June 05, 2026

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

Teilhard wrote this while working as a paleontologist and Jesuit priest in the early twentieth century, a man whose scientific work kept getting him into trouble with the Church and whose theological work baffled many of his colleagues. He lived inside a genuine tension: two institutions, two identities, neither of which fully claimed him. That specific friction is why this line still lands. It asks you to consider which part of yourself is doing the living, and which part keeps getting treated like a problem to manage.