There Was No Contradiction in His Soul
"Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am..." —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
This post is part of the Maps, Lenses, and Mirrors Series, a collage of conversations, music, voice memos, visual art, and words exploring how to know. Here’s Part One.
Before we go any further, let us tuck this entire series into a vaster context—one concerned with the dynamic interplay between the inner dimensions of the human person and our collective outer unfolding. It is vital that we bookmark this and keep returning. Without this asterisk, we will miss the heart of the matter.
“A proper application of astrological symbolism would seem to lead not to selfishness and egotism, but toward self-knowledge and self-acceptance—not forcing the future or redefining the past but toward comprehending the moment.
To truly read the map of presence, with its peaks and valleys, its wide oceans and gentle streams, would rather imply an inner journey towards the beginning of real consciousness and conscience so that the whole vibrating cosmic web can be acknowledged and, for brief extraordinary instants, almost understood, related to, and maintained.”
—Rob Baker, Parabola, “Maps of Presence”
Video Artifact #2
I see the wheels of my heart turning in this low-quality, high-presence video from May 2025. In this relational space, as we articulate what we have each already recognized, seeds find fertile soil.
It is unity we have tasted, not uniformity. As we go our separate ways, what we take with us is distinct. It is the synthesis of essence and being in Teilhard that I cannot shake, nearly one year later.
Kirsten Harrison on living into who our soul was imprinted to be, drawing on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a teacher.
This artifact invites a willingness to bear another tension.
Although Teilhard’s ideas may ignite something in us, I am not asking us to swallow them whole. He was writing in a time both similar to and different from our own. His language may draw us, or leave us bristling.
Instead of looking directly at Teilhard, can we look through him?
Perhaps a sojourn with Teilhard will enflesh something already felt, already known, but not yet refracted in just this light.
Invocation: A Song + A Short Meditation
Prelude To A Soul, Sebastian Plano
An unknown heaven, Lee Van Laer
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Drop
From the vastness of the Ocean, an inherent wholeness unfurls particularly within a drop…
What might have been taken in my attitude during the last thirty years for obstinacy or disrespect is simply the result of my absolute inability to contain my own feeling of wonderment. Everything stems from that basic psychological condition, and I can no more change it than I can change my age or the colour of my eyes.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in a letter to the church leadership after he was forbidden to circulate the ideas burning within him
First, a little bit of context from his close colleague, Pierre Leroy, SJ, from the foreword to The Divine Milieu…
Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin lived during a period of doubt and perplexity. He witnessed the modernist crisis, with the sacrifices it entailed; he was driven from his own country by the injustice of political strife and when he reached manhood he was caught up in the terrible war of 1914. A few years later he saw the collapse in the heat of the revolution of social structures to which centuries of history seemed to have given permanence. He was present when forces were let loose which were to lead to a second world war; he was in Pekin when the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was his own fate to be misunderstood and condemned to silence, and to suffer torments that at times came near to overwhelming him. Like many others, he might well have retreated into his own solitary existence and abandoned his chosen field of activity, but his reaction was the exact opposite.
Teilhard bore in his being what others might consider contradictions. Though it was not easy, he tuned the instrument of his life to the bass note sounding within him.
Born May 1, 1881, in Sarcenat, France, Teilhard incarnated with a predominantly fixed Earth nature of a Taurus; the cosmos within him would express through Gemini-tinted glass.
An EMT in World War I, where the seeds of his work came into form relationally, amid visceral precarities.
A paleontologist with a wildly expansive intuition for latent futures nesting within the long arc of geological time. A practitioner of science, certain that Love is the organising principle of the Universe.
In his element at a party, ideas came to life in conversation. A serious man who didn’t seem to take himself too seriously.
A celibate Jesuit priest whose becoming was fanned into forest fire flames within the dynamic fecundity of a conscious and particular love, a mutual soul embrace.
Died in New York City on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, in an exile he painstakingly consented to, in fidelity to a deeper yes.
An Artifact of Conscience (An endangered species in 2026)
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.—Wallace Stevens
One might be tempted to lament the futility of a life broken open, poured out.
