yes, the human layer of the earth is wholly and continuously under the organising influx of the incarnate Christ."
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"Everything yields up the portion of positive energy contained within its nature so as to contribute to the richness of the divine milieu."
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| 25 |
"God, in all that is most living and incarnate in him, is not far away from us, altogether apart from the world we see, touch, hear, smell and taste about us. Rather he awaits us every instant in our action, in the work of the moment. There is a sense in which he is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle – of my heart and of my thought. By pressing the stroke, the line, or the stitch, on which I am engaged, to its ultimate natural finish, I shall lay hold of that last end towards which my innermost will tends."
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