I was looking at the peach tree in blossom, and then I suddenly felt that it was not just the tree that was beautiful, but LIVING BEAUTY seemed to be coming through it, and it was in touch with me. It was an intensely personal contact, and it was like some BEING was communicating with me in a wordless way. It was like meeting some very special person who had an extraordinary effect on me. This eternity, I felt, was seeking itself through the activity of innumerable forms of life -- through nature, as with a flower or spider weaving a web, or through a human being creating a work of art, so that the same life would express itself through me... I was flooded by an overwhelming sense of harmony. In a flash countless aspects of beauty were revealed to me which I had never realized before.
Teilhard de Chardin says that the universe will be "unified only through personal relations." It will become one only under the influence of love. Teilhard calls this the "amortization" of the universe, the healing of the world by loving. Only love has the capacity to transform the individual parts of our lives and world into a living cum-unus. Nothing else can do it. . . "Love," says Teilhard, "is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces." How much truth and energy are we losing, he asks, by neglecting our "incredible power to love"?