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object:4.03 - The Meaning of Human Endeavor
book class:Hymn of the Universe
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
class:chapter



THE MEANING OF
HUMAN ENDEAVOR

40

The aspect of life which most stirs my soul is the
ability tp share in an undertaking, in a reality, more
enduring than myself: it is in this spirit and with
this purpose in view that I try to perfect myself
and to mastef things a little more. When death lays
its hand upon me it will leave intact these things,
these ideas, these realities which are more solid and
more precious than I; moreover, my faith in Provi-
dence makes me believe that death comes at its
own fixed moment, a moment of mysterious and
special fruitfulness not only for the supernatural
destiny of the soul but also for the further progress
of the earth. Why then should I be afraid or filled
with grief, if the essential thing in my life remains
untouched, if the pattern will not be broken off but
will be extended further without any harmful inter-
ruption of continuity? The realities of faith cannot
give us the same feeling of solidity as those of expe-

* "To leave nothing unattempted."



116 Hymn of the Universe

rience; hence, inevitably and providentially, when
we have to leave these for those we feel terrified
and bewildered: but that is the very moment at
which we must ensure the triumph of adoration
and trust and the joy of being part of a totality
greater than ourselves.

41

In the lowliness of fear and the thrill of danger we
carry on the work of completing fcn element which
the mystical body of Christ can draw only from us.
Thus to our peace is added the exaltation of creat-
ing, perilously, an eternal work which will not exist
without us. Our trust in God is quickened and
made firmer by the passionate eagerness of man to
conquer the earth.

42

It would be surprising to find, in a bouquet, flowers
which were ill-formed of sickly, since these flowers
are picked one by one and artificially grouped to-
gether in a bunch. But on a tree which has had to
struggle against inner accidents of its own develop-
ment and external accidents of climate, the broken
branches, the torn leaves, and the dried or sickly or
wilted blossoms have their place: they reveal tons
the greater or lesser difficulties encountered by the
tree itself in its growth.

Similarly in a universe where each creature
formed a little enclosed unit, designed simply for
its own sake and theoretically transposable at will,



PensSes 117

we should find some difficulty in justifying in our
own minds the presence of individuals whose po-
tentialities and upward-soaring drives had been
painfully impeded. Why this gratuitous inequality,
these gratuitous frustrations?

If on the other hand the world is in truth a bat-
tlefield whereon victory is in the making— and if
we are in truth thrown at birth into the thick of the
battle — then we can at least vaguely see how, for
the success of this universal struggle in which we
are both fighters and the issue at stake, there must
inevitably be suffering. Seen from the viewpoint of
our human experience and drawn to our human
scale, the world appears as an immense groping in
the dark, an immense searching, an immense on-
slaught, wherein there can be no advance save at
the cost of many setbacks and many wounds. Those
who suffer, whatever form their suffering may take,
are a living statement of this austere but noble con-
dition: they are simply paying for the advance and
tiie victory of all. They are the men who have
fallen on the battlefield.



43

Then it is really true, Lord? By helping on the
spread of science and freedom I can increase the
density of the divine atmosphere, in itself as well as
for me, that atmosphere in which it is always my
one desire to be immersed. By laying hold on the
earth I enable myself to cling closely to you.

May the kingdom of matter, then, under our
scrutinies and our manipulations, surrender to us



118 Hymn of the Universe

the secrets of its texture, its movements, its history.

May the world's energies, mastered by us, bow
down before us and accept the yoke of our power.

May the race of men, grown to fuller conscious-
ness and greater strength, become grouped into
rich and happy organisms in which life shall be put
to better use and bring in a hundredfold return.

May the universe offer to our gaze the symbols
and the forms of all harmony and all beauty.

I must search: and I must find.

What is at stake, Lord, is the element wherein
you will to dwell here on earth.

What is at stake is your existence amongst us.

