The Heart of Teilhard de Chardin's Spirituality

The following excerpt comes from the Introduction of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin written by Ursula King.

[Teilhard] was a man of extraordinary passion and sensitivity who combined a unity of heart and mind which is rare. His deepest desire was to see the essence of things, to find their heart and probe into the mystery of life, its origin and goal. In the rhythm of life and its evolution, at the center of the cosmos and the world, he saw a divine center, a living heart beating with the fiery energy of love and compassion. The heart is really a fleshly reality, but the image of this very flesh, this concentration of living, breathing matter, came to symbolize for Teilhard the very core of the spirit. The incarnation of God in the world was very real for him, tangible and concrete, understood and expressed with such a strong realism that it can be startling. It can shock us into an awareness whereby the narrow boundaries and constraints of common sense experience melt away in an intensity of perception and feeling that is linked to the palpable disclosure of the divine within and around us. Teilhard de Chardin is truly one of the least well known and most ignored Christian spiritual writers of the present age who, with a great visionary vigor, foresaw many of the material and spiritual issues that have to be addressed in the new twenty-first century.

...Teilhard's incarnate spirituality of divinized matter and flesh, of the sacramental offering up of the whole world with all its toil and pain to God, is the very basis for holding together all the elements of his worldview, so that there exists a mutual interdependence between his spirituality and his approach to life in the universe. His universal, dynamic vision of the world, and of human beings in it, draws out the best of Christianity. It also creatively welds together science, religion, and mysticism in one unifying synthesis. It is a deeply sacramental vision suffused with great reverence and love for life.