Waiting for God
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Price: $10.07
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Simone Weil is an outsider's saint. The daughter of an agnostic French family of Jewish descent, Weil was never baptized ("God does not want me in the Church," she wrote), and her conversion to Christianity at the age of 23 took her by surprise. Until then, she had been a solemn, committed leftist intellectual. Now she was moving toward a life of divine encounters whose desolate ecstasy, as described by the journals, letters, and essays excerpted in Waiting for God, bear comparison to St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. As Leslie Fiedler writes in her introduction to Weil's book, "She speaks of the problems of belief in the vocabulary of the unbeliever, of the doctrines of the Church in the words of the unchurched." The book is most notable for Weil's lengthy letter titled "Spiritual Autobiography" and for her "Meditation on the Pater Noster," which is the discursive record of a spiritual process that led to her almost daily attainment of a mystical vision of God. This is not pretty writing; it is an agonized record of amazement. --Michael Joseph Gross
At the start of my review of Waiting for God, let me confess that I only made it about two thirds of the way through the book. A very good friend often says of philosophers, "they just have too much time on their hands." I generally find this a cop out, but it the case of Waiting for God, I truly do feel that Simone Weil had too much time on her hands.
I greatly admire her drive and her life story. She lowered herself so that she formed bonds with the working men and women. She was able to understand through experience the pains and dehumanization that the working classes suffered as their lot in life.
In her letters, which start off the book, she goes through mental gymnastics to explain exactly why she has decided not to accept baptism, consequently removing the possibility of taking communion. Her reasoning is well though out, but I felt that she missed the point. She seems to be saying that she could not accept baptism until she became worthy. But none of us ever do. In my opinion, baptism is a major step on the life long pathway to spiritual growth and the goal of the journey is perfection. If one has to obtain perfection before starting on the path, then one can never reach perfection.
The second part of the Waiting for God consists of a number of essays. As far as I got through them, it seems like they could be edited way down and not lose their essential point. This type of philosophical verbiage might appeal to some, but it leaves me rather bored.
wanted to read some lives of some famous christian saints but
wanted to read some lives of some famous christian saints but didnt really exactly more thumb thru but it just wasnt there too devotional could be now whats her name she was different not a saint saintly however out on the fringes never wanting to become part of any organized church firmly christian and yet It is not up to us to believe in God, but only to not grant our love to false gods things like that are way off the wall she said lots of things like this universe we live in, of which we are a part, is this distance put by divine Love between God and God odd the true definition of science is that it is the study of the beauty of the world dream on dreamer human wretchedness is irreducible it is as great in the totally sinless person as in the sinner which makes me wonder at what point afflictions cause us to reject all the things we thought we believed in hardly been there yet my continued confusion frustration loneliness dead ends am absolutely certain there is no God, in the sense that you are absolutely certain there is nothing real that resembles what you can conceive when you pronounce that name absolutely certain there is no Good, in the sense that you are absolutely certain there is nothing real that resembles what you can conceive when you pronounce that certain there is no Happiness, in the sense that you are absolutely certain there is nothing real that resembles what you can conceive when there is no Certainty, in the sense that an atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God ringing in my ears does not want me in the Church ringing in my when a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, in my then we know that it is really a door my every perfect life is a parable invented by God ears
Life changing
I guess when one is ready for certain changes in one's life God leads us to those things that will best facilitate that change. Simone Weil has been a catalyst for a major change in my life. Her writings have struck a responsive chord in my life. Although some of her writings are difficult for me to understand, the underlying message is powerful. I found myself relating to her desire to discover the love of God in her life. I appreciated her soul searching honesty is wanting that encounter to be completely without deception, pretense or even pride. She so wanted to guard against a false religious experience, or siimply a social religious experience. Her descriptions of what it is to truly love another are profound. Her life is a journey that I want to follow. I looked up the meaning of her name in the dictionary. It means "one who hears." Certainly, she is one who sought to hear the voice of God. I, too, want to hear the voice of God without deception or pride. I honor Simone as a true religious teacher for me.
a bit unorthodox, to say the least
I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. I was hoping to give this book to my brother-in-law, someone with a Catholic upbringing but a Marxist philosophy now- a bit of the reverse of Simone Weil. The theology in this book is so individual, however, as to make me uncertain that it could even be called Christian. In any case, I'm not sure it's a life-path that would inspire any other than a very select group. Because it is different, and because there probably are some people that it might speak to I give it 2 stars, but it wasn't for me.
by a modern saint
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a remarkable saint of the modern era. After being raised in a Jewish middle class family and graduating from the finest schools, she went to work in the inner city as a blue-collar factory worker. She once complained to the supervisor about a coal drill: "This drill was designed to break rocks. It was not designed for human hands" while illustrating the vibrating effects with her arms. She reportedly debated Trotsky on the living conditions of the proletariat into the ground.
