Perspective is everything. When it’s lost, headaches and heartaches set in, take root and begin to dominate our lives. When we lose perspective, everything is reduced: the vast horizon, the depth of our minds, the compassion of our hearts, and the enjoyment of our lives. When perspective is lost, the world turns upside down: contentment gives way to restlessness, humility to ambition, and patience to a hopeless pursuit of a consummation, renown, and immortality that this life can never provide. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French scientist/priest/mystic/philosopher, was like the rest of us, living a life with its share of hurts, ambitions, cold, lonely seasons, and obsessions. He spent most of his life unsure that anyone really understood him. But, and this is where he is rare, he invariably was able to put things into perspective, to regain the vast horizon, and to see things, no matter how bad they appeared on the surface, as making sense in Christ. A chip of rock in the desert or an opera in Paris or New York held equal potential for delight. The simple pleasures of life, the elementary act of looking at the world and feeling its elements- the weather, the soil, the sun, and the very dust- could give him joy that borders on ecstasy. It didn’t matter whether he was with his loved ones, at home in France, or away from his loved ones and loved land, in exile in China; every kind of everyday experience could leave him feeling deeply grateful just for the fact of living. He could love deeply, and he could also let go, and this letting go was what saved him from the always-present fear, ambition, and loneliness that so often asphyxiates so many. At age thirty-five, he found himself on the front lines of the First World War. Before a particular battle, fearing that he might be killed, he wrote: “I shall go into this engagement in a religious spirit, with all my soul, borne on by a single great impetus in which I am unable to distinguish where human emotions end, and adoration begins. And if I am destined not to return from those heights, I would like my body to remain there, molded into the clay of the fortifications, like a living cement thrown by God into the stonework of the New City.” Humbling words, noble words, from a rare person with a rare faith. We all need to read and write words like this, and then, perhaps, we won’t live in restlessness and ambition, waiting for that special something that never comes. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Christian Perspective”]