October 11, 2026

Let Yourself Be Carried

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 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.

Teilhard wrote these words as a Jesuit priest and geologist stationed in China, at a time when his religious order had forbidden him to publish his theological writing because it blended Catholic faith with evolutionary science. The Divine Milieu circulated privately among friends for decades before it was finally printed after his death. In this passage he is not describing a crisis he has solved but one he is still living inside, aging, exiled from his own pulpit, watching his body and his plans slip from his control. He speaks to forgiveness and release today because he treats what cannot be changed, illness, aging, failure, the slow loosening of our grip, as material to be handed over rather than fought.