Love in the Void

After reading some essays by Simone Weil this book comes as a breath of fresh air. In this short book Weil talks about what I call infinite themes like love, suffering, or beauty. No matter what you think about her own beliefs, this book will make you take a step back and think about your own principles and morals and what you bring to the world - how you can make it become a better place.

How does one begin to approach such a modern mystic, such a pure spirit as Simone Weil? She was described Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus as "the only great spirit of our time." I first encountered her work years ago, back when I was in undergraduate school when I came across a copy of her Waiting For God. It was my love for the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky that I had been reading obsessively that caused me to begin a further studying into Existentialism and had begun reading everyone from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Camus and Sartre. It was Albert Camus statement that made me pick up a paperback of Waiting for God from the shelf of the bookshop where I was working and purchase it so that I could begin reading it on my break. What I would soon discover is that I became so engrossed in her writing that I completely forgot to eat my lunch.

I had never read anyone like her.

"Attention," she wrote, "consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of that thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with, the diverse knowledge we have acquired, which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain, who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive its naked truth the object that it is to penetrate."

Reading Weil, made me, for the first time, stop and consider what I gave my "attention" to. For her thinking is a form of attention and attention is one of the deepest forms of generosity or love that one can give another, even God. As she wrote, "Absolute unmixed attention is prayer." Attention for her is active and not passive. Prayer then is a form of active receptivity or, as she puts it, "The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest." It is a focusing on reality. It is giving a deep attention to reality. Listening as a way of understanding, of forming thought, of comprehending (whether it's listening to another person or to God). "The poet produces the beautiful," she believed, "by fixing his attention on something real."

The moral landscape within her works shattered my notion of what was and wasn't Christian. She was certainly a counter-cultural figure whose ideas on consumerism certainly ran against the grain of modern American Christianity and its consistent focus on self. Susan Sontag wrote of Weil's works that they helped us to "acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world."

Despite dying at the young age of forty-three, Simone Weil's writing is filled with a spiritual maturity lacking in much theology and philosophy. Even when I do not agree with her ideas, I cannot help but admire that they sprang from someone who is not driven by ego but the desire for transcendence in the soul. She pursued the truth, pursued God with such a fevered intensity that one cannot read her words without seeing the deepest desires of her heart.

In Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, we get a glimpse of a woman who often thought of prayer not as expression of our needs and wants but that it is "a frame of mind that leads to illumination. We pray not to change our circumstances, but to change ourselves, specifically, to increase our capacity for loving attention . . ."

Prayer is a kind of waiting on God. It is a focusing of all one's attention not on the self but on the Creator, in all that one's soul is capable of. "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity," she wrote in Gravity and Grace. Weil believed that "It is the highest part of the attention only which makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned toward God."

Attention is a focusing of our direction solely on God. This is the true substance of prayer. "Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object . . ." We empty ourselves of ourselves in order that we might be filled by that which we most ardently desire: God.

The lucidity of Weil's mind in this text is rich as it addresses love, beauty, injustice and inequality, suffering, idolatry, and virtue. These meditations are more than mere instruction but a sublime wrestling of spiritual and intellectual honesty. She grasps that, "Generosity and compassion are inseparable, and both have their model in God, that is to say, in creation and in the Passion. Christ taught us that the supernatural love of our neighbor is the exchange of compassion and gratitude . . ." which happens only when one "turns his attention toward it."

Simone Weil offers no easy or simplistic answers. Yet for those who have never read her, this book is a great introduction.