Thanks to my friend, Fr. Coveney, some books on and by Teilhard have come into my hands again.
The first: Letters from a Traveller is a beautiful revelation of poetry and beauty. I will share an excerpt here---
15 April, 1913
All day long we have been gliding through the Gulf of Suez
between two fantastically picturesque and desolate lands : Sinai,
a great massif of granite and slashed red sandstone, and the
Egyptian coast, at first regular and tabular and then bristling with all sorts of extraordinary peaks, all equally sharp and bare. Above them, dreamlike colours, strangely soft for a climate of such extremes. To the east, the sea seemed dark blue. Its line on the horizon was as sharp as a knife blade. And then, above this dark band, without a break, the pale pink of the mountains rose up into a misty green sky.
At sunset, it was the western coast which drew
to itself all the beauty of the evening. As the sun disappeared in a
little flutter of burning clouds, so the mountains of Egypt, until
then covered in mist, began to pass through every possible shade
of violet, from the very deepest to the most transparent mauve.
Last to be seen was a whole line of sharp points, like the teeth of
a saw, silhouetted in the golden sky. But all this magic was
nothing compared with what the mind was uncovering in these
almost unknown lands, which hardly anyone visits and to which,
perhaps for that very reason, the most mysterious phases of our
religious history are linked. I would have liked to land on those
rocky slopes, not only to test them with my hammer, but also to
learn whether I too could hear the voice of the Burning Bush.
But has not the moment passed when God speaks in the desert,
and must we not now understand that * He who is ' is not to be
heard in this place or that, for the heights where He dwells are
not inaccessible mountains but a more profound sphere of things? The secret of the world lies wherever we can discern the transparency of the universe.
The first: Letters from a Traveller is a beautiful revelation of poetry and beauty. I will share an excerpt here---
15 April, 1913
All day long we have been gliding through the Gulf of Suez
between two fantastically picturesque and desolate lands : Sinai,
a great massif of granite and slashed red sandstone, and the
Egyptian coast, at first regular and tabular and then bristling with all sorts of extraordinary peaks, all equally sharp and bare. Above them, dreamlike colours, strangely soft for a climate of such extremes. To the east, the sea seemed dark blue. Its line on the horizon was as sharp as a knife blade. And then, above this dark band, without a break, the pale pink of the mountains rose up into a misty green sky.
At sunset, it was the western coast which drew
to itself all the beauty of the evening. As the sun disappeared in a
little flutter of burning clouds, so the mountains of Egypt, until
then covered in mist, began to pass through every possible shade
of violet, from the very deepest to the most transparent mauve.
Last to be seen was a whole line of sharp points, like the teeth of
a saw, silhouetted in the golden sky. But all this magic was
nothing compared with what the mind was uncovering in these
almost unknown lands, which hardly anyone visits and to which,
perhaps for that very reason, the most mysterious phases of our
religious history are linked. I would have liked to land on those
rocky slopes, not only to test them with my hammer, but also to
learn whether I too could hear the voice of the Burning Bush.
But has not the moment passed when God speaks in the desert,
and must we not now understand that * He who is ' is not to be
heard in this place or that, for the heights where He dwells are
not inaccessible mountains but a more profound sphere of things? The secret of the world lies wherever we can discern the transparency of the universe.
The entire text can be found here:http://archive.org/details/LettersFromATraveller