44

Let us just consider whether we might not be able
to escape from the anxiety into which the danger-
ous power of thought is now plunging us — simply
by improving our thinking still more. And to do
this let us begin by climbing up till we tower over
the trees which now hide the forest from us; in
other words let us forget for a moment the details
of the economic crises, the political tensions, the
class struggles which block out our horizon, and let
us climb high enough to gain an inclusive and im-
partial view of the whole process of hominization*

* Hominlzation is Pere Teilhard's term for what Sir Julian
Huxley has called "progressive psychosocial evolution," i.e.,
the process whereby mankind's potentialities are more and
more fully realized in the world, and all the forces con-
tained in the animal world are progressively spiritualized in
human civilization. (Tr. note.)



Penstes 119

as it has advanced during the last fifty or sixty
years.

From this vantage point what do we first notice?
And if some observer were to come tons from one
of the stars what would he chiefly notice?

Without question, two major phenomena:

the first, that in the course of half a century tech-
nology has advanced with incredible rapidity, an
advance not just of scattered, localized technical
developments but of a real geotechnology which
spreads out the close- woven network of its interde-
pendent enterprises over the totality of the earth;

the second, that in the same period, at the same
pace and on the same scale of planetary coopera-
tion and achievement, science has transformed in
every direction — from the infinitesimal to the im-
mense and to the immensely complex — our com-
mon vision of the world and our common power of
action.



45

Lord, what is there in suffering that commits me so
deeply to you?

Why should my wings flutter more joyfully than
before when you stretch out nets to imprison me?

It is because, among your gifts, what I hanker
after is the fragrance of your power over me and
the touch of your hand upon me. For what exhila-
rates us human creatures more than freedom, more
than the glory of achievement, is the joy of finding
and surrendering to a Beauty greater than man, the
rapture of being possessed.



120 Hymn of the Universe

Blessed then be the disappointments which
snatch the cup from our lips; blessed be the chaiiis
which force us to go where we would not

Blessed be relentless time and the unending
thraldom in which it holds us: the inexorable bond-
age of time that goes too slowly and frets our impa-
tience, of time that goes too quickly and ages us, of
time that never stops, and never returns.

Blessed, above all, be death and the horror of
falling back through death into the cosmic forces.
At the moment of its coming a power as strong as
the universe pounces upon our bodies to grind
them to dust and dissolve them, and an attraction
more tremendous than any material tension draws
our unresisting souls towards their proper center.
Death causes us to lose our footing completely in
ourselves so as to deliver us over to the powers of
heaven and earth. This is its final terror — but it is
also, for the mystic, the climax of his bliss.

God's creative power does not in fact fashion us
as though out of soft clay: it is a fire that kindles
life in whatever it touches, a quickening spirit.
Therefore it is during our lifetime that we must de-
cisively adapt ourselves to it, model ourselves upon
it, identify ourselves with it. The mystic is given at
times a keen, obsessive insight into this situation.
And anyone who has this insight, and who loves,
will feel within himself a fever of active depend-
ence and of arduous purity seizing upon him and
driving him on to an absolute integrity and the
complete utilization of all his powers.

In order to become perfectly resonant to the
pulsations of the basic rhythm of reality the mystic



PensSes 121

makes himself docile to the least hint of human ob-
ligation, the most unobtrusive demands of grace.

To win for himself a little more of the creative
energy, he tirelessly develops his thought, dilates
his heart, intensifies his external activity. For cre-
ated beings must work if they would be yet further
created.

And finally, that no blemish may separate him,
by so much as a single atom of himself, from the es-
sential limpidity, he labors unceasingly to purify
Jiis affections and to remove even the very faintest
opacities which might cloud or impede the light.

46

Where human holiness offers itself as a means to
his ends, God is not content to send forth in greater
intensity his creative influence, the child of his
power: he himself comes down into his work to
consolidate its unification. He told us this, he and
no other. The more the soul's desires are concen-
trated on him, the more he will flood into them,
penetrate their depths and draw them into his own
irresistible simplicity. Between those who love one
another with true charity he appears — he is, as it
were, born — as a substantial bond of their love.

