Jesuit Journeys
winter 2005

LAURA A. WEBER

“God takes what meager gifts we do have – perhaps a few fish and single loaf – and transforms them into a feast for all who hunger!”

My first encounter with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ was an accident, or so I thought. While mourning the death of my high school drama teacher, I found myself in the small library of a retreat center looking for something – anything really

– to dull the pain. After six months of shock over the sudden death of this holy layman who was my teacher and friend, I suddenly felt a crippling emptiness.

Looking for a distraction, I searched the titles on the library shelves and was intrigued by the title, The Hymn of the Universe. I turned to the section called “The Mass on the World” and was riveted by its poetic imagery and attracted even more to its vibrant spirituality. “Here was a person fully alive,” I thought, “someone on fire with love for God-in-all.”

“The Mass on the World” describes Teilhard’s (pronounced Táy-ard) experience of celebrating the Eucharist in the Gobi Desert, without bread and wine at his disposal. Lifting up to God the gifts he does have – the earth and its fruits, the sun, the stars, and the infinite universe – he calls down sacred Fire to consecrate the world and gives thanks to God for the simplicity and fecundity of the material universe. In this way, Teilhard exercises his baptismal priesthood by consecrating all things and all people of the earth as holy and beloved by God. Only then, after blessing and giving thanks, does he receive holy “Communion” with God-in-all, as he embraces all the suffering and dying of contingent existence, like Jesus. In total surrender there is self-giving love. He concludes his “Mass on the World” with a prayer of affirmation in the Lord of the universe, incarnate and eternal Mystery.

As I allowed the text to wash over me, I experienced myself lost in the revelry of poetic expression, then found again in the light of its truth. The words were a healing balm for the sad loneliness in my soul. As I read, I knew in my heart that within those pages, published after the author had died, I had discovered a kindred spirit. With my imagination reawakened and my desire for union with God aroused, I wept tears of gratitude for this Frenchman. Like his heroes – St. Paul, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and St. Francis Xavier – Teilhard had walked the Way of Jesus. The account of his desert journey made me hungry for more insight from this “mystic of sacred matter,” the man whose reverence for God-in-all had gotten him silenced, punished, and banned from publication on matters theological.

“Ah, just like Jesus,” I thought, “a radical whose primary crime was love.” The sad part is that he was entirely innocent, and badly misunderstood by his detractors. Teilhard was a man ahead of his time, committed to both science and faith in his pursuit of Truth. A brief scan of his publication record will attest to that. However, of all Teilhard’s publications, my favorite is still his

“Mass on the World.”

The main reason that the “Mass on the World” inspired my subsequent study and love of Teilhard was that it represented something I already knew through life experience to be true – that God comes to us in our lacking, and fills us beyond our capacity to receive with joy and gratitude. God takes what meager gifts we do have – perhaps a few fish and single loaf – and transforms them into a feast for all who hunger!

When I revisit my experience of first reading The Hymn of the Universe in my memory, two things stand out: first, deep gratitude; then a profound reverence for finding God in all things. I could not have known it then, but in retrospect it seems less like an accident and more like Divine Providence that Teilhard’s writings confirmed the foundational Ignatian principles that my mentor and teacher had instilled in me. These same principles still enliven and anoint my life as an Ignatian laywoman today. Whenever God visits me in my poverty, in my loss, and becomes one with my broken humanity, it is a moment of certain grace.

Profile: Quentin L. Quade, Ph.D. was executive vice-president of Marquette University from 1974-90, and above all else a serious scholar of political science who authored more than 100 articles and books over the course of a career in which he rose through the ranks to become the school’s chief operating officer. Born in Kneirim, Iowa in 1933, he served in the Air Force in the early 1950s before pursuing undergraduate studies at Creighton University and his master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Notre Dame. Quade arrived at Marquette in 1961 as an assistant professor of political science. He was dean of the graduate school (’68- ’72) and vice president for academic affairs (’72-’74) before becoming executive vice president. He was named Raynor Professor of Political Science in 1991 and director of the Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education, which was established in 1992 and named after his first mentor, school choice pioneer Fr. Virgil C. Blum, SJ. In 1998 he was named emeritus professor and emeritus executive vice president. Quade’s efficiency and capacity for work were legendary. The standing order was that his office receive the minutes of every university meeting down to the department level. He read, digested, and often responded to all of them within 24 hours. When Quade died in 1999, then Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist called him “the intellectual behind school choice.” Former Wisconsin Fr. Provincial Bert Thelen, SJ described him as “a champion of freedom.” And one colleague said, “Dr. Quade left an unmistakable trail of solid, responsible work and genuine humanitarian concern for others. He was the stuff of heroes and giants.”

I am now convinced that what I recognized some twenty years ago in Teilhard’s cosmology, anthropology, and theology was what I had seen before in my heroes, and what I recognized later on my journey through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: God’s love has transforming effects on what is lacking, what is least, and even what is loathsome. We are truly beloved sinners, all pilgrims searching for God in the macrocosm, only to discover that God finds us in the microcosm!

God works in and through dirt and blood and tears and transforms all by the healing power of love and forgiveness. The mysterious cosmos, infinite in its reaching out, is becoming more and more the sacred Body of Christ, bringing us all into union with God and all Being. In our human condition, we are bound up with the evolution of our Mother Earth, in dire need of our healing care and loving vigilance. We ourselves are being transformed into a new creation in Christ, in which the “least” and the “last” are the very marrow of God’s plan for salvation.

When we tend to our Mother Earth, and to her cycles of death and life, we are good stewards of God’s creation, nurturing the seeds of new life, tiny as they may seem. When we tend to those in pain, care for God’s children who are ailing, hungry, homeless, and dispossessed of community, we are carrying forward the mission of Jesus. We are extending the Body of Christ to the ends of the universe, transforming our world from the reign of retaliation, suffering, and death, to the reign of forgiveness, healing, and new life!

Whether exhuming human bones in the Gobi Desert or exploring the uncharted waters of the primordial longing for unity with God, Teilhard was a man on a mission. He was a man who could (and did) see God-inall. His sacramental eyesight helped him perceive God’s transformative love in the depths of the human condition and in the mysterious limitlessness of God’s stupendous creation. May God help us do the same! and in the mysterious limitlessness of God’s stupendous creation. May God help us do the same!

Laura Weber is a founding member of the Ignatian Associates and currently serves at Creighton University as director of Campus Ministry and adjunct professor of New Testament in the Theology Department.

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