Friday, August 21, 2026: Teilhard de Chardin always lived by one certainty: "you can only convert what you love"

Dear Emmaus Community,

The Fall monthly Reading Circle will resume in September. We wil be reading Teilhard's essay "The Eternal Feminine" using the Lectio Divina method. 

To obtain the Zoom link please email Kathleen Duffy SSJ at kduffy@chc.edu and request to be added to the group. She will probably send a copy of the essay as well. See the schedule below. We will meet on Monday's and Wednesday's. The same content will be presented on both days. I hope to see you there.

Steve Lyman

September 21 & 16

October 12 & 14

November 16 & 18

December 7 & 9

Here's an excerpt about Teilhard de Chardin from an address delivered March 19, 2016 at Centre Sevres in Paris by Marie Bayon de la Tour, grand niece of Pierre (Father) Teilhard de Chardin

It is not that I have already taken hold of it (righteousness) or have already attained it in perfect maturity, but I continue my pursuit in hope that I may possess it, since I have indeed been taken possession of by Christ - Letter from St Paul to the Philippians 3:12

Introduction

If ever there was a delicate subject, it’s a religious man’s relationship with women. 

The life of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a charming man with an apparently free-spirited existence, is no exception to the rule.1  If he had many great female friends, we mustn’t forget that he also had many male friends who were pillars for him: Fathers Pierre Charles, Auguste Valensin, Henri de Lubac, Bruno de Solages and Pierre Leroy2, to name but a few religious, not forgetting lay friends, scientific or otherwise.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s life, work and thought are extremely coherent. As a son of Saint Ignatius (a Jesuit), he lived in the world and, “confronted” it in all its dimensions. The “feminine” is a fundamental dimension, and he never avoided or obscured it. But doesn’t he take too many risks?

Courageously, however, he sought to integrate all the dimensions of women in the Church and in his vision of the universal Christ. The usual “disposition” of a religious towards the feminine, a hundred years ago, was certainly not similar to that of today. We can follow this quest throughout his work, even if it is only explicitly expressed in three texts: “The Eternal Feminine” (1918)3, “The Evolution of Chastity” (1934)4 and the end of “Heart of Matter”, entitled “The Feminine or the Unitive”5 in 1950.

Father Teilhard never ceased to question and deepen his vision of “the feminine”, and we can follow this evolution in his writings.

The women of his childhood:

In his autobiographical essay “Heart of Matter”6, written in 1950, 5 years before his death, Pierre Teilhard himself acknowledges what his mother passed on to him, and speaks of her “radiance”7. He said of her: “Attentive, her beautiful, serious face seemed to be illuminated from within”8, a face that revealed for him a little of God’s love.  His brother Joseph wrote: “My mother knew how to meditate: apart from Pierre, Marguerite-Marie and Gabriel, her children were not nearly as capable”, and he added: “From time to time, she would bring in preachers of her choice to the old churches of Orcines or Luzillat. I especially remember Fr Matheo, a zealot for devotion to the Sacred Heart…/…. 

We know that Father Teilhard saw the Sacred Heart as the place where the conjunction of the Divine and the Cosmic is realized. 

Referring to his mother, Father Teilhard says in the same text from “Heart of Matter”: “A spark had to fall on me, to make the fire spring forth. Now, this spark by which ‘my Universe’, still only half-personalized, would complete its centering by priming itself, it was undoubtedly through my mother, from the Christian mystical current, that it illuminated and ignited my infant soul”9. 

He always loved people: family, friends, work associates. Because he loved people, he sought the best path for them. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin always lived by one certainty: you can only convert what you love. 

He wrote: “Immerse yourself in order to emerge and lift yourself up”.61  And it was with all his humanity inhabited by his vision of Christ, with his fervent prayer and all his affectivity that he committed himself to the path of friendship. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw other dimensions in women, who inspired him and helped him to broaden his vision. 

The feminine helps man to tear himself away from himself to better reach God. On October 4, 1944, he wrote in his diary: “Essentially, the Feminine is not a ballast (weight), but an upward force.” For him, this uprooting from himself must therefore be a process of growth.