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 indeed something unspeakably beautiful and sufficient, exhausting all reality and satisfying all needs of the soul. When one thinks of Him, one becomes dizzy. Why must this devotion be marred by all that affectation and false sentimentality…!
I fear that I might be mistaken in this (because our Lord offered us love for His Heart as something very communal, open to all, and thus left to the excesses of false piety), but I would tend to consider the Most Sacred Heart as such a worthy, such a sacred object of love, that it ought to be almost an object (…) of a cult reserved for those who truly want to be complete Christians, Christians from the bottom of their hearts. It troubles me that it has become an image scattered at every step…
But I repeat that the main error may perhaps lie on my side. For saints, the love of 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)
