September 2008 Archives

A fabulous intellectual friend of mine gave me a book for my 30th birthday called
Waiting for God by Simone Weil. Each morning’s reading left me between concluding that this woman was a mystic who had a closer contact with the divine than I could comprehend, or that she was closer to the charge of heresy by my familiar orthodoxy. The bits I did understand and resonate with are as follows:

Sin is turning our gaze in the wrong direction [73]

If we examine human society and souls closely and with real attention, we see that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and exact as the laws of gravitation. To know this is profitable and necessary. Those whom we call criminals are only tiles blown off a roof by the wind and falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice by which they became such tiles. [75]

We are incapable of progressing vertically. We cannot take a step towards the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us. [79]

We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back to our own desire for goodness. [105]

The object of science is the presence of Wisdom in the universe, Wisdom of which we are the brothers, the presence of Christ, expressed through matter which constitutes the world. [108]

The longing to love the beauty of the world is a human being is essentially the longing for the incarnation. [109]

He who has located the absolute in pleasure cannot help being dominated by it [111]

Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation of religious practices. That is why no system of morality can take its place. [129]

So when do we start doing something radical about poverty? Last night as I unloaded our $120 worth of groceries for the week, and mentally compiled my list of things to buy at target today I concluded that perhaps when my guilt becomes less bearable than my complacency or sense of powerlessness I might change something. After returning from Haiti and reading the most convicting book I’ve ever encountered- Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger- I feel like I am accountable for too much. There is a price to be paid for exposure.

One of my most favorite things about living in downtown Los Angeles between skid row and bunker hill, is how the people you walk by on your way to wherever, are just as likely to be industry executives as incapacitated indigents. This isn’t just voyeuristic curiosity, but also a sociological fascination with the differences and similarities between us all. One striking difference I often feel is how the former executive type of group is not likely to ask anything of you, or even to speak to you. The latter group is far more likely to offer a greeting and possibly a request for money, food, or a cigarette. It is the difference between self sufficiency and dependency, and I will admit that I breath a little easier when the person approaching me does not appear to require anything from me including a good evening. If I extend this principle that self sufficiency is better than dependency however my breath catches a little remembering that as a follower of Christ I am called to a life that ought to be used to offering and asking of others looking more like dependency.