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arts / alt.fan.heinlein / Thou art God. Jean Houston "Mr. Tayer," - Teilhard de Chardin

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Thou art God. Jean Houston "Mr. Tayer," - Teilhard de Chardin

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Subject: Thou art God. Jean Houston "Mr. Tayer," - Teilhard de Chardin
Date: Tue, 4 May 2021 10:14:23 -0700
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 by: a425couple - Tue, 4 May 2021 17:14 UTC

from FB Heinlein Forum

Thou art God.
Deepa Khanna Sobti
AtgpeSriomsclSdStd gpiuon28 siatf 5s:od4re8sr dPsM ·

“ I'll never forget this story told by Jean Houston at a conference I
attended as an MIU student. Very beautiful and moving, worth a read,
especially if you're familiar with Teilhard de Chardin and his writings
that got him in trouble with the church because he was way too cosmic
for them.
"Mr. Tayer," by Jean Houston

When I was about fourteen I was seized by enormous waves of grief over
my parents’ breakup. I had read somewhere that running would help
dispel anguish, so I began to run to school every day down Park Avenue
in New York City. I was a great big overgrown girl (5 feet eleven by the
age of eleven) and one day I ran into a rather frail old gentleman in
his seventies and knocked the wind out of him. He laughed as I helped
him to his feet and asked me in French- accented speech, “Are you
planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”
“Yes, sir" I replied. “It looks that way."
“Well, Bon Voyage!” he said.
“Bon Voyage!” I answered and sped on my way.
About a week later I was walking down Park Avenue with my fox terrier,
Champ, and again I met the old gentleman.
“Ah." he greeted me, “my friend the runner, and with a fox terrier. I
knew one like that years ago in France. Where are you going?"
“Well, sir." I replied, “I’m taking Champ to Central Park."
“I will go with you." he informed me. “I will take my constitutional."
And thereafter, for about a year or so, the old gentleman and I would
meet and walk together often several times a week in Central Park. He
had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it,
which was “Mr. Tayer" as far as I could make out.
The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr. Tayer seem
to have absolutely no self-consciousness, but he was always being seized
by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly
and literally falling into love. I remember one time when he suddenly
fell on his knees, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed
to me, “Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhh!” I joined him on the
ground to see what had evoked so profound a response that he was seized
by the essence of caterpillar. “How beautiful it is", he remarked, “this
little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite!
Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis." He
then regarded me with equal delight. “Jeanne, can you feel yourself to
be a caterpillar?”
“Oh yes." I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply faced
teenager.
“Then think of your own metamorphosis." he suggested. “What will you be
when you become a butterfly, une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of
Jeanne?” (What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl!) His long,
gothic, comic-tragic face would nod with wonder. “Eh, Jeanne, look at
the clouds! God’s calligraphy in the sky! All that transforming. moving,
changing, dissolving, becoming. Jeanne, become a cloud and become all
the forms that ever were."
Photo was not included in story
Photo was not included in story
Or there was the time that Mr. Tayer and I leaned into the strong wind
that suddenly whipped through Central Park, and he told me, “Jeanne,
sniff the wind." I joined him in taking great snorts of wind. “The same
wind may once have been sniffed by Jesus Christ (sniff). by Alexander
the Great (sniff), by Napoleon (sniff), by Voltaire (sniff), by Marie
Antoinette (sniff)!” (There seemed to be a lot of French people in that
wind.) “Now sniff this next gust of wind in very deeply for it
contains.. . Jeanne d’Arc! Sniff the wind once sniffed by Jeanne dArc.
Be filled with the winds of history."
It was wonderful. People of all ages followed us around, laughing—not at
us but with us. Old Mr. Tayer was truly diaphanous to every moment and
being with him was like being in attendance at God’s own party, a
continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. But mostly Mr. Tayer
was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with
everything. Always he saw the interconnections between things—the way
that everything in the universe, from fox terriers to tree bark to
somebody’s red hat to the mind of God, was related to everything else
and was very, very good.
He wasn’t merely a great appreciator, engaged by all his senses. He was
truly penetrated by the reality that was yearning for him as much as he
was yearning for it. He talked to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks
as dear friends, as beloved even. ‘Ah, my friend, the mica schist layer,
do you remember when...?” And I would swear that the mica schist would
begin to glitter back. I mean, mica schist will do that, but on a cloudy
day?! Everything was treated as personal, as sentient, as “thou." And
everything that was thou was ensouled with being. and it thou-ed back to
him. So when I walked with him, I felt as though a spotlight was
following us, bringing radiance and light everywhere. And I was
constantly seized by astonishment in the presence of this infinitely
beautiful man, who radiated such sweetness, such kindness.
I remember one occasion when he was quietly watching a very old woman
