Autobiography

Review: Waiting for God

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Cover image for "Waiting for God" by Simone Weil

Waiting for God, Simone Weil, Translated by Emma Craufurd with Introduction by Leslie A. Fiedler. Harper & Row Perennial Library (ISBN: 0060902957) 1973 (Originally published in 1951, link and cover photo are to current edition in print).

Summary: Weil’s correspondence with her mentor and four essays on her religious thought focused around loving and attending to God.

Simone Weil is a “one off” figures. She struggled with migraine headaches. She worked tirelessly while paying little heed to her own nourishment or her worsening tuberculosis. Weil struggled with her intellectual inferiority to her brother, the mathematician Andre Weil, mostly because she struggled with geometry while producing profound religious and philosophic insight. She died young, at the age of 34.

Waiting for God captures the essence of her spiritual journey and insights into one’s relationship with the transcendent God. The title captures a theme running through the correspondence and essays that make up this book. In “The Love of God and Affliction” she writes:

“How are we to seek him? how are we to go toward him? Even if we were to walk for hundreds of years, we should do no more than go round and round the world. Even in an airplane we could not do anything else. We are incapable of progressing vertically. We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.”

Life consists of waiting for God to come to us in love and stir in us love for him. And in her spiritual autobiography written to her priestly mentor, Father Perrin, she describes how during prayer at Assisi and in reciting George Herbert’s poem, “Love,” “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” Yet despite this profound encounter, she never felt she could enter the church.

Her letters to Father Perrin that make up the first part of this collection, explain her reasoning. Part of her answer is that she does not believe she loves God enough to deserve the grace of baptism. Another aspect is that while she loves the saints and liturgy, she does not love the church. Instead, she fears the flawed influence it might have upon her as a social structure, Thus, she anticipates many of the objections of the “nones” who would describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. While her intellectual integrity prevents her from entering the church, she takes great pains to express her gratitude to Father Perrin. At one point, she writes,

“In gaining my friendship by your charity (which I have never met anything to equal), you have provided me with a source of the most compelling and pure inspiration that is to be found among human things. For nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God, than friendship for the friends of God.

What a friend Father Perrin must have been!

Then the second part of the book turns to her essays. First is her essay on school studies. Having worked in student ministry, this essay was worth the price of admission. Specifically, Weil draws the connection between prayer and study in the act of attention. In particular, the “lower attention” given to disciplined study develops this faculty in prayer. But I also found myself wondering whether attention in our prayers also may make us attentive in our studies.

From here she discusses “The Love of God and Affliction.” She speaks of the corrosive effects of enduring affliction on the soul and how help may only be found at the foot of the cross. Only by grace may we enter into an apprenticeship of obedience that awaits the coming of God to us.

Her longest essay is “Forms of the Implicit Love of God.” The essay is divided into sections on the love of neighbors, the order of the world, religious practices, friendship, and implicit and explicit love. In contrast to the clarity of her shorter letters, I found this essay more difficult to follow. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that it read a bit like the Pensees with her thoughts grouped under the subheadings.

However, she concludes on a high note in a line by line meditation upon the “our Father.” As have many others she concludes that the prayer “contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer not already contained in it.”

This is but one of the many works she produced, most published posthumously. I differ with her at points. For example, we will never deserve grace, in baptism or anything else. Yet hers is a voice that comes from outside of our echo chambers. Above all, her insight that life consists in waiting for and attending to God captures the heart of Christian devotion.

Review: Cradling Abundance

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Cradling Abundance, Monique Misenga Ngoie Mukuna with Elsie Tshimunyi McKee. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: An autobiography of a lay leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo, describing her work with women addressing their education, helping them develop usable skills, and addressing the gender violence and health issues they face.

Maman Monique, as the author is spoken of, is an amazing woman. As a student of twenty, she was on a transport home when stopped by an illegal military barricade, with soldiers intent on confiscating their luggage. Instead of complying, she demanded to see their orders, knowing such barricades to have been declared illegal by President Mobutu. They all were permitted to leave with their luggage, and when they arrived home, the others told her father, “She is a man!” Her father told her, “That is good! You must always be like that.”

This is the account of how this Presbyterian lay leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo fulfilled her father’s words, to the betterment of many other women in her country. She narrates her life from childhood, her student days, her marriage to Tatu Mukunu, her work as an educator and entrepreneur. Her big business idea was making clothing, the wraps women wore and other accessories. First she learned to do this herself, and then to train other women. Her work grew as she was asked to lead women’s ministry with her church.

