When you were very young in college, you ran across some authors, almost by accident, who took your breath away, so lucid and creative were their minds. And you promised yourself – someday I will return to your table and feast again on your wisdom. Will it be as nourishing then. you wondered, as it is now?
Simone Weil (pronounced VEY), whom
Albert Camus thought was the most courageous person among the writers of his
day, many of them, including Camus, literary giants, was hauled into the
Christian faith by the following George Herbert poem:
Love (III)
By George Herbert
Love bade me welcome.
Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love,
observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered,
worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind,
ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and
smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I
have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says
Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down,
says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
Five years after her soul had been besieged by Christ, she
knelt for the first time at the shrine in Assisi and persuaded herself at last
to say the Pater Noster daily with
such attention that she felt at each repetition Christ himself had “descended
and took her.”
Her’s was a hard mind and brilliant, like diamonds. Her
religious experiences did not – could not – separate her from the agonies of
daily life. She was driven by the wild horses of her personality never to
separate herself, in any fashion, from the misfortunes of others. For this
reason, she refused to leave Paris, then occupied by Nazis. And when she
sniffed the malodorous anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy government, she left off
teaching and joined Gustave Thibon, a lay theologian in charge of an agricultural
colony in the south of France. Later, she would petition Charles DeGaulle to parachute her into Paris. He refused.
She worked in the vineyards with peasants until her health,
always fragile, broke down. At first Thibon
mistrusted her motives. She had already attained a reputation in Paris as a
radical intellectual, and here she was perversely “returning to the soil,”
eating what peasants ate, sleeping as they slept, clothed in poverty, and
giving lectures to them on the Upanishads.
In time, Thibon became closely attached to her – as did many
others with whom over the years she had established close contact. It was to
Thibon that she entrusted her journals and occasional jottings, which he
decided to publish after her death, caused in part by her refusal to eat any
more than French soldiers at the font had at their disposal during the last
months of World War ll.
Fr. Perrin, the anvil upon which she hammered out her
thoughts on Christ, was a great friend and confidant. In the introduction to Waiting on God, a invaluable collection
of Weil’s letters and essays, Leslie Fielder writes, “One has the sense of
Simone Weil as a woman to whom ‘sexual purity’ is as instinctive as breath; to
whom indeed any kind of sentimental life is scarcely necessary. But a few lines
in one of her absolutely frank and unguarded letters to Father Perrin reveal a terrible
loneliness which only he was able to mitigate to some degree and vulnerability
which only he knew how to spare: ‘I believe that, except for you, all human beings
to whom I have ever given, through my friendship, the power to harm easily,
have sometimes amused themselves by doing so, frequently or rarely, consciously
or unconsciously, but all of them at one time or another…’”
For Weil, who suffered from crippling migraines for a good portion
of her life, suffering is not a nullity. Nor was it a nullity for Christ pinned
to a cross: “…persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul
cannot keep back the cry ‘My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?’ If we
remain at the point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that
is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary
and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow – the very love
of God… Extreme affliction…is a nail whose point is applied at the very center
of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time…
He whose soul remains ever turned towards God, though pierced with a nail,
finds himself nailed to the center of the universe…at the intersection of
creation and its Creator…at the intersection of the arms of the Cross.”
It is nearly impossible for the postmodern, materialistic
mind to believe that such airy effusions are other than poetry, and dangerous
poetry at that. But if postmodernism wishes to argue the point with Weil, its
arguments will lack conviction; for Weil’s larger point is that the believing Christian
is, in truth, a slave to the truth, a convict of Godly love. To attend is to
love.
It may shock the shriveled, inattentive mind of postmodern
academics that Herbert’s poem, which opened to Weil a window on the splendor of Christ
the criminal, is not poetry either. It is the life-giving breath of God.
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