While you are close to our Lord, in the influence of His Heart, ask Him for both of us for a fervent love for Him, which would become the strength and happiness of our lives. The Heart of our Lord is truly something indescribably beautiful and sufficient, exhausting all truth and satisfying all needs of the soul. When one thinks of Him, their head spins. Why must this devotion be marred by all that affectedness and false sentimentality…!
I fear that I may be mistaken in this (because our Lord offered us love for His Heart as something very social, open to all, and thus left to the whims of false piety), but I would tend to consider the Most Sacred Heart as such a worthy, so sacred an object of love, that it should be almost an object of (…) devotion reserved for those who wish to be truly complete Christians, Christians from the bottom of their hearts. It troubles me that it has become an image scattered at every turn…
But I repeat, the main error may indeed be on my part. In the saints, love for God has always been associated with a truly passionate desire to make Him known to others.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ /1881–1955/, letter from the front, to his cousin, March 31, 1917;
quoted from the book Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Birth of Thought. Letters 1914–1919, Malvern 2021)
