Greetings,
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a
French Jewish writer, social and political activist, and religious seeker. She left her job as a teacher to become a
laborer in order to identify with the worker, and later joined the
International Brigade against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. She was forced to flee France in the Second World War, and ended up working for
the Free French government in London. She died at
the age of 34 due to an empathetic, forced diet. Her agnostic, anticlerical position was
altered in the latter part of her life by a sincere attraction to Christianity. Until her death she was torn between the
two positions. Her fascinating writings
make clear that she continued “waiting for God.” This excerpt is from her Waiting on God,
English translation (1951), pp. 77f.
“When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock
received by the large head of the nail passes into 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 point 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…
“He whose soul remains ever turned in the direction of
God while the nail pierces it, finds himself nailed on to the very centre of
the universe. It is the true centre, it
is not the middle, it is beyond space and time, it is God. In a dimension which does not belong to space,
which is not in time, which is indeed quite a different dimension, this nail
has pierced a hole through all creation, through the thickness of the screen
which separates the soul from God. In
this marvelous dimension the soul, without leaving the place and the instant
where the body to which it is united is situated, can cross the totality of
space and time and come into the very presence of God.
“It is at the intersection of creation and its
Creator. This point of intersection is
the point of intersection of the branches of the Cross.”
Yours
& His,
DED
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