Alright, I did not intend to pick up Gravity and Grace when I was kept awake by a mighty heartburn from hell last night. "How to raise a happy baby" was more like what I was after. But right now all of my twenty seven baby books are in Durham and I'm in Alsace.
The books I've got left at my mum's are so dense that I never even fancied taking them to Durham to try and read them. Gravity and Grace is sitting right on top of Bonheoffer's impossibly dense Ethik (in the original German, which is so freaking dense that even my German friends read the English translation first). So anyway, 3am on a Thursday and a raging heartburn was a good a set of conditions as any to revisit my love-hate relationship with Simone Weil's oeuvre. The notes I scribbled in the book tell it all, ranging from "pure unadulterated genius!" to "you f***ing sicko".
I'm convinced that I'm not doing justice to her chapter on "self" and superimposing some thoughts of my own, so I do recommend getting the original text if you can. I'd love to link to the full text but I can't find it online. It's a short text which not disappoint those Christians who find themselves dwelling in the absence of God more often than they would want to.
Right at the begining of the book, Weil asks a fantastic question: "How come people never seem to have nearly enough energy to do the right spiritual things but have plenty of energy for immediate self-seeking priorities"? The former energy she calls "grace", while the latter is "gravity". The objective: more grace, less gravity. That is bound to get me interested.
Her chapter on "self" turns out to be suprisingly practical (or maybe it's just my reading of it). Weil posits that all human start out with quite a high level of "self" which in itself is neither really good nor really bad. The self can be -externally- destroyed by evil (she's thinking war crimes and extreme exploitation and alienation) or the self can be -internally- given to God by the creature. Because of her first hand experience of the Spanish Civil War, she has plenty of experience of the total collapse of the selves of people who have suffered intensely under evil powers and also a fair deal of experience of the ineptitude of those ideqlistic types who would have liked to "help" them.
She reckons that there are stages in the -external- destroying of selves by evil powers:
1. At the first stage, individuals suffer intensely from the humiliation and feels extreme revolt "like a fighting animal".
2. At the second stage, when the self is "half dead", it can be woken up by pure love. And yet the experience is incredibly painful for the individual who frequently lashes back at the dogooder. At this point she says it is our duty to absorb some of the anger.
3. In most extreme cases the self has been fully killed by evil forces. The person enjoys receiving streams of love and attention from a variety of sources but s/he is not nourished by it and does not fully re-emerges.
On the other hand, she reckons that your "self" is the only offering you can ever give to God.
When you do, some of the space formerly occupied by your "self" is occupied by the presence of God, which alone has the resources of love which does not harm. Bit by bit the presence of God (in what was formerly you) can at times restore the selves that have been destroyed. It's a bit like St Paul saying that he does not live any more, but Christ lives in him, although Weil herself does not use this specific example.
But that's not easy to do, and surrendering your "self" is not something you can do in five minutes, or in five years either. You can kid yourself that you did, but that has the potential to make you dangerous if you engage with people who are vulnerable. Weil cautions against the danger of love that isn't pure love.
Weil says that this offering of your self to God takes supplication. Now if you supplicate a human being, she says, you are trying to make them see things like you do so they will change their mind. But suplicating God involves forgetting about yourself and what you think and begging God to "rewire" you so you can see and operate in God's way and God changes you. [And in my opinion that can take a hell of a lot of time].
I'm going to leave this post here for now. The stuff I'd like to write about next, while directly related, is not found in Weil's material but in other things I've got from various sources. So it seems fairer to start another post later. I haven't fully digested the chapter yet, and there are some ideas I'm not entirely comfortable with but I can't pinpoint why. Mostly to do with my unconditional allegiance to Carl Rogers I suspect. Weil is way too pessimistic.
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