June 7, 2010: Hymn of the Universe
For my summer reading, I discovered a book in my shelf that has a copy rite of 1961. Father Chardin was and is a prophet. Having experienced a war in the desert first hand, the Gulf of Mexico death by oil, and a beautiful world of matter that is on life support; I sense our only hope is a cry to the CREATOR of the world for mercy and healing. This article might help us come up with a true solution to the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico and not another band-aid. It won’t be easy.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has been hailed as one of the 20th century’s most remarkable prophetic thinkers, an Aquinas of the atomic era” (Time Magazine). HYMN OF THE UNIVERSE is an intimate communication of his experience of God. The intensely mystical quality of the world-famed scientist and priest is present here in the form of prose poems under four headings.
I will share with you Father Chardin’s Hymn to Matter which is on pages 68-71. He wrote this in August of 1919, exactly 40 years before I was born. I will then follow this up with a prophecy of Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger at 42 years old) on a German radio program in 1969. The prophecies of both of these men have been commented on by TIME magazine. Our quest to suck the “blood” out of the earth in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico and throughout the world has consequences. We all have participated in the destruction and exploitation of our gift, Planet Earth.
HYMN TO MATTER
‘Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.
‘Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untamable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.
‘Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
‘Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.
‘Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.
‘Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists.
‘Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
‘I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you, debased, disfigured—but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature.
‘You I acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality for existence and transformation wherein the predestined substance germinates and grows.
‘I acclaim you as the universal power which brings together and unites, through which the multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they all converge on the way of the spirit.
‘I acclaim you as the melodious fountain of water whence spring the souls of men and as the limpid crystal whereof is fashioned the new Jerusalem.
‘I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as the clay moulded and infuse with life by the incarnate Word.
‘Sometimes, thinking they are responding to your irresistible appeal, men will hurl themselves for love of you into the exterior abyss of selfish pleasure-seeking: they are deceived by a reflection or by an echo.
‘this I now understand.
‘If we are ever to reach you, matter, we must, having first established contact with the totality of all that lives and moves here below, come little by little to feel that the individual shapes of all we have laid hold on are melting away in our hands, until finally we are at grips with the single essence of all subsistencies and all unions.
(I wrote the word EUCHARIST in the column of the book at this point.)
‘If we are ever to posses you, having taken you rapturously in our arms, we must then go on to sublimate you through sorrow.
‘Your realm comprises those serene heights where saints think to avoid you—but where our flesh is so transparent and so agile as to be no longer distinguishable from spirit.
‘Raise me up then, matter, to those heights, through struggle and separation and death; raise me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me in perfect chastity to embrace the universe.
Down below on the desert sands, now tranquil again, someone was weeping and calling out: ‘My Father, my Father! What wild wind can this be that has borne him away?’
And on the ground there lay a cloak.
(In the notes: There was need of that long, heroic journey through the mystical dark night, and of an exceptional development of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, before matter could become ‘diaphanous’ to Pere Teilhard’s eyes and could reveal to him within itself not only the hallowing stream which flows from the Incarnation and the Eucharist but also the radiant presence of Christ.
For an exact understanding of the Hymn to Matter, therefore, we must place it at the end of the way purgation and looking on wand up to the mountain-top where the heavenly Jerusalem shines forth.) Hymn to the Universe, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York and Evanston 1961 (1965 in English).
Beloved, we are in a world of nuclear proliferation and religious extremism, insurrectionists and the fog of war, ecological disaster and unheard of greed. The Gulf oil spill looks to be irreversible loss of the beauty of nature in an area larger than the Mediterranean Sea. I found the last paragraph of TIME magazine page 43 of June 7, 2010 both disheartening and hopeful. Although the article focused on the clergy sex-scandal, I believe that the real problem is much bigger. We are living in a world where we blame everyone else but ourselves and try to prove to others that we are victims. Jesus was the true victim and could easily prove it. However he loved the Church into existence. Jesus cried out on the cross, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!” It seems that we are stuck. How will we respond to this truly heart wrenching ecological catastrophe and endless barrage of war and war mongering for profit? We must act together as the Church of love and of the poor. We are all becoming poor of a healthy Mother Earth which is the Matter.
The final paragraph
One vision for the future echoes from the past. A conservative website is circulating a prophecy uttered by a 42-year-old Catholic theologian in 1969, amid the turmoil of that year of radicalism and barricades. The priest envisioned a post imperial papacy, shorn of wealth and pretenses of earthly power. “From today’s crisis, a church will emerge tomorrow that will have lost a great deal,” he said on German radio. “She will be small and, to a large extent, will have to start from the beginning. She will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings created in her period of great splendor. Because of the smaller number of her followers, she will lose many of her privileges in society. Contrary to what has happened until now, she will present herself much more as a community of volunteers … As a small community, she will demand much more from the initiative of each of her members and she will certainly also acknowledge new forms of ministry and will raise up to the priesthood proven Christians who have other jobs … It will make her poor and a church of the little people …All this will require time. The process will be slow and painful.” The theologian was Joseph Ratzinger. And his vision from 40 years ago may now unfold in ways he could never have imagined.
Beloved,
Have a wonderful week. Be open to the Spirit of God within you in the Eucharist.
Love, joy, peace,
Father Ron Moses +
