As a young person, I discovered Simone Weil.
What a blessing. She taught me to wait.
And, it is obvious, that although she refused to enter the Catholic Church and instead, remained in the Jewish fold, she knew God as few do.
Here is one quotation from her and a link from the past.
“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
Gravity and Grace
Only one who loves can write this. Only one who has met God in suffering and come to see the love in purgation can say this. Gratitude comes from a humble heart.
I love this pure and profoundly simple philosopher. May God bless her and may His Face shine upon her.
Monday, 24 June 2013
Waiting for God and Waiting on God vs. the Self-Hug of Indulgence: Weil and Jones
I also attended, over thirty years ago, a superb conference on her at Notre Dame. I had already read her books but the conference presenters were top-drawer. Sadly, it was not well attended.
Already, the need to listen to spirituality of love and suffering was becoming too tedious for most young people.
Suffering is part of the journey to God and cannot and should not be avoided. Weil has a few points I would like to highlight today.
The first is that she says that Christianity is the religion of slaves. What she means is that only those who are humbled in this world can appreciate this religion. She couples this with the extreme poverty of St. Francis. Her desire to be a vagabond was born of the ideal of purity, separating herself out from the world, and being totally dependent on God.
A slave is totally dependent on his or her master. Louis de Montfort uses this imagery in his consecration to Mary. We are repealed by the idea of slavery, as we identify ourselves as sons and daughters of God.
However, those of us who have had the good fortune of being in love understand the ideal of waiting on a person's every need or desire. Indeed, in the Scriptures, we have this phrase from Psalm 132:2 DR:
Behold as the eyes of the servants are on the hands of their masters, As the eyes of the handmaid are on the hands of her mistress: so are our eyes unto the Lord our God, until he have mercy on us.
The second idea I want to note is that Weil experienced a personal love relationship with God, which even in the midst of great suffering, sustained her. The mystery of His Presence was given to her, and she notes that His Presence of Love was there even in suffering. I understand this. One can be suffering intensely and know all the time that Christ is with one. This Presence is Love, but He is not the Comforter at this point.
The third point is key. Weil notes that Christ wants us to prefer Truth to Him. What she means it that if we seek Truth, and Christ is Truth, we shall find Him. But, if we stray from Truth, we lose Him.
Those who seek consolations are not seeking Truth. These people kid themselves that they are seeking God, but in reality, they are seeking only themselves, in a self-hug of indulgence.
Another point to highlight for today, and I shall come back to her another day, is that one can meditate and contemplate using the Our Father alone. For years, Weil contemplated the Our Father daily, and from that prayer came great graces for her. We do not have to be complicated in our prayers. Christ Himself gave us the Our Father, and in that prayer is all we need for Love to blossom.
I read Weil over and over as a young woman, and her love for and in Christ is ever new. The greatest sadness to me is that she could not bring herself to be baptized, although Christ met her again and again. She decided for the sake of her Jewish brothers and sisters, to stay outside in the vestibule of the Church.
One more last point is key. Weil states that God uses rejects, castaways, wastes. I can identify with that for many reasons. God shines forth most clearly in those who are low and lowly. But, the world does not see this. Neither do some Catholics, who are so bent on middle-class spirituality, that they miss God, who is waiting for them. They miss Him, as David Jones writes, "For it is easy to miss him, at the turn of a civilisation."
(If and when I eventually get to heaven, after seeing Christ, Mary and Bernard of Clairvaux, I want to see David Jones. I am sad I never met him, but he died in 1974, six years before I came to England.)
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| Thanks to Wiki for Photo |
A, a, a, DOMINE DEUS
The 70th anniversary of Simone Weil's death is on August 24th.
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Thoughts on Simone Weil
She is buried in Ashford, Kent and last year, I visited her grave with a friend of mine. Simone was only 34 for she died and her writing may appeal to young people. I read her over thirty years ago and I had the honor of attending a three day conference at the University of Notre Dame concerning her thought. Simone never became a Catholic, although she loved Christ and His saints, such as St. Francis. She said she wanted to sit on the steps of the great cathedral which was the Church, waiting outside with her people, the Jews. I think she may have had the Baptism of Desire.
What is significant is Simone, who came from a brilliant family, represents the end of a generation of mystical philosophers, so common on the Continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As philosophy became more and more modern, post-modern, etc., separation between prayer and philosophy, between religious experience and philosophy and theology and philosophy has been irrevocably broken. Her death and her small grave symbolize to me the end of the great tradition of philosophy being the handmaid of theology.
