[Carol Kilby –]

<p>Thank you, Terri and Brian.</p><p>I too have found some connection reading of de Chardin’s response to his war experience . Here is the exerpt I’ve found in The Phenomena of Man.</p><p>“ obedient to the voice that called him, he was ready to plunge into another distressful adventure, an experience so monstrous and ghastly and yet, so exhilarating. He joined as a stretcher-bearer. He lived through the nightmare of war with all the generosity of his soul, with no thought for himself. Even amid scens of death and devastation he knew a sense of fulfilment. .. he breathed a new invigorating atmosphere.”</p><p>He is quoted as writing,  “the man at athe front is no longer the same man… The shell of common assumptions and conventions was broken and a fresh light shed on the hidden mechanism by which man’s will has power to shape his development. Life takes on a new savour in the heroic devotion to a grand ideal. … the reality he found at the front would be with him for evern in the great work of creation and of sanctifying humanity.'</p><p>My own thoughts based on this are that de Chardin witnessed the power of cataclysm as it was experienced in a war which requires the ultimate sacrifice. And that the experience of participating voluntarily in such sacrifice makes the human one with the cosmic experience in which such sacrifice is involuntary as in the case of supernovas.  I understand that he is saying, in this way is humanity ‘sanctified’. In this experience he suggests the “shell of common assumptions and conventions was broken” which I interpret as individualism. And then, perhaps most importantly, he suggests the human is then free to discover his own power to evolve to the highest self/or human being.</p><p> The challenge for me is not to glorify war but to honour that the destructive power of cataclysm manifested in war may be as you suggest, a driver in human consciousness and commitment to life as a whole.  Then, I must ask myself, in that I don’t see it, can I believe in and trust that in the Big History, this is so? </p><p> </p><p> </p>

[Author]

Posts