We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
About 100 years ago, a young monk by the name of Pierre Teilhard was suffering from what today we call post traumatic stress disorder. Like most young men in Europe, he had been swept into the butchery of WWI. His job was to gather up the wounded and the remains of fallen soldiers—a job that left him broken. On a leave from the front, he took vows as a monk and became a Jesuit. By the end of the war, the French government was making good on its promise to take ownership of all religious properties. The Jesuits were exiled to Great Britain.Teilhard's life was not a series of ups and downs as much as a series of continuous downs. Before the war, he had studied paleontology, embracing the concept of Darwinian evolution. Now, as a Jesuit, his writings to reconcile religion with Darwin were rejected by the church. Teilhard was censured.
These painful experiences drove him inward, and he began to write about suffering and the spiritual nature of man—a theme he developed for the rest of his life. As I read about him, I kept thinking about the times we are in, with one crisis following another. Yet in spite of the pandemic, the life loss, job loss, division and loneliness, many say they too have begun to rely more heavily on their interior relationship with God.
I've noticed our men's prayer group seems to be elevated somehow through this time of separation as we meet divided from each other by computer screens. The concern for others, the challenges in our country and world seem more present and we join together in a heightened spiritual experience to lift others up through prayer.
Though we have suffered from isolation, loss, and fear, through it all, when we recognize ourselves as spirit in human form, we not only become better humans, we find we are capable of peace and are better armed against the ravages of these divided times. Jesus told Simon, "Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch." In the depths of our being—in our own personal deep water, Spirit is there.
What a catch that is,
Jim
