Simone Weil
I stumbled on the thoughts of Simone Weil, a female French philosopher who died at the age of 34 of a tuberculosis induced heart attack (one induced by her refusal to accept no more food than the rations the French troops fighting Germans on the front in spite of her frail health.). Solidarity with those suffering is a theme not only in her thought but also in her actions and it is exactly this ongoing congruence between her thoughts and acts that attracts me to reading what she wrote. Simone was born and lived in a time when there was a sharp distinction between the working, noble and bourgeois classes. Simone was bourgeois and this class believed it is best to keep to yourself and proof your worth through education and rational thought.
Simone wrestled with the problem human suffering to a great extent. She distinguished between suffering, that brings about physical discomfort and affliction which include physical discomfort and pain but is much broader as it affects the soul. Affliction drills into the soul, enslaves it and sometimes even robs half of it. To her affliction has evil as it’s author and preyed upon “innocent” people (meaning there is no direct relationship between the affliction that befalls a person and the imperfections or sins of that person). She did however see affliction as a matter of necessity for human existence.
Interesting is her notion of friendship which she brought into conversation with her notions of suffering and affliction…and God. She held that in friendship there are two needs met. The need for closeness and the need for distance. We have the need to be close to or one with someone else in friendship, but we also have the need to have distance from someone that doesn’t severe the bond of love and friendship despite the distance. Both experiences communicate love. This might sound very theoretical and distant until you think about your marriage or a close friendship and recognize how you sometimes have the need for closeness and other times for distance without it ending the relationship. It is indeed often the tightrope we walk and need to negotiate in our close friendships and relationships.
Now, in our relationship with God we experience closeness in his grace and provision aka the good things in life. This is one way in which we experience God’s love. But in affliction we experience distance from God and in time the overcoming love of God that does not allow distance to separate us from God. In this way also affliction becomes a way we experience the depth of God’s love. Affliction is therefore a necessity of life that should be embraced in your own life and in the lives of others. Affliction, just as much as provision could be a vehicle that carry you to a deeper understanding of God’s all encompassing and conquering love for you.
She seemed to have thought that solidarity in suffering could give us a richer experience of life and love even in times we ourselves does not experience affliction directly. What strikes me is how open this approach to embrace the good and the bad of life made her…it made her fearless, even in the face of death itself. Somebody able to deny herself and in that way find her life’s meaning and purpose.
Hope lies in the way in which the good and even the worst things that happen to us, has the potential to turn our attention to God. Not only when we experience it ourselves as individuals but also when we share in it in solidarity with other people.
So, let us get practical (like Simone got together with her deep thinking). Isaiah 58: 1-12 can help us with this. The prophet who reads these words sounds like he was Simone’s teacher. He takes a critical stance towards religion (Simone did too) and poses that religion will regain integrity and meaning if it is complemented by practical assistance to the afflicted. It recommends for of these, almost in a prescription style:
- Share your food with the hungry
- Provide shelter for the wanderer
- Clothe the naked
- Do not turn away from your own flesh and blood (or your own).
When we do this, we compliment the closeness to God in worship with the distance we experience in human affliction and see God’s love at work in it. Our social justice action ennobles our worship and our worship in turn enrich our social justice actions as rooted In God and his love for humankind.
So, seek out, join and participate in a church or para-church organization that does this. Make these actions part not only of your communal but also of your personal life rhythm. I am sceptical of easy steps to and recipe approaches to complex problems but attending to these four things is as close as it gets to a recipe for an authentic and intimate experience of God and his love. It even comes with the promise of God sustaining people who does this to remain life-giving well-springs.
Gabriel J Snyman February 5th 2020