The Communion of Becoming
A Teilhardian Inspired Prayer of Consent to Love’s Ongoing Evolution
I’ve been sitting with this version of a prayer from Teilhard’s Divine Milieu:
”O Energy of my Lord, irresistible and living Force, since, of us two, You are infinitely stronger, it is for You to consume me in the union that shall fuse us together. Give me, then, something even more precious than the grace which all the faithful beg from you. It is not enough that I die in communion. Teach me communion in my dying.”
I’m pondering what this might mean for those engaged in the hard work of living - through the eyes of self-giving love, through a theology of consent - that inspires hope not just for some future glory, but for a love-inspired hope in the moment-by-moment struggle for greater consciousness, greater compassion, and a more radiant sense of union.
The Communion of Becoming
Beloved Energy,
breath beneath my breath,
I cannot hold You.
You hold me - within and all around.
You move through the marrow of my longing,
a tidal pull drawing me deeper
into the currents of becoming,
the slow unfurling of all things toward Love.
O Radiant Love,
hidden Flame at the heart of matter,
Pulse of stars and cells and trembling atoms -
whisper in the quiet between my thoughts
and shape the waves beneath the waves
where consciousness opens into wonder.
Since You are always more,
it is not mine to seize You,
but Yours to shape me, draw me, and inspire me
into ever-greater wholeness,
where all things shine with Your secret fire.
You do not coerce or command.
You beckon - gently, relentlessly -
into the Great Communion of Becoming:
not sameness, but a harmony of difference,
where what is truly lovely endures
and everything finds its home in You.
Teach me the wild communion:
to lean, to trust, to join my life
to the great unfolding of Love -
until all that is small in me
falls into Love’s wider gravity.
Loosen in me this fragile sense of self,
and let me discover
that nothing true is ever lost -
it only transforms.
Here I am, Living Love.
I open to our shared becoming.
Draw us forward - You in me and I in You -
each made more real, more radiant,
as Love ripens the universe
toward its fullness in You.
Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael
Beautiful! I especially love "as Love ripens the universe toward its fullness in You."
⸻
Communion in the Living
Teilhard’s prayer — “Teach me communion in my dying” — is less about death than about learning to live in union. His “dying” is not an ending, but a continual yielding — the moment-by-moment consent that allows divine energy to flow through our finite lives.
For Teilhard, the Divine Milieu is not a distant realm but the living atmosphere of God in which all motion, labor, and love unfold. To ask for communion in our dying is to ask that even our smallest surrenders — the loss of control, the fatigue of care, the letting go of pride — become sites of connection rather than collapse.
This is the hard work of living through self-giving love: to remain open while being spent, to let exhaustion become participation, to allow what feels like diminishment to reveal a deeper aliveness. Teilhard’s “Energy of my Lord” is not something we await; it is the force already moving through every act of compassion, every gesture of trust.
Communion, then, is not the fruit of our striving but the field in which we strive. It is the living union that holds us — transforming each surrender, each moment of consent, into a deeper expression of hope.