Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French paleontologist and Jesuit priest born in 1881, studied and taught evolution when many Christians rejected it as heresy. His work earned him censure and a lengthy trip to China from the Vatican as punishment. Ironically the attempt at censure backfired. His years in China seem to have helped him synthesize a new way of seeing evolution as a reason to “trust in the slow work of God.”

According to Teilhard, the process of evolution reveals the way God works in all matters of life.  God is working slowly and persistently toward the ultimate goal of creation which is a kind of unity between creatures and with God. We are living in a tiny slice of time and so we can’t see it very clearly ourselves. However, when we see the extreme change brought by evolution so far, we can learn to trust that God is at work. Teilhard’s writings are challenging to read, yet they overflow with excitement and hope because the God of evolution will not be stopped.

Keep this backstory in mind as you read what might be Teilhard’s most popular quote written in 1915 in a letter to his cousin.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

It seems like good advice for many of us today.  Spiritual maturity doesn’t come quickly, we need to “trust in the slow work of God.”