Weil died of physical and mental exhaustion at age 34 after an arduous life of fasting, writing, and working in solidarity with the most downtrodden of society. Besides her amazing solidarity with the working class, it is Weil's profound writings that have established her legacy. Contemporary Albert Camus called her "the only great spirit of our time." T.S. Eliot wrote in his forward to one of her books: "We must expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint." In his essay titled, "The Importance of Simone Weil," Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "France offered a rare gift to the contemporary world in the person of Simone Weil." Waiting for God (Harper Perennial, 2001) is the best introduction to her spiritual writings, and what follows are some highlights from that work.
The first few chapters consist of letters she wrote to her friend, Father Perrin. Though one gets a better sense of how she felt and struggled daily living out her ideas, it is her four essays in the latter half of the book that show the most profundity and coherence of thought. Every page, nearly every paragraph has such significance, one cannot finish reading an essay without being ravished through the direction of one who knew the spiritual life as deeply as she did.
When I first read the essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God," I was having trouble picking up a case to read for law school. It seemed pointless especially since I had already decided to become a pastor rather than an attorney. But Weil showed me that "the key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention." (p.58). She states, "Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer." (p.59) This explains why Weil mastered several languages including Sanskrit and a wide range of academic subjects: they helped her to pray more effectively. She exhorts, "Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great treasure." (p.64)
In another application, Weil insightfully states that studying also helps one love his neighbor. She explains, "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention." (p.64) Hence studying helps enable the soul to "[empty] itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth." (p.65) The immeasurable help that studying can bring to others is captured in this thought: "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle." (p.64)
In the next essay "The Love of God and Affliction," Weil writes:
"The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. It is not surprising that the innocent are killed, tortured, driven from their country, made destitute . . .since there are criminals to perform such actions. It is not surprising either that disease is the cause of long sufferings, which paralyze life and make it into an image of death, since nature is at the mercy of the blind play of mechanical necessities. But it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign lord. At the very best, he who is branded by affliction will keep only half his soul." (p.69)
Weil defines affliction as the experience of "physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time." (p.81) She analogizes it to a nail that God uses to pierce the center of one's soul, to leave the person as it were crucified, where he or she can experience God most intimately as Job and Christ did in view of God's apparent absence.
But Weil warns that amidst affliction, if one does not strain to hear an absent God in silence, or feel the beauty of God in the world's absolute obedience to Him, then the person remains like a slave with half a soul. For "sin is not a distance," according to Weil, "it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction." (p.73) In other words, losing hope is a greater sin than acknowledging one's feelings of abandonment by God. She elaborates that just as two strangers may be near but not together and two friends may be apart but still near, "God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. . . . That is why the Cross is our only hope." (p.75)
In her essay "Forms of the Implicit Love of God," Weil comments on four loves: of neighbor, the order of the world, religious practices, and friendship. Regarding love for our neighbor, she profoundly states, "The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbor and justice." (p.85) She explains that "the supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship." (p.85) Thus a believer cannot show love to his poor neighbor if he assumes that he is reaching down or doing the impoverished person a favor.
