The Roots of Christian Mysticism Session 25
Summary of Rebecca Brewin's
"Simone Weil" talk, The London Christian Meditation Centre,
St Mark's, Clerkenwell, 06 June 2006
Simone Weil’s particular offering is as “Patron
Saint” of outsiders
She has something to say to us about the outsider. She might almost
be the Patron Saint of Outsiders, (both the outsider who is another
and the outsider in ourselves.) The insights of Simone Weil into
the Cross and the suffering of Christ enable us to come to understand
that the love of God is beyond even our own self-rejection.
She has a particular relevance in the modern world. Mankind’s
biggest problem is disorientation in a chaotically busy world. It
is important for us to have points of reference. She had a very
painful life in many ways.
She was a teacher and a philosopher. She was revered as a mystic
of genius proportions. She most identified herself with the margins.
There is a collection of her private letters to a friend who was
a priest. These letters reveal a strong sense of vocation. In one
of her letters she writes:
It is the sign of a vocation to remain in a sense anonymous, ever
ready to be mixed into the paste of common humanity.
She used the word “Dangerous” to describe herself.”
It was with a sense of sadness and regret, a kind of death, a letting
go of what she most valued that she pursued what she felt was true.
She considered it unwise for anyone to get close to her. She did
not want to belong to the church:
It seems to me that the will of God is that I should not enter
the church at present. The reason for this I have told you already
and it is still true. It is because the inhibition which holds me
back is no less strongly to be felt in the moments of attention,
love and prayer than at other times. And yet I was filled with a
very great joy when you said that the thoughts which I confided
to you were not incompatible with membership of the Church, and
that, in consequence, I was not outside it in spirit.
I cannot help wondering whether in these days when so large a proportion
of humanity is sunk in materialism, God does not want there to be
some men and women who have given themselves to him and to Christ
and yet remain outside the Church.
There is something toxic about her writing. It gets under your
skin and pins you down to a harsh reality. Her own uncompromising
desire was to fulfil the two commandments:
Every time I think of the crucifixion of Christ I commit the sin
of envy.
In Jesus the Teacher Within Laurence Freeman says that Simone Weil
is his favourite mystic:
More conventional Christians however cannot sidestep her prophetic
witness merely by pointing to her eccentricity. The very oddity
of her outsidership sheds light on the essential outsidership of
all Christian identity. Like any saint her uniqueness shows that
Christian identity incorporates the solitude of each individual
created and loved by God.
Background
She was born in Paris on 3rd February 1909. Her brother Andre
was very advanced in literature and science from a young age. She
fell into a deep night of the soul at 14 years old because she felt
that her gifts were so mediocre in comparison to her brother. This
horror of mediocrity fuelled her search for truth. She refers a
lot to “attention.” She brings out the idea of “the
one thing necessary.” This longing defined her journey and
her writing. She was interrupted by the war. She developed an interest
in Hinduism and in Sanskrit but her intellectual endeavours did
not take her away from her sense of vocation to the outsider. So
she worked in the Renault factory and she picked grapes in addition
to being a teacher of philosophy.
In 1941 she was introduced to a Dominican Father Perrin. This friendship
fired her pursuit of the mystical life and her life as a manual
worker. Waiting on God is a collection of essays and letters sent
to Father Perrin. Her thought can be summed up as waiting with attention.
She suffered with acute headaches and other physical ailments.
She refused extra provisions that were prescribed for her insisting
only on eating what was available to other people. Eventually her
health deteriorated so much she was admitted to the Middlesex hospital
in London then transferred to a sanatorium in Ashford Kent where
she died on 29th August 1943 at the age of 34. It seems that she
could hardly bear the insights she had been gifted with and her
constitution deteriorated as a result.
She helps us to see that the degree to which we can bear the gravity
of our cross is exactly proportional to the degree we are open to
receive God’s grace. Throughout her life she demonstrated
the degree to which she was open to the sufferings of Christ. She
takes us into the place where what it means to be human is to live
with a divine purpose.
She had the mind of a mathematician and saw maths as a way to enlightenment
because of the attention that was required to work out a problem
to find the correct answer.
The degree to which we can experience joy is the degree to which
we can take on suffering and on our ability not to have a preference
for one or the other:
Through joy the beauty of the world penetrates our soul through
suffering it penetrates our body.
A and B are good friends. They normally experience joy and suffering
at the same issues. But it is a difficult time of year for B whereas
A is full of joy. B starts to resent A being so happy. There is
a distance between the two created by these different emotional
states. It is as if B is looking at A over a great void. What A
and B assumed to be a connection between them has turned into a
chasm, a breakdown in their relationship. At this point of disjuncture
A’s joy and B’s sadness seem meaningless. Both are caught
in a plight of emptiness and meaninglessness. This is the plight
that the mystics recognise that separates us from God. It stems
from A and B’s inability to share each other’s feelings.
The Gospel imperative is to weep with those who weep and laugh with
those who laugh. This is the transcendence that can take place when
a person gets out of the cycle of expectation and disappointment
and can see that there is no difference between joy and sadness.
The pursuit of holiness comes from a willingness to be open to both.
This ability cannot come about from our own understanding. Our ability
to transcend is given to us by grace. The moment of grace is our
ability to share in the joy and sadness of the other regardless
of how we are feeling:
We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary
position at the centre, to renounce it, not only intellectually
but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to see the true
light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place
at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception
of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation
analogous to that of which takes place in the dusk of an evening
on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had first
seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognise as a rustling
of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see
the same colours, we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way.
Affliction
This is a central theme in Waiting on God. How in the place of
affliction can we still discover this thing called love. Affliction
is not what we would normally consider suffering. It is the total
disintegration of a person. It is practically impossible to love
someone experiencing affliction. If we can then we come to what
she would consider the centre of the cross:
When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received
by the large head of the nail passes onto the point without any
of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and
the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same.
The shock of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the
point to which it was applied.
Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul
and social degradation, all at the same time, constitutes the nail.
The point is applied at the very centre of the soul. The head of
the nail is all the necessity which spreads throughout the totality
of space and time.
Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and
ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature
the immensity of force, blind, brutal and cold. The infinite distance
which separates God from the creature is entirely concentrated into
one point to pierce the soul in its centre.
The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation.
He struggles like a butterfly which he’s pinned alive into
any album. But through all the horror he can continue to want to
love..For the greatest suffering, so long as it does not cause fainting,
does not touch the part of the soul which consents to a right direction.
It is only necessary to know that love is a direction not a state
of the soul.
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