Matter Matters

Web Posted: June 30, 2003

The lush summer season provides us ample opportunity to reflect on the beauty of creation. Consider starting your week by pausing to read "Hymn to Matter" by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Hymn to Matter

Blessed be you, harsh matter,
barren soil, stubborn rock;
you who yield only to violence:
you who force us to work if we would eat.

Blessed be you, perilous matter,
violent sea, untameable passion:
you, who unless we fetter you, will devour us.

Blessed be you, mighty matter,
irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born;
you who by constantly shattering our mental categories,
force us to go ever further in our pursuit of truth.

Blessed be you, universal matter,
Immeasurable time, boundless other,
abyss of stars and atoms and generations;
you, who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow
standards of measurement,
reveal to us the dimensions of God.

I acclaim you as the melodious fountain of water
from whom springs the souls of all people,
and limpid crystal,
whereof is fashioned the new Jerusalem.

I acclaim you as the divine milieu,
charged with creative power,
as the ocean stirred by the spirit,
as the clay molded and infused with life by the incarnate word.

Your realm comprises those supreme heights
where saints think to avoid you---
but where your flesh is so transparent and so agile
as to be no longer distinguishable from spirit.

Raise me up then, matter,
to those heights through the struggle and separation
and death;
raise me up until at long last it becomes possible
for me,
in perfect chastity, to embrace the universe.

-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin