On Monday evening, April 14, we wrapped up our book study of The Heart of Matter by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ.

For the last six weeks, we gathered and journeyed together with Teilhard, into his words and vision as he guided us to contemplate and reflect on how the Heart of Matter is not just within us, yet it is us, as we are called to be continually and consciously transformed, made new as we evolve to become more, to become Ultra-Human. 

Although I have been a student of Teilhard’s work for over a decade, I feel like I learn the most about his larger vision through both my own embodied experience in this human form along with the testimonies shared by the company and community I have had along the way. I’m so grateful for and hopeful because of this sense of connection and the emergent plentitude. Taking Teilhard’s words to heart, “sooner or later there will be a chain-reaction.”

“Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human. These two components are everywhere ‘in the air’; generally, however, they are not strong enough, both at the same time, to combine with one another in one and the same subject. In me, it happens by pure chance (temperament, upbringing, back-ground) that the proportion of the one to the other is correct, and the fusion of the two has been effected spontaneously – not as yet with sufficient force to spread explosively – but strong enough nevertheless to make it clear that the process is possible – and that sooner or later there will be a chain-reaction.
This is one more proof that Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.”
New York, March 1955