Slow Work?

Ok - so why the title?

Well the phrase "slow work" comes from a poem by Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I came across it a few years ago and felt a deep resonance with what he's saying.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually –
Let them grow,
let them shape themselves
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time and grace and circumstances
will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

For someone like myself, in transit between old certainties readily received and new convictions hard won, these are good words to hang on to. These things take time. It's ok not to have all the answers. Take it one step at a time. Trust that God is there, leading you. There's something about this that has the absolute ring of truth for me.

I remember as a kid feeling my way into the sciences at school. In the first few years of secondary education they'd tell you about atoms and you'd assume they were hard little spheres, like mini marbles. Then, later on, they'd explain that they were more complicated; that inside the atom was this core with protons and neutrons, and orbiting around them in different 'shells' were the electrons - tiny planets spinning around a tiny nuclear sun. Then, just when you'd got that into your head, they confessed that it was even more complex! These electrons didn't actually move in shells, but existed in probability clouds around the nucleus. I remember these grey forms seriously illustrated in dense textbooks - some looking like smoothed-over Charles Atlas dumbells, others like the petals of some cosmic uber-flower. Better still, Heisenberg told us that we couldn't know an electron's position and speed at the same time anyway. And that's before we get into quarks and mesons and bosons......


And here's the point. You can't jump from A to Z in one effortless bound. There's a whole lot of learning you simply have to go through before you're ready for Z. There's slow work to be done. You have to take each model, flawed though it is, and get it into your head before you're ready for the next one.

Moving between models is painful (just ask Rod Stewart). Certainties have to be divested and unknowing has to be embraced, and that inevitably brings some instability. But in the long run, the work is worth it because a better model, a deeper understanding, emerges which allows you to do more and think better than ever before.

For years now I've felt that instability in my theology as I feel my way towards an understanding which can cope with all that I've had to leave behind. But at the same time, in my spirit, I have a growing sense that what lies ahead; indeed what already surrounds me, is far better than I've ever known. A God more embracing, more loving, more generous than I could ever have believed. At times I catch glimpses of that God, and on occasions rarer still, I might even reflect something of him to others. For the hope of knowing more about that kind of God, I can accept the anxiety of feeling myself in suspense and incomplete. Thanks, Teilhard.

TODAY'S WORDS OF PROFOUND WISDOM: There's always an easy solution to every human problem: neat, plausible and wrong