“Isn’t it odd that both of us . . . have the same weakness for the self-centered life of contemplation, undisturbed by anything, and in which no ‘third party’ . . . is unwelcomely added to the two essentials, the soul and God? . . . We should resist this weakness. But it’s still true that, speaking on a natural level, the ‘other’ (which means everybody except the handful of human beings allowed to move in our orbit) is an importunate intruder. At least that’s how I feel sometimes. . . We have to remember that we are in the process of becoming, and that all this multiplicity, through the charity which our Lord asks of us, in spite of our natural inclinations, will end by forming only one whole. . . It’s no doubt an increase of this unity, bought by our effort to get outside ourselves, that makes itself felt in us by fully development of the interior life, resulting from the exteriorization of ourselves through the charity of which you speak. At those times, as at the times when providence sends us suffering, we become strangely aware that our real strength is not in ourselves, but comes to us from outside, when we surrender our freedom to the conditions of existence that have nothing in common with our petty personal inter-relations.”

–– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind; Letters from a Soldier-Priest (p. 202);