Dear Marguerite,
In response to your letter of January 24, I gladly choose today's Feast of the Presentation – these Candlemas of our ancestors – which this year takes place for me in a gloomy atmosphere and somber reflection on the banks of the Yser. (…) I am sure that this morning you will gladly embrace, as if with your own hands, your goodwill, your hopes, your desires, and also your fears, your resistance, and your disgust, and you will bring this so vivid, so sensitive, so trembling bundle for distinction, for the pleasure, for the purifying action of our Lord. (…) The posture that fully places us in the truth is the posture of the Offering of oneself, in which we powerfully expose ourselves to the powerful action of the infinite Being, with a fervent desire that it may penetrate us and transform us into Itself.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ /1881–1955/, letter from the front, to his cousin, February 2, 1916;
quoted from the book Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Birth of Thought. Letters 1914–1919, Malvern 2021)
