For us, children of instant gratification

Posted on August 25, 2010

5



 

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
                    to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
                    to something unknown,
                         something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
                    by passing through some stages of instability
                        and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
                    as though you could be today what time
                        — that is to say, grace —
                    and circumstances
                        acting on your own good will 
                    will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
                    gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing 
                    that his hand is leading you,
                    and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
                        in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
     our loving vine-dresser.

 Amen.

A poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist and philosopher. 1881-1955.

 

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