[Reflections After a Recent World War I Battle]

“That’s probably why I was more vividly aware of the ‘shadow of death’, and the formidable gift that existence presents us with: an inevitable advance towards an inevitable, sentient end, —a situation from which one can emerge only through physical dissolution … I believe I’ve never felt that to be so real . . . And then I understood a little better the agony of our Lord, on Good Friday. And the remedy seemed clearer to me, always the same: to abandon oneself, with faith and love, to the divine future (the becoming) which is ‘ the most real ‘ of all, ‘the most living’,—whose most terrifying aspect is that of being the most renewing (and hence the most creative, the most precious of all). Yet how difficult it is to fling oneself into the future: inevitably our sensibility sees in it only a dizzy void and restless fluidity: to give it solidity, we must have faith, mustn’t we? Let us pray for one another.”

–– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind; Letters from a Soldier-Priest (p. 230-31);