Instead a believer must seek to reaffirm the dignity of this person made in God's image before seeking to help him. (p.88) Weil comments that "[i]t is not surprising that a man who has bread should give a piece to someone who is starving. What is surprising is that he should be capable of doing so with so different a gesture from that with which we buy an object. Almsgiving when it is not supernatural is like a sort of purchase. It buys the sufferer." (p.91) The beauty of the inseparability of justice and love is that it creates solidarity between rich and poor, and allows the coexistence of generosity and respect. In this way of "creative attention" we become God-like. Weil elaborates:
"God alone has this power, the power really to think into being that which does not exist. Only God, present in us, can really think the human quality into the victims of affliction, can really look at them with a look differing from that we give to things, can listen to their voice as we listen to spoken words. Then they become aware that they have a voice, otherwise they would not have occasion to notice it. . . . God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet." (p.93-4)
Regarding love of the order of the world, Weil writes, "[T]he soul's natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high." (p.103). She describes the beauty of the world as "Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter." (p.104) Weil however laments that too many treat the dim reflections of God's beauty on earth as the final and only reality (as manifested in luxury, art, science). (p.106-8) This locating the absolute in pleasure is the "crime of idolatry." (p.111)
On the love of religious practices, the thought most associated with Weil's contribution to spirituality is that "one of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us." (p.125) She offers the illustration: "The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it." (p.125) Weil is adamant that "the will cannot produce any good in the soul." (p.126) She writes:
"That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way . . . not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed." (p.127)
To the contrary, Weil emphasizes that "the effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent." (p.126) In other words, "[t]he crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience." (p.126) Thus, Weil exhorts, "it is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that befits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire." (p.125)
She distinguishes between morality, which depends on the will, and religion, which consists of desire, and concludes, "It is desire that saves" and again "to long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save us." (p.127-8) Acknowledging the counterintuitive nature of true sanctification that is contrary to the commonly held view of it being a matter of sheer strenuous will power, Weil nevertheless exclaims: "There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts" and "this waiting for goodness and truth is . . . something more intense than any searching." (p.127-8) She perceptively observes that "the notion of grace, as opposed to virtue depending on the will, and that of inspiration, as opposed to intellectual or artistic work, these two notions, if they are well understood, show the efficacy of desire and waiting." (p.129)
Weil's comments on friendship are brief, so I will be brief. She defines it as "a supernatural harmony, a union of opposites." (p.132) She explains, "In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity. All friendship is impure if even a trace of the wish to please or the contrary desire to dominate is found in it." (p.135) Thus "in a perfect friendship . . .the two friends have fully consented to be two and not one, they respect the distance which the fact of being two distinct creatures places between them. Man has the right to desire direct union with God alone." (p.135)
She concludes her essay on the four loves with a few more precious insights only one of which I'll mention. She encourages people to cherish the certainty of one's hunger for God as invaluable even if one is uncertain of His presence. For the greatest argument for the existence of God, as with bread or water, is hunger and thirst. (p.138)
In her essay "Concerning the Our Father," Weil explicates the Lord's Prayer sentence by sentence. His prayer had special meaning for her because through it, she once wrote in her diary, Christ daily "descended and took her." I leave it to the reader to discover its riches.
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Emerging from the thought-provoking discussions and correspondence Simone Weil had with the Reverend Father Perrin, this classic collection of essays contains the renowned philosopher and social activist's most profound meditations on the relationship of human life to the realm of the transcendent. An enduring masterwork and "one of the most neglected resources of our century" (Adrienne Rich), Waiting for God will continue to influence spiritual and political thought for centuries to come.
Simone Weil is an outsider's saint. The daughter of an agnostic French family of Jewish descent, Weil was never baptized ("God does not want me in the Church," she wrote), and her conversion to Christianity at the age of 23 took her by surprise. Until then, she had been a solemn, committed leftist intellectual. Now she was moving toward a life of divine encounters whose desolate ecstasy, as described by the journals, letters, and essays excerpted in Waiting for God, bear comparison to St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. As Leslie Fiedler writes in her introduction to Weil's book, "She speaks of the problems of belief in the vocabulary of the unbeliever, of the doctrines of the Church in the words of the unchurched." The book is most notable for Weil's lengthy letter titled "Spiritual Autobiography" and for her "Meditation on the Pater Noster," which is the discursive record of a spiritual process that led to her almost daily attainment of a mystical vision of God. This is not pretty writing; it is an agonized record of amazement. --Michael Joseph Gross
Customer Reviews
Too much time on her handsAt the start of my review of Waiting for God, let me confess that I only made it about two thirds of the way through the book. A very good friend often says of philosophers, "they just have too much time on their hands." I generally find this a cop out, but it the case of Waiting for God, I truly do feel that Simone Weil had too much time on her hands.
I greatly admire her drive and her life story. She lowered herself so that she formed bonds with the working men and women. She was able to understand through experience the pains and dehumanization that the working classes suffered as their lot in life.
In her letters, which start off the book, she goes through mental gymnastics to explain exactly why she has decided not to accept baptism, consequently removing the possibility of taking communion. Her reasoning is well though out, but I felt that she missed the point. She seems to be saying that she could not accept baptism until she became worthy. But none of us ever do. In my opinion, baptism is a major step on the life long pathway to spiritual growth and the goal of the journey is perfection. If one has to obtain perfection before starting on the path, then one can never reach perfection.
