Teilhard de Chardin & Ernesto Cardenale on Soul & Cosmos

We have been celebrating the vastness of soul that we all carry within us—or better, that carries all that is within us, our bodies included.  Scientist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin and poet Ernesto Cardenale, who blends Latin American history to the new creation story of the universe in his epic poem Cosmic Canticle (Cantico cosmico), speak to the reality of cosmos and expanded soul. 

Says Teilhard: 

Our own age seems primarily to need a rejuvenation of supernatural forces to be effected by driving roots deeply into the nutritious energies of the Earth. Because it is not sufficiently moved by a truly human compassion, because it is not exalted by a sufficiently passionate admiration of the universe, our religion is becoming enfeebled.*

Over sixty-five years ago, Teilhard proposed that “our religion is becoming enfeebled.” The reason being that we are too cut off from awe and wonder and a “passionate admiration of the universe.”

We are too anthropocentric, living our lives entirely in boxes and a consciousness that is too small.

What follows is that we lack a “truly human compassion,” and are cut off from our deepest roots, which derive from “the nutritious energies of the Earth.”  Only the Earth can save us from our smallness and the enfeeblement of culture that follows from that.  The Earth being a daughter of the universe, as Thomas Berry reminds us when he says “ecology is functional cosmology.” 

Teilhard elaborates on the “cosmic sense” that we all have access to when he writes:

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us…. The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as humanity found itself facing the frost, the sea and the stars. And since then we find evidence of it in all our experience of the great and unbounded: in art, in poetry, and in religion.**

Speaking of art, poetry and religion, and the “cosmic sense,” what does poet and activist priest and contemplative Ernesto Cardenale tell us about the cosmos and our own souls?  (Cardenale, who was from Nicaragua, once joined the monastery where Thomas Merton lived and Merton was his novice master.  He did not remain for a particularly long time however.) 

He says:

Nature is religious in its very essence. The star-studded firmament, for example, is one great supplication. The spirit of every landscape is a spirit of prayer, and so is the deep silence of solitary places.

The crickets and the stars speak to us of God, and what they are telling us is that they were created by God.

The entire cosmos aspires to a union with that God from whom it has gone forth. . . . . The law of love is the supreme physical and biological law of the universe and also the one and only moral law (“I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you”).***

*Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War (NY: Harper & Row 1968), p. 262

**Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 82.

***Ernesto Cardinale, To Live is To Love: Meditations on Love and Spirituality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1974), p. 88.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, # 218, 227, 334.

Banner Image: Monsoon storm producing a forked lightning bolt from the Red Hills Visitors Center at Saguaro National Park in Southern Arizona. Photo by Pete Gregoire for NOAA Weather in Focus Photo Contest 2015

Do you experience nature as” religious in its very essence”?

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