Tuesday, December 10, 2024
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Thy kingdom come
Comfort, comfort ye my people, says your God … If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray?
Just after watching Moana with Miles and Jasper, after they finally fell asleep in their tent in our living room, I needed to make some cranberry fluff for a Sunday School Christmas party, but instead I read about Teilhard de Chardin, who always wrote about God’s reckless love of us, his beloved children. Here is what the article’s author Eric Clayton says Teilhard said:
“The deeper I descend into myself, the more I find God at the heart of my being,” wrote the French Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “The more I multiply the links that attach me to things, the more closely does he hold me — the God who pursues in me the task, as endless as the whole sum of centuries, of the incarnation of his Son.
Now Teilhard said this very well, but I also said it a few days ago, that even if I’m doing a lousy job of sitting still with God, he hangs in there with me. “The more I multiply the links that attach me to things, the more closely does he hold me.” All of us can say this in our own way because it is true.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Her sin has been paid for, and now she has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins.
Teilhard feels God’s swift, hot pursuit, “as endless as the whole sum of centuries.” What is this pursuit? What has washed away my sin? Nothing but the love of Jesus.
O, precious is the flow.
Teilhard in his lifetime did not receive permission to publish any of his books. But he was an unsung medic and hero in the trenches of World War I, he unearthed the skeleton of a dinosaur, he named Peking Man as one of our earliest ancestors, he charmed women in New York and Paris in spite of himself, and in fact he wrote and wrote and wrote, even though the Vatican consistently declined their imprimatur. “We exhort rectors, presidents and professors to protect the minds of youth against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin.”
Over time many of his books have been copied into the digital public domain. Here are 21 of them. In The Divine Milieu Teilhard wrote of what he thought we are doing (consciously or not) in this life on this earth, an earth he considered not to be dying but rather in the process of continually being born:
By our fidelity we must build – starting with the most natural territory of our own self – a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. We make our own soul throughout all our earthly days; and at the same time we collaborate in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time narrowly determines the perspectives of our individual achievement: the completion of the world.
Teilhard was a paleontologist and a theologian; he dug into both the black dirt of the desert in China and the depths of our human understanding of heaven. Thus his perspective on evolution could not have been more comprehensive.
Later in the evening, as I listened to nearly silent breathing coming from the tent, my mind wandered through Michael De Sapio’s questions about heaven and earth. From his ever-optimistic point of view this musician and teacher wrote, “The kingdom of God promised in the Gospel is gradually seeping into our world, like fresh grass growing through a sidewalk.” N. T. Wright came up with that analogy, and Teilhard could not have agreed more.
C. S. Lewis pondered The Weight of Glory, or rather its weightlessness, which he thought is much lighter than we easily imagine:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.
Perhaps, Michael writes, we haven’t come to terms with the Resurrection, “even after 2000 years.”
Perhaps that is why we inadvertently dilute our Christianity with doses of fatalism, Stoicism, Platonism, systems of thought that imply a strict separation between the created world and an ideal world beyond.
De Sapio remembers that N. T. Wright warns us against “Platonic escapism,” a conception of heaven that is disembodied, overly abstract, and tacitly leaves out the resurrection.
As Michael’s thoughts come to a close he asks more and more questions, not seeking answers so much as delighting in the asking. Then at last he is astonished at Jesus’ words in his most famous prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The day of the Lord is near; behold, he comes to save us!
I can’t share these thoughts easily with Miles and Jasper at breakfast tomorrow, but later Margaret and I will read through them together. And I so appreciate your diligence in reading this through to the end, wondering with me along with Teilhard, Lewis, Wright, and Mr. De Sapio, how on earth Jesus might descend from heaven, and what will happen when He gets here.
And unless He comes tonight, I’ll get that cranberry fluff made tomorrow morning.
 (Isaiah 40, Psalm 96, Matthew 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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