"Over 2,000 years ago, there was a wandering teacher in Israel named Jesus. In his deeds and in his words, he led people to love not only their families and friends, but to love strangers and even enemies -- and to love love itself. His followers practiced and repeated his message after his death and formed communities which spread and grew around the world."
That's my summary of the Plain English Version of the New Testament and of the Christian religion. There is a way to deliver the Christian message without Christian jargon.
My latest book, Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus, is animated by the same motivation: to translate the faith into everyday language, so that beginners, as well as Christians cultivating "beginner's mind", can access it directly and begin to live it out.
After reading "Gravity and Grace" by the French philospher/theologian Simone Weil, I'm inspired to go farther with this project.
Simone Weill lived for only 34 years, through the upheavals of World War II and the tumult that preceded it. She was a Jewish by heritage, a philosphical prodigy at the Sorbonne and a radical leftist who then found herself attracted powerfully by Catholic Christianity. Though she never was baptized, her writings, most of which only came into print after her death, distinguish her as an important theologian of Christianity. In Luke 9:58, Jesus said: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” That was Simone Weil: an "insider" by virtue of her deep practice of Christian contemplation, but an "outsider" with noplace that felt right to lay her head inside the Christian fold.
Years ago, I became her devotee after reading "Waiting for God", a collection of her essays. How I failed to read "Gravity and Grace" sooner, I can't explain - but I'm very grateful I got around to it. (Thanks to "musings" reader Greta Van Damme for leading me to it!)
Simone Weil was painfully lacking in social graces, though her intentions were graceful. She exasperated her family and friends even as they recognized her inner saintliness. Her way of writing was as unvarnished as her personality. What some writers would say in two pages she would strip down to a sentence crystal-clear in plain prose, yet so dense that it needed to be soaked in water overnight before it could be consumed. Even then, the reader needs to go over it again and again to let it metabolize in the mind and soul.
Here I offer but a subset of the many, many passages I highlighted in my copy of her book. They amount to a Plain English Version of Christianity (translated from French), with my commentary added:
The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.
Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things.
Simone Weil was enthralled by the Catholic mass in her early encounter with the faith. The Christian gospel, with its embodiment in the eucharist, spoke to and for her soul. For her, there was a core of truth in the faith that had been clouded by the theological and institutional trappings of the church. Her work was to clear that fog of doctrine and jargon and go to the heart of the Christian message, in word and deed.
Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
There is absolutely no other free act which is given to us to accomplish, only the destruction of the “I”.
I am all. But this particular “I” is God. And it is not an “I”.
We have to be nothing in order to be in our right place in the whole.
To be proud is to forget that one is God….
Humility is the refusal to live outside of God. It is the queen of virtues.
May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
A case of contradictories which are true. God exists. God does not.
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” There we have the real proof that Chrsitianity is something divine.
“In the desert of the East..” We have to be in a desert. For he whom we love is absent.
Simone Weil saw clearly that Christianity is rooted in paradoxes which are intrinsic to the human condition. Living selfishly seems like it would lead to happiness, but it leads to frustration. Living selflessly sounds like the opposite of fulfillment, but is really the only way to get there. We would like to believe in a benevolent, all-powerful God - but it is only by forsaking any such conception or description of God that we can enter into the divine presence - which takes the form of an absence. But this divine void is at the same time filled with the whole universe. We want to be seen - but in order for us to see, our egos must disappear. Sitting with these contradictions, accepting their reality, was the heart of faith for Simone Weil. She had no use for flowery theologies that attempted to explain them away or gloss them over. For her, facing these conundrums squarely was the essence of contemplation.
We imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real; we have to fasten onto the hunger.
Catholic communion. God did not only make himself flesh for us once, every day he makes himself matter in order to give himself to man and to be consumed by him. Reciprocally, by fatigue, affliction, and death, man is made matter and is consumed by God. How can we refuse this reciprocity?
We must become nothing, we must go down to the vegetative level; it is then that God becomes bread.