In linear terms, one would have good reason to do so. Teilhard’s direct efforts did not change the immediate course of history. Teilhard “sang his heart to all dark matter,” and the tune did not resound far and wide in his lifetime. And this stings.
An Image
No consious work is ever wasted.
—Br. Raphael Robin
Teilhard’s Audacity at a Quantum Scale
Was the friction Teilhard encountered sand in the oyster of being?
Was it his willingness to bear that friction?
What is born in the dynamism between the sheer refusal to either let go of or cling to one pole of an irreconcilable tension?
An Impression
The events could have played out in myriad ways—any of which had the potential, given the requisite proportion of forces, to transmute Teilhard’s offering into a pearl.
Is this pearl still suspended in the cosmos—an inexhaustible sacrament for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to understand?
This dawns as feeling within me as Teilhard’s most widely circulated words, in context, take on vivid color and dimensionality…
Things were briefly quiet on the war front, so Teilhard had time to respond to his cousin Marguerite’s letters. I’ve recorded them in a voice memo, so you can behold with more than your physical eyes.
From The Making of a Mind: Letters From A Soldier-Priest...
Receiving the Sacrament
If something in you recognizes Truth…
If a phrase shimmered, if a single word caught your heart’s eye…
Receive the impression consciously.
No need to dissect the bird, simply take it in.
A Benediction
I give thanks for your presence. As you transition to whatever comes next, may the resistance you encounter, within and without, be food for your song. In us, another world is born.
Love, Kirsten
There may be six billion of us, but somehow we are all One.
—Bruno Barnhart
Notes + Resources
There is no introduction to astrology I love more than this post by Frederick Woodruff.
Here’s how Woodruff describes the Taurus function…
“Have you ever seen a human ovum under a microscope? Well, that tiny little egg has been carefully protected (and released on a schedule) since the woman who carried it was born. Consider the entire lineage of that egg. All that makes us Earthlings is in that egg. Through stillness and sustainment, the egg attracts what it needs to trigger a creative metamorphosis. And there you have the quintessential Tauri expression. It’s said that the Buddha was a Taurus. He sat still under a tree and became enlightened, but only because he persisted in pondering life’s big questions—in other words, the terms of his life were defined by constant inquiry: What is desire? What is life? What is death? What is beauty? Always, with Taurus, there are the enjoyments, the pleasures, of being embodied—our birthright as Earthlings—but also from the body comes the lineage of the egg: the questions and the concentrated power to endure and manifest via intention and persistence.”
Dr. Becca Tarnas with a look at Teilhard’s natal chart: An Archetypal Glimpse into Teilhard’s Evolutionary Vision
My friend Carin shared this Alan Watts quote with me right after I read about the conditions Teilhard was writing in, vivifying my imagination and my appreciation.
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.”
The Cost of True Love: A Conversation between Cynthia Bourgeault and Ilia Delio on YouTube
“The Lost Words Blessing” by Spell Songs
“Look to the sky with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you journey on past dying stars exploding
Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light
And in the dead of night my darling,
find the gleaming eye of starling
Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter”
Pierre Leroy, SJ in the foreward to The Divine Milieu
In his own self the integration of life had been achieved; if he loved God, it was through the world, and if he loved the world it was as a function of God, the animator of all things. “The joy and strength of my life,” he wrote a month before his death, “will have lain in the realization that when the two ingredients—God and the world—were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such instense brilliance that all the depths of the world were lit up for me.”
Jesus’ reply to the disciples’ question, “Why do you tell stories?” in Matthew 13, The Message Bible
Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.
My name is Kirsten. I write, collage, and practice spiritual direction online and in Vashon, WA. Describing what spiritual direction is feels like trying to “catch a cloud and pin it down.”
Spiritual direction is spacious accompaniment. Together we attune to the deep and the timeless. We hold questions no one else can answer for you and listen deeply to what arises. We open to what you sense and ground intuitions in rhythms and practices that anchor you as you live into what is emerging. We notice what is—obscurity, pain, fear, longing, wonder, delight, hope—and invite it into the home within you where true belonging and wisdom are always, already present.
Read More on the Soulspace Blog
Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity
Can’t go under it. Can’t go over it. We’ve got to go through it.
