Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that “perspective is everything.” When it’s lost, headaches and heartaches set in, take root and begin to dominate our lives. When we lose perspective, everything is reduced: the wide horizon, the depth of our minds, the compassion of our hearts, the enjoyment of our lives, and the consolation of our God. When perspective is lost, the world turns upside down: contentment gives way to restlessness, humility to ambition, and patience to a hopeless pursuit of a consummation, renown, and immortality that this life can never give. To have perspective, I must be praying, mystically feeling the other world, and content enough in my anonymity to take my place, but no more than that, among others, as one small but integral member of the billions of men and women who have walked, and will walk, the earth and will, one day, be presented by Christ to his Father. It is not easy to keep perspective and to claim no more, and no less, than my true place in history. When my own prayer and mysticism are too weak for me to properly do this, one of the things I can still do is to stay in touch with those who have kept things in perspective. One of the people who helped me with this is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French scientist/priest/mystic/philosopher who died on Easter Sunday in 1955. Like the rest of us, his life, too, had its share of hurts, ambitions, cold, lonely seasons, and obsessions. He spent most of his life unsure that anyone really understood him. But, this is where he is rare; he invariably was able to put things into perspective, to regain the wide horizon, and to see things, no matter how bad they appeared on the surface, as making sense in Christ. Because of this perspective, he was a gifted man, gifted not just with extraordinary insight but also with exceptional joy. He could see God in a stone. A chip of rock in the desert or an opera in Paris or New York—both held equal potential for delight. The simple pleasures of life, the elementary act of looking at the world and feeling its elements—the weather, the soil, the sun, the very dust could give him a joy bordering on ecstasy. He could love deeply, and he could also let go, and this letting go was what saved him from the always-present fear, ambition, and loneliness that so often asphyxiates me. He was able to keep things in perspective, so he didn’t need to dwell on past hurts, on present loneliness, and on future fears.