The Eucharist should not then be an object of belief for the part of me which apprehends facts. That is where Protestantism is true. But this presence of Christ in the Host is not a symbol, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image, it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself, it is not supernatural. There the Catholics are right…
For Simone Weil, the eucharist was both a sign and that to which the sign referred, a sign of a reciprocal relationship between human beings and Ultimate Reality, and the essence of the relationship itself. She offered a corrective both for Protestants, who in the Reformation began to view the eucharist as symbolic, and for Catholics, who see it as the literal body and blood of Christ. I believe this is central to the progressive Christian project: to embody our faith through the sacrament of communion. To experience directly the real presence of the divine in the bread and in the wine. To make it a body-trip again, and not just a theological head-trip.
For Weil, the dialectic in the relationship of humanity with God was demonstrated directly in the mass. Yet she never took the bread and wine herself. We might call her relationship to the eucharist something like Catholic "adoration of the blessed sacrament", in which the consecrated host, enclosed in a "tabernacle" box on the church altar, is contemplated visually and spiritually by the faithful between masses. In an essay on beauty, she wrote: The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be... Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat."
It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day…. We must be rooted in the absence of a place. 86
Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.
Adam and Eve sought for divinity in vital energy. A tree, fruit. But it is prepared for us on dead wood, geometrically squared, where a corpse is hanging. We must look for the secret of our kinship with God in our mortality.
I have to be like God, but God crucified.
We are the crucifixion of God.
God gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect – it is for them to choose.
The cross as a balance and as a lever. A going down, the condition of rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven. A lever. We lower when we want to lift.
…the intersection of the world and that which is not the world. The cross is this intersection.
The point of contact between a circle and a straight line (a tangent). This is the presence of the higher order in the lower under the form of what is infinitely minute. Christ is the point of tangency between humanity and God.
Simone Weil's brother was a prodigy in geometry, which shaped her perception of the cross. It was for her a geometry of paradox: a lever bringing heaven to earth and earth to heaven. The intersection of the divine and the earthly. Like progressive Christians today, her focus in contemplating the cross was not substitutionary sacrifice - not the theology of Jesus dying for our sins - but rather the cross as the sign and the reality of the human and divine experience of suffering. Her interpretation of the cross resonates with that of Carl Jung in his "Answer to Job", a mythical, depth-psychological depiction of the gospel story of the crucifixion as God's restitution for the suffering he inflicted unjustly on Job: "Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous." There is no way around suffering. There is only the way through it, beginning with staring at it, as it is.
Our consent is necessary in order that he may perceive his own creation through us.
God who is no other thing than love has not created anything other than love.
I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am.
We must try to love without imagining. To love the appearance in its nakedness without interpretation. What love then is truly God.
Like progressive Christians today, Simone Weil saw God as love. Not just warm, fuzzy, romantic, or familial love. Rather as agape love, which embraces all beings and things - and all experiences, including suffering. Communion with the divine was, for her, manifested in attention:
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious.
The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem… We must not want to find…. To draw back before the object we are pursuing. Only an indirect method is effective.
Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality.
By attending to reality, we attend our way to God. Attention = prayer = love = God.
And how to live out that love in our lives? Simone Weil's spirituality flowed seamlessly into a mysticism of ethics:
We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well-directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those which we are unable not to do.
All absolutely pure goodness completely eludes the will.
In general, the expression “for God” is a bad one. God ought not to be put in the dative. We should not go to our neighbor for the sake of God, but we should be impelled toward our neighbor by God, as the arrow is driven toward its target by the archer. To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the plowed field, between the data of a problem and the solution, between the blank page and the poem, between the starving beggar and the beggar who has been fed.
We must act as becomes a slave while contemplating with love…
We experience good only by doing it.
One does not fall into good.
Her aim was to be so suffused in God that she would have no choice about what actions to take or refrain from taking. By disciplined abandonment of the ego, by living out St Paul's words - "it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me", ethical action would flow naturally - or, as she might have put it, supernaturally.
I must move toward an abiding conception of the divine mercy, a conception which does not change whatever event destiny may send upon me, and which can be communicated to no matter what human being.
This sentence from "Gravity and Grace" expressed Simone Weil's personal manifesto: to reduce the Christian religion down to its bones, and express its universal truths in ways "which can be communicated to no matter what human being". And, I daresay, that is the mission of progressive Christianity today. To express - and to live out - the P.E.V. - the Plain English Version of the faith.