It became ever clearer that the way to empower women in a highly patriarchal society was for women to be educated and equipped to earn their own living through training in practical skill, having access to microloans, and learning how to run a business, all this out of her home in the early years. She expanded her work by launching Woman, Cradle of Abundance/FEBA to both educate and advocate more effectively.

This is hardly a story of going from success to success. Her accounts describe the setbacks of political upheavals, opposition from other church leaders, often protecting the misappropriation of funds. Yet she met these challenges with faith and strengthened others, eventually giving leadership to women’s groups in a network of African countries, and engaging in efforts for the restoration of neighboring Rwanda. We also see the structures of patriarchy at work in stripping women of economic resources, barring their empowerment and inflicting sexual and physical violence against them, not only in the culture, but sadly in the church as well.

Yet she persisted. The hardest blow was the death of her own husband, and being stripped of family belongings by his family, a cultural practice. She is forced out of leadership in her church.

Amid all this Elsie McKee, a Princeton Theological Seminary professor becomes a friend, supporter, and advocate, help Woman, Cradle of Abundance to expand its work. McKee also translated this narrative from Maman Monique’s French into English. Having never heard Maman Monique, I can only speculate, but McKee translates but doesn’t get in the way. One has the sense of sitting in a room as Maman tells her story–there is a distinctive voice to this narrative that carries both the faith and force of this woman who has done so much to empower other women. I’m glad to have been able to listen to her story and grateful for the woman who gave us her story in English without getting in the way of a good storyteller.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Autobiography of Saint Therese: The Story of a Soul

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The Autobiography of Saint Therese: The Story of a Soul
The Autobiography of Saint Therese: The Story of a Soul by Thérèse de Lisieux
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I take personal retreats regularly at a center named after Saint Therese. So it seemed only right that at some point I should read her autobiography.

It is personal narrative with a single thread throughout: Therese’s intense love for Jesus that was a consequence of her great confidence that she was greatly loved by Jesus. It is this love, even more than the fact that two of her sisters had preceded her in entering the monastery, that moved her from an early age to long to be “wed” to Christ.

She confesses at times that her writing is “muddled” and indeed it has something of a “stream of consciousness” flow to it moving from an event in her family to reflections to a narrative on caring for novitiates. Yet the theme of the love of Christ and her love for Christ weaves throughout and gives the narrative an underlying coherence.

The book speaks of her earliest spiritual memories in her awareness of the love of God for her manifest both in nature and in the Catholic mass. She describes her confirmation and chrismation and the joy of knowing herself sealed by Christ’s Spirit. She recounts her pleas with her priest, bishop, and finally on pilgrimage, the Pope to be allowed to enter the Carmelite order early. At last, all relented and she entered at age 15.

She describes the vicissitudes of monastic life and how she learns through each of these to see them as loving gifts from God to form her more deeply in the love of Christ. She discovers that this is a love that is greater than all her weaknesses. We see her embrace of caring for others in her novitiate beginning with her prayers. With that love, we see a growing passion for “lost souls” expressed in prayer both for missionary priests and the people they sought to win.

We hear this love burning more brightly as her death at age 24 approaches. Toward the end of this narrative (and her life) she wrote this, which expresses well the recurring theme of this narrative:

“O eternal Word, my Saviour, You are the Eagle I love and the One who fascinates me. You swept down to this land of exile and suffered and died so that you could bear away every soul and plunge them into the heart of the Blessed Trinity, that inextinguishable furnace of love. You re-entered the splendours of heaven, yet stayed in our vale of tears hidden under the appearance of a white Host so that You can feed me with Your own substance. O Jesus, do not be angry if I tell you that Your love is a mad love…and how can you expect my heart, when confronted with this folly, not to soar up to You? How can there be any limit to my trust?(p. 158).

The Catholic context in which this love is expressed may seem foreign to the non-Catholics like me who read this account. But one cannot help but ask oneself in reading Therese’s narrative, “do I love Jesus with anything like the longing of this woman who died so young?” As one who believes in the grace of God in Christ, I must ask whether I have anything like the confidence of Therese in the greatness of God’s love to overcome my lesser and greater sins?

Good questions for my next retreat, it seems.

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