object:1.02 - Fire over the Earth
book class:Hymn of the Universe
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
class:chapter
Fire over the Earth
Fire, the source of being: we cling so tenaciously to
the illusion that fire comes forth from the depths of
the earth and that its flames grow progressively
>'.....„.. .
14 Hymn of the Universe
brighter as it pours along the radiant furrows of
life's tillage. Lord, in your mercy you gave me to
see that this idea is false, and that I must overthrow
it if I were ever to have sight of you.
In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving,
energizing. In the beginning was the Word, su-
premely capable of mastering and molding what-
ever might come into being in the world of matter.
In the beginning there were not coldness and dark-
ness: there was the Fire. This is the truth.
So, far from light emerging gradually out of the
womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing be-
fore all else was made which, patiently, surely,
eliminates our darkness. As for us creatures, of our-
selves we are but emptiness and obscurity. But you,
my God, are the inmost depths, the stability of that
eternal milieu, without duration or space, in which
our cosmos emerges gradually into being and
grows gradually to its final completeness, as it loses
those boundaries which to our eyes seem so im-
mense. Everything is being; everywhere there is
being and nothing but being, save in the fragmen-
tation of creatures and the clash of their atoms.
Blazing Spirit, Fire, personal, super-substantial,
the consummation of a union so immeasurably
more lovely and more desirable than that destruc-
tive fusion of which all the pantheists dream: be
pleased yet once again to come down and breathe
a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter
with which this day the world is to be freshly
clothed.
I know we cannot forestall, still less dictate to
The Mass on the World 15
you, even the smallest of your actions; from you
alone comes all initiative— and this applies in the
first place to my prayer.
Radiant Word, blazing Power, you who mold the
manifold so as to breathe your life into it; I pray
you, lay on us those your hands — powerful, consid-
erate, omnipresent, those hands which do not (like
our human hands) touch now here, now there, but
which plunge into the depths and the totality, pres-
ent and past, of things so as to reach us simultane-
ously through all that is most immense and most in-
ward within us and around us.
May the might of those invincible hands direct
and transfigure for the great world you have in
mind that earthly travail which I have gathered
into my heart and now offer you in its entirety.
Remold it, rectify it, recast it down to the depths
from whence it springs. You know how your crea-
tures can come into being only, like shoot from
stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of ev-
olution.
Do you now therefore, speaking through my lips,
pronounce over this earthly travail your twofold
efficacious word: the word without which all that
our wisdom and our experience have built up must
totter and crumble— the word through which all
our most far-reaching speculations and our encoun-
ter with the universe are come together into a
unity. Over every living thing which is to spring
up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say
again the words: This is my Body. And over every
death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to
16 Hymn of the Universe ."
wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding
words which express the suprenie mystery of faith:
This is my Blood.*
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