It is God himself who rises up in the heart of this
simplified world. And the organic form of the uni-
verse thus divinized is Christ Jesus, who, through
the magnetism of his love and the effective power
of his Eucharist, gradually gathers into himself all
the unitive energy scattered through his creation.

Christ consumes with his glance my entire being.



122 Hymn of the Universe

And with that same glance, that same presence, he
enters into those who are around me and whom
I love. Thanks to him therefore I am united with
them, as in a divine milieu, through their inmost
selves, and I can act upon them with all the re-
sources of my being.

Christ binds us and reveals us to one another.

What my lips fail to convey to my brother or my
sister he will tell them better than I. What my heart
desires for them with anxious, helpless ardor he
will grant them if it be good. What men cannot
hear because of the feebleness of my voice, what
they shut their ears against so as not to hear it, this
I can confide to Christ who will one day tell it
again, to their hearts. And if all this is so I can in-
deed die with my ideal, I can be buried with the vi-
sion I wanted to share with others. Christ gathers
up for the life of tomorrow our stifled ambitions,
our inadequate understandings, our uncompleted
or clumsy but sincere endeavors. Nunc dimittis,
Domine, servum tuum in pace. . . .*

It happens sometimes that a man who is pure of
heart will discern in himself, besides the happiness
which brings peace to his own individual desires
and affections, a quite special joy, springing from a
source outside himself, which enfolds him in an im-
measurable sense of weUrbeing. This is the flowing
back into his own diminutive personality of the
new glow of health which Christ through his incar-
nation has infused into humanity as a whole: in

*"Now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord, in peace."
(Luke 2.29.)



PensSes 123

him, souls are gladdened with a feeling of warmth,
for now they can live in communion with one an-
other. . . ,

But if they are to share in this joy and this vision
they must first of all have had the courage to break
through the narrow confines of their individuality,
cease to be egocentric and become Christocentric.

For this is Christ's law, and it is categorical: Si
quis vult post me venire, abneget semetipsum*

Purity is a basic condition of this self-re-
nouncement and mortification.

And charity much more so.

Once a man has resolved to live generously in
love with God and his fellow-men, he realizes that
so far he has achieved nothing by the generous re-
nunciations he has made in order to perfect his own
inner unity. This unity in its turn must, if it is to be
born anew in Christ, suffer an eclipse which will
seem to annihilate it. For in truth those will be
saved who dare to set the center of their being out-
side themselves, who dare to love Another more
than themselves, and in some sense become this
Other: which is to say, who dare to pass through
death to find life. Si quis vult animam suam salvam
facere, perdet earn. * ?

Clearly, the believer knows that at the price of
this sacrifice he is gaining a unity greatly superior
to that which he has abandoned. But who can tell

* "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself."
(Matt. 16.24.)

** "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; for he that
shall lose his life for my sake, shall save it." (Luke 9.24.)



124 Hymn of the Universe

the anguish of this metamorphosis? Between the
moment when he consents to dissolve his inferior
unity and that other, rapturous moment when he
arrives at the threshold of his new existence, the
real Christian feels himself to be hovering over an
abyss of disintegration and annihilation. The salva-
tion of the soul must be bought at the price of a
great risk incurred and accepted: we Jiave, without
reservation, to stake earth against heaven; we have
to give up the secure and tangible unity of the ego-
centric life and risk everything on God. "If the
grain of wheat does not fall into the ground and
die, it remains just a grain/'

Therefore when a man is burdened with sorrow,
when he falls ill, when he dies, none of those
around him can say with certainty whether his
being is thereby diminished or increased. For
under exactly the same appearances the two oppo-
site principles draw to themselves their faithful,
leading them either to simplicity or to multiplicity:
the two principles which are God and Nothing-



47

Egoism, whether personal or racial, has good rea-
son to be thrilled at the idea of an individual ele-
ment ascending, through its fidelity to life, to the
uttermost development of all that is unique and in-

* <
position" writes the author elsewhere, of this antipode of
God, (Ed. note.)



