It is the Country that God Has Given Us to Love (Simone Weil)
Our theme this month is “God is Truth, Truth in Nature.” Rev. Stephen Kinney suggested we draw from Simone Weil’s collection Waiting for God to help articulate this theme. The following segments are borrowed from the blog, Not With Ink.
###
From the esssay, Forms of Implicit Love —
Love of Neighbor:
“The gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbour and justice.”
“To treat our neighbour who is in affliction with love is something like baptizing him.”
“God is not present, even if we invoke him, where the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing good.”
Love of the Order of the World:
“By loving our neighbor we imitate the divine love which created us and all our fellows. By loving the order of the world we imitate the divine love which created this universe of which we are a part.”
“In general…the beauty of the world is almost absent from the Christian tradition. This is strange. It is difficult to understand. It leaves a terrible gap. How can Christianity call itself catholic if the universe itself is left out?”
“The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.”
“The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation.”
“The suitability of things, beings, and events consists only in this, that they exist and that we should not wish that they did not exist or that they had been different.”
“We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.”
The Love of Religious Practices:
“Each religion is an original combination of explicit and implicit truths; what is explicit in one is implicit in another. The implicit adherence to a truth can in some cases be worth as much as the explicit adherence, sometimes even a great deal more. He who knows the secrets of all hearts alone knows the secret of the different forms of faith. He has never revealed this secret, whatever anyone may say.”
“Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation of religious practices.”
“One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us…It is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that befits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire..."
"The effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover.”
Implicit and Explicit Love:
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty.”
“God is pure beauty…God is, moreover, our real neighbour…God is also the perfect friend…In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament.”
###
