Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
Mid-Week Message
March 21, 2012
Fear and Faith in the Aging
Recently, I have been making a lot of visits to parishioners who are ill, some of whom are direly ill and preparing to die. Again and again, I have seen how fragile our lives are, and how dependent we are on God and others for our well-being, health, and balance. In extremis, in the depths of suffering, we often find ourselves challenged in our trust in God, but then find our trust reaffirmed when our hope in God is all that remains when everything else seems taken from us. This is a matter that Fr. Morgan Silbaugh’s Thursday Bible Study, which just finished the Book of Job and now has moved on to the Book of Qohelet (Ecclestiastes), has seen again and again in those texts.
Teilhard de Chardin was one of the great anthropologists and theologians of the early 20th century. He was one of the discoverers of the Peking Man pre-human fossils and the author of The Phenomenon of Man, one of the great progressive theological efforts to place Christian faith in the context of modern science. Teilhard died in 1955 at the Jesuit House in New York City. He died after a long degenerative dementia. When he first encountered its early signs and knew that he was going to lose the intellectual skills that he so valued, he wrote the following prayer. It expresses very well the interplay of fear and trust, of hope and faith in old age’s illness.
When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken
to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.
When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken
to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.
Peace and Grace,
Fr. Tony+
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