PensSes 125

communicable within itself. Its instinct therefore is
correct Its only mistake, but one which causes it to
aim in exactly the wrong direction, is to confuse in-
dividuality with personality. By trying to separate
itself as far as possible from others, the element in-
dividualizes itself; but in so doing it falls back, and
tries to drag the world back into plurality and ma-
teriality. In point of fact therefore it dwindles away
and is lost. If we are to be fully ourselves we must
advance in the opposite direction, towards a con-
vergence with all other beings, towards a union
with what is other than ourselves. The perfection of
our own being, the full achievement of what is
unique in each one of us, lies not in our individual-
ity but in our personality; and because of the evo-
lutionary structure of the world we can find that
personality only in union with others. There can be
no mind without synthesis; and this same law holds
good everywhere in created reality, from top to
bottom. The true self grows in inverse proportion
to the growth of egoism. The element becomes per-
sonal only in so far as (in imitation of that Omega
point which draws it onwards) it becomes univer-
sal

But there is an obvious and essential proviso to
be made. It follows from the foregoing analysis that
if the human particles are to become truly person-
alized under the creative influence of union it is not
enough for them to be joined together no matter
how. Since what is in question is the achieving of a
synthesis of centers it must be center to center and
in no other way that they establish contact with
one another. Amongst the various forms of psychic



126 Hymn of the Universe

interaction which animate the noosphere, therefore,
it is the "intercentric" energies that we have above
all to identify, to harness and to develop if we
would make an effective contribution to the prog-
ress of evolution within ourselves.

In other words, the problem to which all this
leads us is the problem of love.

48

The sacramental bread is made out of grains of
wheat which have been pressed out and ground in
the mill; and the dough has been slowly kneaded.
Your hands, Lord Jesus, have broken the bread be-
fore they hallow it. • . .

Who shall describe, Lord, the violence suffered,
by the universe from the monent it falls under your
sway?

Christ is the goad that urges creatures along the
road of effort, of elevation, of development.

He is the sword that mercilessly cuts away such
of the body's members as are unworthy or decayed.

He is that mightier life which inexorably brings
death to our base egoism so as to draw into itself
all our capacities for loving.

That Christ may enter deeply into us we need al-
ternatively the work that dilates the heart and the
sorrow that brings death to it, the life that enlarges
a man in order that he may be sanctifiable and the
death that diminishes him in order that he may be
sanctified.

The universe splits in two, it suffers a painful
cleavage at the heart of each of its monads, as the



PensSes 127

flesh of Christ is born and grows. like the work of
creation which it redeems Mid surpasses, the Incar-
nation, so desired of man, is an awe-inspiring work:
it is achieved through blood.

May the blood of the Lord Jesus — the blood
which is infused into creatures and the blood which
is shed and spread out over all, the blood of en-
deavor and the blood of renouncement-— mingle
with the pain of the world.

Hie est calix sanguinis rnei* . . .*

49

To be pure of heart means to love God above all
things and at the same time to see him everywhere
in all things. The just man, whether he is rising
above and beyond all creatures to an almost imme-
diate awareness of Godhead or throwing himself
upon the world — as it is every man's duty to do — to
conquer it and bring it to perfection, will have eyes
only for God. For him, objects have lost their sur-
face multiplicity: in each of them, according to the
measure of its own particular qualities and possibil-
ities, God may truly be laid hold on. The pure
heart is of its nature privileged to move within an
immense and superior unity. Who then could fail to
see that the effect of this contact with God must be
to unify it to the inmost core of its being; and who
could fail to divine the inestimable aid that life in
its progress will henceforth derive from the Word?
While the sinner, by abandoning himself to his

