THE DIVINE MILIEU
Pierre Teilhard deChardin
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"God whom we try to apprehend by the groping of our lives – that self-same God is as pervasive and perceptible as the atmosphere in which we are bathed. He encompasses us on all sides, like the world itself….God truly waits for us in things, unless indeed He advances to meet us."
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"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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| 3 |
"Look upon the world as maturing – not only in each individual or in each nation, but in the whole human race – a specific power of knowing and loving whose transfigured term is charity, but whose roots and elemental sap lie in the discovery and the love of everything that is true and beautiful in creation."
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"The substantial ONE and the created MANY fuse without confusion in a WHOLE."
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"Our lives, and consequently the whole of our world, are full of God."
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"Everything can be taken up again and recast in God, even one's faults."
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"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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"Every genesis presupposes inter-connections, mutual or reciprocal dependence, with no breach. It implies in the being that is forming itself a kinship between the composing elements; thus a static cosmos, fragmented in make-up, is unthinkable." Pierre Leroy, S.J., foreword
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| 9 |
"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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"Christ of glory, hidden power stirring in the heart of matter, glowing centre in which the unnumbered strands of the manifold are knit together; whose brow is of snow, whose eyes are of fire, whose feet are more dazzling than gold poured from the furnace; you whose hands hold captive the stars; you, the first and the last, the living, the dead, the re-born; you, who gather up in your superabundant oneness every delight, every taste, every energy, every phase of existence, to you my being cries out with a longing as vast as the universe: for you are indeed my Lord and my God." 'Mass Upon the Altar of the World'
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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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"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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"What is most divine in God is that, in an absolute sense, we are nothing apart from him."
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"Matter and spirit, as we know them in our universe, are not two separate substances, set side by side and differing in nature. They are two distinct aspects of one single cosmic stuff and there is between them no conflict to baffle our intelligence." Pierre Leroy, S.J., foreword
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"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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"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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"To overcome every obstacle, to unite our beings without loss of individual personality, there is a single force which nothing can replace and nothing destroy, a force which urges us forwards and draws us upwards: this is the force of love."
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"The world undergoes a sort of vast 'ontogenesis' (a vast becoming what it is) in which the development of each soul, assisted by the perceptible realities on which it depends, is but a diminished harmonic. Beneath our efforts to put spiritual form into our own lives, the world slowly accumulates, starting with the whole of matter, that which will make of it the Heavenly Jerusalem or the New Earth."
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"In the whole process which from first to last activates and directs the elements of the universe, everything forms a single whole. And we begin to see more distinctly the great sun of Christ the King, of Christ amictus mundo, of the universal Christ, rising over our interior world."
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"In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it in indebted to an inheritance worked upon from all sides – before ever it came into being – by the totality of the energies of the earth."
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"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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| 22 |
"Humanity was sleeping – it is still sleeping – imprisoned in the narrow joys of its little closed loves. A tremendous spiritual power is slumbering in the depths of our multitude, which will manifest itself when we have learnt to break down the barriers of our egoisms and, by a fundamental recasting of our outlook, raise ourselves up to the habitual and practical vision of universal realities."
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"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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"I am not speaking metaphorically when I say that it is throughout the length and breadth and depth of the world in movement that man can attain the experience and vision of his God."
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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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