"Mass upon the Altar of the World"

It was during an expedition, in the stillness of the vast solitude of the Ordos desert that one Easter Sunday Pierre Teilhard de Chardin finished the mystical and philosophical poem, Mass upon the Altar of the World. Alone before God, he prayed with lyrical fervour:

'Christ of Glory, hidden power stirring in the heart of matter, glowing centre in which the unnumbered strands of the manifold are knit together; strength inexorable as the world and warm as life; you whose brow is of snow, whose eyes are of fire, whose feet are more dazzling than gold poured from the furnace; you whose hands hold captive the stars; you, the first and the last, the living, the dead, the re-born; you who gather up in your superabundant oneness every delight, every taste, every energy, every phase of existence, to you my being cries out with a longing as vast as the universe; for you indeed are my Lord and my God.'

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