• This is the chalice of my blood. . . 7*



128 Hymn of the Universe

appetites, brings about a dispersal and disintegra-
tion of his spirit, the saint, by an inverse process,
escapes from the complexities of affection and in so
doing he immaterializes himself. For him, Cod is
everything and everything is God, and Christ is at
once God and everything. On such an object,
which comprises in its simplicity — for the eyes, the
heart, the spirit— all the truth and all the beauties
of heaven and earth, the soul's faculties converge,
touch, are welded together in the flame of a single
act which is indistinguishably both vision and love.
Thus the activity proper to purity (in scholastic
terms, its formal effect) is the unification of the
inner powers of the soul in a single act of appeti-
tion of extraordinary richness and intensity. In fine,
the pure heart is the heart which, surmounting the
multiple and disruptive pull of created things,
fortifies its unity (which is to say, matures its spirit-
uality) in the fire of the divine simplicity.

What purity effects in the individual, charity
brings about toithin the community of souls. One
cannot but be surprised (when one looks at it with
a mind not dulled by habit) at the extraordinary
care taken by Christ to urge upon men the impor-
tance of loving one another. Mutual love is the
Masters new commandment, the distinguishing
mark of his disciples, the sure sign of predestina-
tion, the principal work to be achieved in all
human existence. In the end we shall be judged
on love, by love we shall be condemned or justi-
fied. • e o



Pensies 129



50



We make bold to boast of our age as an age of sci-
ence. And to a certain extent welre justified, if we
are thinking simply in terms of* the dawn as op-
posed to the night which preceded it Thanks to
our discoveries and our methods of research, some-
thing of enormous import has been born in the uni-
verse, something which I am convinced will now
never be stopped. But while we exalt research and
profit by it, with what pettiness of mind, what pal-
try means, what disorderly methods, do we still
today pursue our researches!

Have we ever given serious thought to out sorry
predicament?

Like art, and one might almost say like thought
itself, science seemed at its birth to be but superflu-
ity and fantasy, the product of an exuberant
overflow of inward activity beyond the sphere of
the material necessities of life, the fruit of the curi-
osity of dreamers and idlers. Then, little by little, it
achieved an importance and an effectiveness which
earned for it the freedom of the city. We who live
in a world which it can truly be said to have revo-
lutionized acknowledge its social significance and
sometimes even make it the object of a cult Never-
theless we still leave it to grow as best it can,
hardly tending it at all, like those wild plants
whose fruits are plucked by primitive peoples in
their forests.



130 Hymn of the Universe

51

Given a really deep, insight into the concept of col-
lectivity, we are t>ound, I think, to understand the
term without any Attenuation of meaning, and cer-
tainly as no mere metaphor, when we apply it to
the sum of all human beings. The immensity of the
universe is necessarily homogeneous both in its na-
ture and in its dimensions. Would it still be so if
the loops of its spiral were to lose any slightest de-
gree of reality or consistence as they mount higher
and higher? The as yet unnamed reality which the
gradual combination of individuals, of peoples, of
races, will eventually bring into existence in the
world must, if it is to be coherent with the rest of
reality, be not infraphysical hut supraphysical.
Deeper than the common act of vision in which it
expresses itself, and more important than the
common power of action from which it emerges by
a sort of autogenesis, there is the reality itself to
which we must look forward, the reality constituted
by the vital union of all the particles endowed with
reflective consciousness.

To say this is simply to say (what is indeed prob-
able enough) that the stuff of the universe does not
achieve its full evolutionary cycle when it achieves
consciousness, and that we are therefore moving on
towards some new critical point. In spite of its or-
ganic connecting-links, the existence of which is ev-
erywhere apparent to us, the biosphere still formed
no more than an assemblage of divergent lines, free
at their extremities. Then, thanks to reflective



PensSes 131

thought and the recoils it involves, the lines con-
verge and the loose ends meet: the noosphere be-
comes a single closed system in ^yhich each element
individually sees, feels, desires' and suffers the same
things as all the rest together wSh them.

