“Talking with you has revived and given a new start to many ideas and impressions in my mind. As the best way of depicting the beauty of our Lord at the heart of things — as I see him in my mind’s eye — I thought of something that pleased me greatly. It would consist of three stories in the style of Benson (The Light Invisible), three sorts of vision (The Picture, The Monstrance, The Pyx) in which Christ would appear gloried by everything that is blessed in reality and infinitely attainable and active in each creature . . . Don’t you think, too, that it would be a good idea, as a way of filling out my (our) ideas, to give a picture of the saints we were speaking of, those through whom, most particularly, there shone a sanctified, deep-seated passion for all that made up the life of their own times (St. Francis of Assisi, St. Angela of Foligno, St. Catherine of Sienna, etc.) — not, of course, complete biographies, but biographies from a particular point of view: ‘Holiness nourished by an intense communication with the earth.’ My ideas are still vague, but you’ll be able to help me to get them into shape and document them. What one would have to write would be a sort of history of the ‘Christian cosmic feeling . . . I think it could be quite easily done, and fascinating.”
–– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind; Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1919 (p.130) (from letter to Marguerite Teilhard dated October 9, 1916)