watching a young boy play a game. “Madame", he suddenly addressed her.
She looked up, surprised that a stranger in Central Park would speak to
her. “Madame,” he repeated, “why are you so fascinated by what that
little boy is doing?” The old woman was startled by the question, but
the kindly face of Mr. Tayer seemed to allay her fears and evoke her
memories. “Well, sir,” she replied in an ancient but pensive voice, “the
game that boy is playing is like one I played in this park around 1880,
only it’s a mite different." We noticed that the boy was listening, so
Mr. Tayer promptly included him in the conversation. “Young fellow,
would you like to learn the game as it was played so many years ago?”
“Well. . .yeah. sure, why not?” the boy replied. And soon the young boy
and the old woman were making friends and sharing old and new variations
on the game—as unlikely an incident to occur in Central Park as could be
imagined.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr. Tayer was the way
that he would suddenly look at you. He looked at you with wonder and
astonishment joined to unconditional love joined to a whimsical
regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one. I felt
myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces
wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential
palpably changed. I was yeasted, greened, awakened by such seeing, and
the defeats and denigrations of adolescence redeemed. I would go home
and tell my mother, who was a little skeptical about my walking with an
old man in the park so often, “Mother, I was with my old man again, and
when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind." That deeply moved
her. You could not be stuck in littleness and be in the radiant field of
Mr. Tayer.
The last time that I ever saw him was the Thursday before Easter Sunday,
1955. I brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah. Escargot." he exclaimed
and then proceeded to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour. Snail
shells, and galaxies, and the convolutions in the brain, the whorl of
flowers and the meanderings of rivers were taken up into a great hymn to
the spiralling evolution of spirit and matter. When he had finished, his
voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, “Omega ...omega. .
..omega.." Finally he looked up and said to me quietly, "Au revoir, Jeanne”.
“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer,” I replied, “I’ll meet you at the same time
next Tuesday."
For some reason. Champ, my fox terrier didn’t want to budge, and when I
pulled him along, he whimpered, looking back at Mr.Tayer, his tail
between his legs. The following Tuesday I was there waiting where we
always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 83rd Street. He didn’t come.
The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn’t come. The dog
looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but
he never came again. It turned out that he had suddenly died that Easter
Sunday but I didn’t find that out for years.
Some years later, someone handed me a book without a cover which was
titled The Phenomenon of Man. As I read the book I found it strangely
familiar in its concepts. Occasional words and expressions loomed up as
echoes from my past. When, later in the book, I came across the concept
of the “Omega point." I was certain. I asked to see the jacket of the
book, looked at the author’s picture, and, of course, recognized him
immediately. There was no forgetting or mistaking that face. Mr. Tayer
was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet and mystic,
and during that lovely and luminous year I had been meeting him out side
the Jesuit rectory of St. Ignatius where he was living most of the time.
I have often wondered if it was my simplicity and innocence that allowed
the fullness of Teilhard’s being to be revealed. To me he was never the
great priest-paleontologist Pere Teilhard. He was old Mr. Tayer. Why did
he always come and walk with me every Tuesday and Thursday, even though
I’m sure he had better things to do? Was it that in seeing me so
completely, he himself could be completely seen at a time when his
writings, his work, were proscribed by the Church, when he was not
permitted to teach, or even to talk about his ideas? As I later found
out, he was undergoing at that time the most excruciating agony that
there is—the agony of utter disempowerment and psychological
crucifixion. And yet to me he was always so present—whimsical, engaging,
empowering. How could that be?
I think it was because Teilhard had what few Church officials did—the
power and grace of the Love that passes all understanding. He could
write about love being the evolutionary force, the Omega point, that
lures the world and ourselves into becoming, because he experienced that
love in a piece of rock, in the wag of a dog’s tail, in the eyes of a
child. He was so in love with everything that he talked in great
particularity, even to me as an adolescent, about the desire atoms have
for each other, the yearning of molecules, of organisms, of bodies, of
planets, of galaxies, all of creation longing for that radiant bonding,
for joining, for the deepening of their condition, for becoming more by
virtue of yearning for and finding the other. He knew about the search
for the Beloved. His model was Christ. For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ
was the Beloved of the soul.
Years later, while addressing some Jesuits, a very old Jesuit came up to
me. He was a friend of Teilhard’s—and he told me how Teilhard used to
talk of his encounters in the Park with a girl called Jeanne.”
Jean Houston
Pomona, New York
March, 1988


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