Thus we have a harmonized collectivity of con-
sciousnesses which together make up a sort of su-
perconsciousness; the earth not merely covered by
myriads of grains of thought but enclosed in one
single enveloping consciousness so that it forms,
functionally, a single vast grain of thought on a si-
dereal scale of immensity, the plurality of individ-
ual acts of reflective consciousness coming together
and reinforcing one another in a single unani-
mous act.

Such is the general form in which, by analogy
and in symmetry with the past, we are led scientifi-
cally to envisage that humanity of the future in
which alone the terrestrial drives implicit in our ac-
tivity can find a terrestrial fulfillment.

52

You know, my God, that I can now scarcely discern
in the world the lineaments of its multiplicity; for
when I gaze at it I see it chiefly as a limitless reser-
voir in which the two contrary energies of joy and
suffering are accumulating in vast quantities — and
for the most part lying unused.

And I see how through this restless, wavering
mass there pass powerful psychic currents made up
of souls who are carried away by a passion for art,



132 Hymn of the Universe

for love, for science and the mastery of the uni-
verse, for the autonomy of the individual, for the
freedom of mankind..

From time to tii^e. these currents collide one with
another in formidable crises which cause them to
seethe and foam in their efforts to establish their
equilibrium.

What glory it were for you, my God, and what
an affluence of life to your humanity, could all this
spiritual power be harmonized in youl

Lord, to see drawn from so much wealth, lying
unused or put to base uses, all the dynamism that is
locked up within it: this is my dream. And to share
in bringing this about: this is the work to which I
would dedicate myself .

As far as I can, because 1 am a priest, I would
henceforth be the first to become aware of what the
world loves, pursues, suffers. I would be the first to
seek, to sympathize, to toil; the first in self-
fulfillment, the first in self-denial. For the sake of
the world I would be more widely human in my
sympathies and more nobly terrestrial in my ambi-
tions than any of the world's servants.

On the one hand I want to plunge into the midst
of created things and, mingling with them, seize
hold upon and disengage from them all that they
contain of life eternal, down to the very last frag-
ment, so that nothing may be lost; and on the other
hand I want, by practicing the counsels of perfec-
tion, to salvage through their self-denials all the
heavenly fire imprisoned within the three-fold con-
cupiscence of the flesh, of avarice, of pride: in
other words to hallow, through chastity, poverty



PensSes 133

and obedience, the power enclosed in love, in gold,
in independence.

That is why I have clothed 1 my vows and my
priesthood (and it is this that gives me my strength
and my happiness) in a detefinination to accept
and to divinize the powers of the earth.

53

Show all your faithful followers, Lord, in how real
and complete a sense opera sequuntur illos, their
works follow after them into your kingdom. Other-
wise they will be like indolent workmen who find
no spin: to action in a task to be achieved; or else, if
a healthy human instinct overrides their hesitancies
or the fallacies they derive from a misunder-
standing of religion, they will still be a prey to a
fundamental division and frustration within them-
selves, and it will be said that the sons of heaven
cannot, on the human level, compete with true con-
viction and therefore on equal terms with the chil-
dren of this world,



54

In the Christian vision, the great triumph of the
Creator and Redeemer is to have transformed into
an essential agent of life bestowal what in itself is a
universal power of diminishment and extinction. If
God is definitively to enter into us, he must in some
way hollow us out, empty us, so as to make room
for himself. And if we are to be assimilated into
him, he must first break down the molecules of our



134 Hymn of the Universe

being so as to recast and remold us. It is the func-
tion of death to make the necessary opening into
our inmost selves. Death brings about in us the re-
quired dissociation; death puts us into that state
which is organically necessary if the divine fire is to
descend upon us. And thus its baneful power to
bring about decomposition and dissolution is har-
nessed to the most sublime of life's activities. What
was of its nature void, empty, a regression into plu-
rality, can now in every human being become plen-
itude and unity in God.

