Briefest on Simone Weil

I see that Simone Weil died today in 1943.

In the Christian calendar a saint is recalled on the day of their death as it is supposed to signify their new birth into the heavenly life. As that is not consonant with my spiritual philosophy I prefer for the most part to note birthdays. However, Weil considered herself part of the Christian camp, even though it is generally believed she was never baptised, and so a day like today seems the right moment to recall this strange, sometimes repellent, but for me more often compelling figure.

She probably wasn’t entirely sane, her asceticism spoke to an ambivalence with the material world, and she probably starved herself to death. She wrote how “attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.” I’m not sure she really got how this works. Not that she’s alone in the quandary of not clinging without cutting oneself off, and the dilemma of the closer we get to the great matter, how truth and lie are intertwined…

Among her shadows, at least for me, is how she had, to frame it in its best possible, a complex relationship with her natal Judaism.

But she also stumbled upon the great spiritual discipline. “The highest ecstasy,” she wrote. “Is the attention at its fullest.”

And Weil appears, as best I can tell from the snippets I find in her writings to have had genuine flashes of insight into the real, what some in my spiritual discipline like to call kenshos. And the detritus of those experiences which are scattered about her writings, I find to be challenging, extolling, pointing…

In that video snippet I’ve posted here, I’m much taken with the phrase “privileged observer.”

Those of us granted through circumstances mostly beyond our control the opportunity to observe – the world around us, or vastly more importantly, our own inner worlds, are without a doubt privileged.

Weil, more than nearly anyone I can think of, struggled with that fact of her life. Her commitment to the world and to the suffering people of the world is a powerful witness to the responsibility that flows from this privilege…

And in that struggle pointed out to me my struggle between the cloister and the world.

I cannot even begin to say why I was privileged with this path of stopping and seeing.

But the fact that I was has many consequences and among them many responsibilities that flow out of that privilege. It means for me not to turn from the world. It needs to manifest here in the great mess. In smaller ways in my own life. In the lives of those whom I touch or who touch me.

And, of course, for the world, sad and vast, beautiful and precious beyond saying…

And calls me to the work of healing.

Certainly how we live in the real is a complicated thing. And Simone struggled with that more than many on the spiritual path. And her successes and failures are pointers we all could profit from noticing…

Thank you, Simone!

I try to persevere…