Day of Infamy

12/7/41, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor has been infamous, but it did not prevent Teilhard de Chardin the scientist and philosopher priest from admitting that “throughout my whole life, during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within...The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe...” Why was Teilhard so optimistic ? His central philosophical position God-Love reaching self-fulfilment only in love. “Christianity is nothing more or less than a ‘phylum of love’ within nature. ... To overcome every obstacle, to unite our beings without loss of individual personality, there is a single force which nothing can replace and nothing destroy, a force which urges us forwards and draws up upwards: this is the force of love... The law of the universe must surely be a continually progressing, irreversible spiritualisation.”

Pearl Harbor, therefore, was just blip on God’s radar screen.

A friend and admirer of Teilhard said that “Even those who were most hostile to his philosophical and religious views recognized the exquisite gift for sympathy which made him a ‘catcher of souls.’ Countless intellectuals, executives, workmen and humble folk caught from him the vital spark of illumination and found peace.” But one fault Teilhard could not tolerate was “deliberate acceptance and delight in the disgust with life, contempt for the works of man, fear of human effort” He said that “anything that makes me sink lower is the real evil.”

Onward and downward we spiral in our current era of President Barack Obama, the ultimate pessimist and basher of the very hope he conjured up in his campaign filled with simple, empty words. Man is not the sum of his own making, according to Obama, but rather only the parts created by the government.

Pearl Harbor day should remind us of ultimate victory over evil. There’s still hope.