55

The (Hvinizing of our efforts through the value of
the intention we put into them infuses into all our
actions a soul of great price, but it does not confer
on their bodies the hope of resurrection. Yet that
hope is a necessity if our joy is to be complete.
True, it is no small thing to be able to reflect that, if
we love God, something of our inner activity, our
operatio, will never perish. But what of the results
of that activity, the products of our minds and
hearts and hands, our achievements, our opus: shall
not these too be in some way preserved, "eternal-
ized"?

Indeed, Lord, yes, it will be so, in virtue of a
claim which you yourself have implanted in the
depths of my will. I want it to be so, I need that it
should be so.

I want it because I cannot help loving all that
your constant help enables me each day to bring
into being. A thought, a harmony, the achievement



PensSes 135

of a perfection in materiaL things, some special
nuance in human love, the exquisite complexity of
a smile or a glance, every new embodiment of
beauty appearing in me or around me on the
human face of the earth: I cherish them all like
children whose flesh I cannot believe destined to
complete extinction. If I believed that these things
were to perish for ever, would I have given them
life? The deeper I look into myself the more clearly
I become aware of this psychological truth: that no
mm would lift his little finger to attempt the small-
est task unless he were spurred on by a more or less
obscure conviction that in some infinitesimally tiny
way he is contributing, at least indirectly, to the
building up of something permanent — in other
words, to your own work, Lord.

56

But, once again, we must tell ourselves: "In truth I
say to you: only the daring can enter the kingdom
of God, hidden henceforth in the heart of the
world"

It is of no use to read these pages, or other simi-
lar pages written twenty centuries ago, merely with
one's eyes. Anyone who, without having put his
hand to the plough, thinks he has mastered them is
deluding himself. We must try to live them.

If we would form an idea of the active power of
faith and of what it achieves we must have strug-
gled long and patiently: we must, in view of the
practical uncertainty of the morrow, have thrown
ourselves, in a true act of inward submission, upon



136 Hymn of the Universe

Providence considered as being as physically real
as the objects of our disquietude; we must, in our
suffering of the ills we have incurred, our remorse
for sins we have committed, our vexation over the
opportunities we have missed, have forced our-
selves to believe unhesitatingly that God is power-
ful enough to turn each and every particular evil
into good; we must, despite appearances to the
contrary, have acted without reservation as though
chastity, humility, gentleness were the only direc-
tions in which our being could make progress; we
must, in the penumbra of death, have forced our-
selves not to look back to the past but to seek in
utter darkness the love of God.

Only he who has fought bravely and been victo-
rious in the struggle against the spurious security
and strength and attraction of the past can attain to
the firm and blissful experiential certainty that the
more we lose all foothold in the darkness and insta-
bility of the future, the more deeply we penetrate
into God.



57

No, Lord, you do not ask of me anything that is
false or beyond my power to achieve. Through
your self-revealing and the power of your grace
you simply compel what is most human in us to
become at long last aware of itself. Humanity has
been sleeping — and still sleeps — lulled within the
narrowly confining joys of its little closed loves. In
the depths of the human multitude there slumbers
an immense spiritual power which will manifest it-



PensSes 137

self only when we have learned how to 'break
through the dividing walls of our egoism and raise
ourselves up to an entirely new perspective* so that
habitually and in a practical fashion we fix our gaze
on the universal realities.

Lord Jesus, you who are the Savior of our human
activity because you bring us a motive for acting,
and the Savior of our human pain because you
endow it with a life-giving value: be also the Savior
of our human unity by compelling us to repudiate
all our pettiness and, relying on you, to venture
forth on to the uncharted ocean of charity.




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