The second part of the Waiting for God consists of a number of essays. As far as I got through them, it seems like they could be edited way down and not lose their essential point. This type of philosophical verbiage might appeal to some, but it leaves me rather bored.
wanted to read some lives of some famous christian saints but
wanted to read some lives of some famous christian saints but didnt really exactly more thumb thru but it just wasnt there too devotional could be now whats her name she was different not a saint saintly however out on the fringes never wanting to become part of any organized church firmly christian and yet It is not up to us to believe in God, but only to not grant our love to false gods things like that are way off the wall she said lots of things like this universe we live in, of which we are a part, is this distance put by divine Love between God and God odd the true definition of science is that it is the study of the beauty of the world dream on dreamer human wretchedness is irreducible it is as great in the totally sinless person as in the sinner which makes me wonder at what point afflictions cause us to reject all the things we thought we believed in hardly been there yet my continued confusion frustration loneliness dead ends am absolutely certain there is no God, in the sense that you are absolutely certain there is nothing real that resembles what you can conceive when you pronounce that name absolutely certain there is no Good, in the sense that you are absolutely certain there is nothing real that resembles what you can conceive when you pronounce that certain there is no Happiness, in the sense that you are absolutely certain there is nothing real that resembles what you can conceive when there is no Certainty, in the sense that an atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God ringing in my ears does not want me in the Church ringing in my when a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, in my then we know that it is really a door my every perfect life is a parable invented by God ears
Life changing
I guess when one is ready for certain changes in one's life God leads us to those things that will best facilitate that change. Simone Weil has been a catalyst for a major change in my life. Her writings have struck a responsive chord in my life. Although some of her writings are difficult for me to understand, the underlying message is powerful. I found myself relating to her desire to discover the love of God in her life. I appreciated her soul searching honesty is wanting that encounter to be completely without deception, pretense or even pride. She so wanted to guard against a false religious experience, or siimply a social religious experience. Her descriptions of what it is to truly love another are profound. Her life is a journey that I want to follow. I looked up the meaning of her name in the dictionary. It means "one who hears." Certainly, she is one who sought to hear the voice of God. I, too, want to hear the voice of God without deception or pride. I honor Simone as a true religious teacher for me.
a bit unorthodox, to say the least
I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. I was hoping to give this book to my brother-in-law, someone with a Catholic upbringing but a Marxist philosophy now- a bit of the reverse of Simone Weil. The theology in this book is so individual, however, as to make me uncertain that it could even be called Christian. In any case, I'm not sure it's a life-path that would inspire any other than a very select group. Because it is different, and because there probably are some people that it might speak to I give it 2 stars, but it wasn't for me.
by a modern saint
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a remarkable saint of the modern era. After being raised in a Jewish middle class family and graduating from the finest schools, she went to work in the inner city as a blue-collar factory worker. She once complained to the supervisor about a coal drill: "This drill was designed to break rocks. It was not designed for human hands" while illustrating the vibrating effects with her arms. She reportedly debated Trotsky on the living conditions of the proletariat into the ground.
Weil died of physical and mental exhaustion at age 34 after an arduous life of fasting, writing, and working in solidarity with the most downtrodden of society. Besides her amazing solidarity with the working class, it is Weil's profound writings that have established her legacy. Contemporary Albert Camus called her "the only great spirit of our time." T.S. Eliot wrote in his forward to one of her books: "We must expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint." In his essay titled, "The Importance of Simone Weil," Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "France offered a rare gift to the contemporary world in the person of Simone Weil." Waiting for God (Harper Perennial, 2001) is the best introduction to her spiritual writings, and what follows are some highlights from that work.
The first few chapters consist of letters she wrote to her friend, Father Perrin. Though one gets a better sense of how she felt and struggled daily living out her ideas, it is her four essays in the latter half of the book that show the most profundity and coherence of thought. Every page, nearly every paragraph has such significance, one cannot finish reading an essay without being ravished through the direction of one who knew the spiritual life as deeply as she did.
When I first read the essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God," I was having trouble picking up a case to read for law school. It seemed pointless especially since I had already decided to become a pastor rather than an attorney. But Weil showed me that "the key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention." (p.58). She states, "Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer." (p.59) This explains why Weil mastered several languages including Sanskrit and a wide range of academic subjects: they helped her to pray more effectively. She exhorts, "Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great treasure." (p.64)
In another application, Weil insightfully states that studying also helps one love his neighbor. She explains, "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention." (p.64) Hence studying helps enable the soul to "[empty] itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth." (p.65) The immeasurable help that studying can bring to others is captured in this thought: "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle." (p.64)
In the next essay "The Love of God and Affliction," Weil writes:
"The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. It is not surprising that the innocent are killed, tortured, driven from their country, made destitute . . .since there are criminals to perform such actions. It is not surprising either that disease is the cause of long sufferings, which paralyze life and make it into an image of death, since nature is at the mercy of the blind play of mechanical necessities. But it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign lord. At the very best, he who is branded by affliction will keep only half his soul." (p.69)
Weil defines affliction as the experience of "physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time." (p.81) She analogizes it to a nail that God uses to pierce the center of one's soul, to leave the person as it were crucified, where he or she can experience God most intimately as Job and Christ did in view of God's apparent absence.
