Monday: Simone

Going to bed late and getting up early, sometimes I open my computer and instead of destroying my day and likely shortening my life by reading the News, I read from one of the books I've downloaded on the computer desktop. This morning from Simone Weil's "Waiting for God". A passage this morning: "The whole universe, as we know it through the senses and the imagination, has been turned over by God to the control of brute mechanism, to necessity and blind force, and that primary physical awareness by which all things eternally fall. The very act of creation entailed the withdrawal of the Creator from the created, so that the sum total of God and his world and all of its creatures is ... less than God himself. Having withdrawn from the universe so that it might exist, God is powerless within it, ineffective except as his grace penetrates on special occasions, like a ray of light, the dark mechanical realm of unlimited misery."

It goes on, in fact there's her superb thinking before and after (what leads a person to think and write down this stuff when there's work to be done, IN baskets to empty, wars to wage, floors to sweep, immigrants to abuse, and dishes to wash?), but this paragraph alone is a theological assertion that would explain a lot, perhaps everything. At any event, it's out there for contemplation, a matrix over our ongoing human experience of what in the next paragraph Simone calls, in a familiar term that's not hers, "the absence of God." 

Jesus gets perhaps closest to it in his "Parable of the Friend at Midnight" at Luke 11:5-13. A man goes to his neighbor at midnight to borrow three loaves of bread because a friend has arrived unexpectedly and he has nothing to offer him to eat. Despite the neighbor's initial refusal to get up because he loves his neighbor, he eventually does so due to the persistent knocking. The parable is meant to commend prayer, but instead of assurance, it has always left me, as a hopeful believer and especially as one about to step into a pulpit and preach it, in despair. The essential truth of it: knock knock knock bang bang knock knock is anyone there? knock knock bang bang bang anybody home? 

Countless Times over the fifteen years I've been writing this more or less daily nonsense, I've recalled a central question of my life, that I asked myself at the Time: can the faith of Tom Weller survive the death of William Hall?, and that answered itself, NO. I came out of that far less confident, naive, gullible, trusting. Is Simone correct with a theological assertion that's close to what professional theologians call clockmaker theology: the clockmaker made the clock, started it ticking, and left? As I typed somewhere above, it certainly fits the common experience of human life - - including mine except for that one moment on my grandfather's birthday a late winter night in 1984, in answer to my own prayer, "I AM speaking to you, Tom Weller." I was forty-something and now I'm ninety-something, and all these years, the memory of it has kept bringing me back to getting up and walking down the aisle again to the tune "Just as I am, without one plea - - O Lamb of God, I come." 

Sounds corny, stupid, a return to naïveté but nevertheless. 

That's all I'm saying this morning as I close Simone Weil and brace myself for opening the morning News.

RSF&PTL

T90 

art pinched online: William Holman Hunt, "The Importunate Neighbour" 1895