The importance of love as the depth of all reality can be traced back to Plato who said love was the highest good and source of all goodness. For Teilhard love meant living with an attentiveness to the beauty of everything that exists. Adoration is an act of reverence for what is. Thinking, working, playing are all forms of adoration if we do them with this attentiveness to beauty.
In the desert of China Teilhard came to an awareness of this holiness in all that is. The whole of life can be offered up in a Eucharistic feast. None of this means that Teilhard was a naïve fool lost in a kind of flower power sentimentality. His being in love with life as it is did not negate the reality of suffering in the world.
Teilhard was a stretcher bearer in the war. He lost his whole family. He was silenced by the Church because of his position on Original Sin. He was exiled to New York and was buried at St. Andrew on the Hudson in anonymity, rejected by the Jesuit Order and sidelined by the Church. All this is to say be was not a naïve sentimental fool. He suffered because of love and remained in love unwilling to leave the Church that denied him because of his love for Jesus Christ.
Reflections from Ilia Delio retreat based on her new book A Hunger for
Wholeness: Soul, Space, and Transcendence.
