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]
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