Thomas Merton and Teilhard de Chardin

ON JUNE 27, 1949, THOMAS MERTON WROTE in his journal about going into the woods behind his monastery: "...both in the wood and especially on my way back, crossing an open hillock, all that I had tasted in solitude seemed to have a luminously intelligible connection with the Mass. It seemed to be a function or an expression of that morning's offertory...I wonder if my eyes have been momentarily opened...Could I end up as something of a hermit-priest, of a priest of the woods or the deserts or the hills, devoted to a Mass of pure adoration that would put all nature on my paten in the morning and praise God more explicitly with the birds?" (Entering the Silence, p. 331)
    ON AUGUST 6, 1923, PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, while on a scientific expedition in the Ordos Desert, wrote this: "Since once again, Lord-though not this time in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia- I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world."  (Hymn of the Universe, p. 19)