But Weil warns that amidst affliction, if one does not strain to hear an absent God in silence, or feel the beauty of God in the world's absolute obedience to Him, then the person remains like a slave with half a soul. For "sin is not a distance," according to Weil, "it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction." (p.73) In other words, losing hope is a greater sin than acknowledging one's feelings of abandonment by God. She elaborates that just as two strangers may be near but not together and two friends may be apart but still near, "God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. . . . That is why the Cross is our only hope." (p.75)
In her essay "Forms of the Implicit Love of God," Weil comments on four loves: of neighbor, the order of the world, religious practices, and friendship. Regarding love for our neighbor, she profoundly states, "The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbor and justice." (p.85) She explains that "the supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship." (p.85) Thus a believer cannot show love to his poor neighbor if he assumes that he is reaching down or doing the impoverished person a favor.
Instead a believer must seek to reaffirm the dignity of this person made in God's image before seeking to help him. (p.88) Weil comments that "[i]t is not surprising that a man who has bread should give a piece to someone who is starving. What is surprising is that he should be capable of doing so with so different a gesture from that with which we buy an object. Almsgiving when it is not supernatural is like a sort of purchase. It buys the sufferer." (p.91) The beauty of the inseparability of justice and love is that it creates solidarity between rich and poor, and allows the coexistence of generosity and respect. In this way of "creative attention" we become God-like. Weil elaborates:
"God alone has this power, the power really to think into being that which does not exist. Only God, present in us, can really think the human quality into the victims of affliction, can really look at them with a look differing from that we give to things, can listen to their voice as we listen to spoken words. Then they become aware that they have a voice, otherwise they would not have occasion to notice it. . . . God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet." (p.93-4)
Regarding love of the order of the world, Weil writes, "[T]he soul's natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high." (p.103). She describes the beauty of the world as "Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter." (p.104) Weil however laments that too many treat the dim reflections of God's beauty on earth as the final and only reality (as manifested in luxury, art, science). (p.106-8) This locating the absolute in pleasure is the "crime of idolatry." (p.111)
On the love of religious practices, the thought most associated with Weil's contribution to spirituality is that "one of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us." (p.125) She offers the illustration: "The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it." (p.125) Weil is adamant that "the will cannot produce any good in the soul." (p.126) She writes:
"That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way . . . not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed." (p.127)
To the contrary, Weil emphasizes that "the effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent." (p.126) In other words, "[t]he crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience." (p.126) Thus, Weil exhorts, "it is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that befits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire." (p.125)
She distinguishes between morality, which depends on the will, and religion, which consists of desire, and concludes, "It is desire that saves" and again "to long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save us." (p.127-8) Acknowledging the counterintuitive nature of true sanctification that is contrary to the commonly held view of it being a matter of sheer strenuous will power, Weil nevertheless exclaims: "There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts" and "this waiting for goodness and truth is . . . something more intense than any searching." (p.127-8) She perceptively observes that "the notion of grace, as opposed to virtue depending on the will, and that of inspiration, as opposed to intellectual or artistic work, these two notions, if they are well understood, show the efficacy of desire and waiting." (p.129)
Weil's comments on friendship are brief, so I will be brief. She defines it as "a supernatural harmony, a union of opposites." (p.132) She explains, "In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity. All friendship is impure if even a trace of the wish to please or the contrary desire to dominate is found in it." (p.135) Thus "in a perfect friendship . . .the two friends have fully consented to be two and not one, they respect the distance which the fact of being two distinct creatures places between them. Man has the right to desire direct union with God alone." (p.135)
She concludes her essay on the four loves with a few more precious insights only one of which I'll mention. She encourages people to cherish the certainty of one's hunger for God as invaluable even if one is uncertain of His presence. For the greatest argument for the existence of God, as with bread or water, is hunger and thirst. (p.138)
In her essay "Concerning the Our Father," Weil explicates the Lord's Prayer sentence by sentence. His prayer had special meaning for her because through it, she once wrote in her diary, Christ daily "descended and took her." I leave it to the reader to discover its riches.
Enter Stage RightProgressive death and debt IV: Without rootsBy Michael Moriarty The Need For Roots, by Simone Weil, is a philosophic examination of human necessity, a treatise created by a French Communist who eventually left Communism to witness to the truth and power of the Catholic Church and the meaning of