Simone Weil

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.

The Weekly Wrap: December 1-7

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parcels in beige wrapping paper and christmas decorative lights
Photo by Nur Yilmaz on Pexels.com

On Giving Books as Gifts

Giving books to a bibliophile can be a fraught enterprise. Ask my family! We have such particular tastes and we read so much! The book gifter runs the risk of buying something we’ve read, or buying something that is not of interest.

The latter is not as much of a danger. Many of us like to stretch and get out of our ruts. My son often seems to find books like this. But this takes knowing your reader and maybe researching what they’ve read. Fortunately apps like Goodreads make this easier. Some create Amazon wish lists. If you want to buy me a book, search my blog to see if I’ve read it. Along the way, you will learn a lot about the kinds of books I’ve read and liked.

Take heart. In every genre, there are so many good choices. Again, my son is good at this. He knows I like baseball books and try to read at least one a year. This year, he found a great book on the World Champion 1948 Indians team. As one who suffered through many years of losing seasons and dashed hopes, it was a delight to read about the year it all came together. He knows I like crime fiction, and he introduced me to the works of Giles Blunt–a real find.

So the pro tip is to do your homework. If you are going to dash out at the last minute, a gift card to your bibliophile friend’s favorite store might be a better choice. And it is always fun to go book shopping when you are spending someone else’s money. With that, I’ll leave you to your holiday shopping!

Five Articles Worth Reading

The New York Times ‘By The Book” interviews are often fascinating glimpses into author’s lives, including what they are reading. I devoured Braiding Sweetgrass and so was delighted to come across an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Robin Wall Kimmerer Is Learning From ‘Rest as Resistance’“. She made this comment about her new book, The Serviceberry, that put it on my buy list: “It’s an invitation to question the values that underpin our current exploitative relation to the living world. Why do we tolerate an economy that actively destroys what we love?”

Speaking of writers talking about the books they are reading, The Millions runs a compilation of contributions by writers and others that posted this week: A Year in Reading: 2024. This is one I always look forward to.

In “Shakespeare the Suicide?” Larry Lockridge considers the evidence that Shakespeare might have taken his own life. Suicide figures in many of works. Perhaps he decided “not to be.”

Simone Weil was a philosopher, activist, and person of deep faith whose writing and life pose demanding questions of those who read her. In “Whose Weil?,” Jack Hanson discusses the ways modern commentators try to make her more “palatable.”

Finally, Phil Christman, a professor at the University of Michigan, poses the question. “Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future?” Particularly, he considers the closure of English programs and the rise of AI and raises important questions about what a university is for.

Quote of the Week

Joan Didion, born on December 5, 1934, made this trenchant observation:

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

I think she is right. These watershed moments define who we are.

Miscellaneous Musings

While reading Quentin J. Schultze’s You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out!, in which he draws life lessons from the movie A Christmas Story, I re-watched this classic, filmed in Cleveland while we lived there. There’s a lot of wisdom in that movie and it reminded me of Christmases of my youth (and a few schoolyard bullies).

And while I’m on the subject of Cleveland, one of the great bookstores on Cleveland’s East Side is Loganberry Books. They are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary TODAY! I’m thrilled that this indie has survived and thrived by serving the bookloving community of Cleveland. Congratulations and Happy Anniversary!

This week also brought news of a new bookstore in Columbus, Clintonville Books, located in the neighborhood of the same name. If you know Columbus, you know that Clintonville is a bookstore kind of place. Can’t wait to visit! I doubt I’ll be around to celebrate their thirtieth anniversary, but I hope they enjoy a good long run in Clintonville.

Next Week’s Reviews

Here’s what I expect to be reviewing next week. I may also do a special post on my “Best of the Year” books.

Monday: Stuart Murray, The New Anabaptists

Tuesday: Stuart M. Kaminsky, Lieberman’s Day

Wednesday: Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America

Thursday: Quentin J. Schultze, You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out!

Friday: Jason Landsel, Richard Mommsen, and Sankha Banerjee, By Fire: The Jakob Hutter Story

Well, that’s The Weekly Wrap for December 1-7, 2024!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: The Year of Our Lord 1943

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The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary: Drawing upon the work of five Christian intellectuals who were contemporaries, explores the common case they made for a Christian humanistic influence in education in the post-war world.

By 1943, it was becoming apparent that the Allies would eventually win the war. For the five Christian intellectuals in this book, the crisis had shifted from resistance to authoritarian regimes, living in the shadow of death, and how one persevered in intellectual work in war-time, to what ideas would shape the post-war world. The five intellectuals featured in this book, along with a cameo by Jacques Ellul in the Afterword, were known to one another but tended to operate in separate circles. They were: Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil.

The basic thread of this book was the common advocacy Alan Jacobs sees among these authors for a kind of Christian humanism that would shape education over and against the rising pragmatism and technocracy that prevailed in wartime. Jacob’s method is to follow these thinkers more or less chronologically, leading off with a particular thinker, and then turning to what others were saying, sometimes in response, but often independently.

Negatively, Maritain, Lewis and Weil particularly warned against technocracy. Maritain characterized it as demonic, and Lewis created the memorable N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength. Without the moral framework of Christian humanism, you had the “flat-chested” men of The Abolition of Man. Weil called for a society that began with the notion of obligations rather than rights. Eliot and Auden, the older and younger, contributed to a Christian poetics, a vision of vocation, and a vision of Christian culture.

These were formidable thinkers yet one wonders why in the end technocracy and pragmatism prevailed. Jacobs describes a wider circle that several of these participated in called Oldham’s Moot. A more extensive study of this group would be fascinating. Most of those involved were Christian and were concerned with rebuilding the Christian underpinnings of European culture. They met regularly, debated various schemes, but eventually lost energy, especially after the death of German sociologist Karl Mannheim, a Hungarian Jew who was both odd man out and set the intellectual tone.

They illustrate a challenge that faced the five principals of this book as well–translating these ideas into the warp and woof of society–its political, educational, industrial, and civic institutions. Perhaps that is always beyond the capacity of such thinkers, except that they need to capture the attention and imagination of those working in these other realms who have some influence and the creativity to translate these ideas into policy and practice. One wonders if it was a lack of people outside their circles who shared their vision and worked entrepreneurially to foster it that consigned the vision of these thinkers to their books and publications.

Many think we are at another time of crisis, one that calls us first to prayer, and then to the communal work of thinking and refining and implementing anew. Jacobs shows us what these five were able to accomplish and educates a new generation to their work. Who will be the thinkers who engage in the retrieval and refinement of their work for our time? Who will be the actors who combine thought and action in creative ways? And will it be enough to check our slide into decadence and disorder in the year of our Lord 2022? These are the questions posed to me in this work.