seek v wait

Wait v Seek. Seek v Wait. Here is a thought from Simone Weil that strikes a note with me as I contemplate that seemingly for me everlastingly tormenting proverb that I learned looking out the window of my Episcopal seminary classroom and reading it inscribed in the lintel over the door of the adjacent library building, Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will. New to the idea at the Time, the proverb struck me as liberating that my denomination's seminary, which I'd expected to Teach Me The Truth, was open enough to signal that they were not the repository of Truth, but the place where I might begin my own search for Truth. 

A reason that Simone Weil's thought appeals is that instead of seeking God that is Truth and/or Truth that is God, I might relax and let the Truth of God seek and find me instead, if God wishes and not if God does not wish. At any event there is surely no rush, for God is never in a hurry and I have no expectation of a successful end to my search as long as I am in this life. Having neither interest nor imaginings about another life - - Life is Good and one Time round, this is it, Time is all we have and praise to God blessed be He, as Simone says elsewhere, God inhabits Eternity, we inhabit Time. Which is why I try always to capitalize Time, it's that important, my sole gift possession, and mine only for the instant moment. 

Anyway, Weil's thought, in a letter to Fr Perrin expressing her spiritual autobiography* - -

"I may say that never at any moment in my life have I 'sought for God.' For this reason, which is probably too subjective, I do not like this expression and it strikes me as false. As soon as I reached adolescence, I saw the problem of God as a problem the data of which could not be obtained here below, and I decided that the only way of being sure not to reach a wrong solution, which seemed to me the greatest possible evil, was to leave it alone. So I left it alone.

"I neither affirmed nor denied anything. It seemed to me useless  to solve the problem, for I thought that, being in this world, our business was to adopt the best attitude with regard to the problems of this world, and that such an attitude did not depend upon the solution of the problem of God."

Her expression "the problem of God" is apt because that's exactly what it is for a mortal who is seriously contemplating and for whom no manner of human-conceived doctrine, dogma or creed is sensible or sufficient to address much less answer the question or resolve the problem. So, search, the seeking; and, as Weil says, there's no point in it anyway because it can't be solved; although there is the fun and stretch of the exercise. So - - back off and let God seek me? But that's no fun. Retired, I have nothing else to do, eh?

Simone Weil waited, but God never came - - or correction, God did come in other ways but never to call her into accepting baptism, which was the subject of her Waiting. Her vocation was counter to the notion of baptism,  her life calling, which in her life she lived beautifully, to be an outsider with outsiders, especially outsiders whom insiders actively regard as outsiders. I am not Simone Weil who is saint, but I follow her and I thank her, as I thank Christian Wiman whose thinking reads very much in touch with Weil's thinking. 

Wiman, who struggles with his vocation to teach in a theological seminary where most of the students are, he opines, half-atheist. If I were wishing Wiman well I might hope for him the success of seeing some of those half-atheist students graduate to half-agnostic. Or maybe 90% or even All, as none of us are "gnostic" in that sense of the word, we are all of us, as the Nicene Creed has it, Πιστεύομεν, We faith; Agnostic: We do Not Know, We believe, open-mindedly mindful that God could be shaking his Head and laughing, or weeping, every Time we stand and say it; God eternally mindful of the bloody, violent human history of constructing that Creed, history that we humans have forgotten if we ever knew. 

Not for public curiosity, a wa/ondering thought for and note to myself as Summer 2025 rocks along warm, humid, mostly wet and gray, someTimes threatening, beautiful days.

RSF&PTL

T89&c

*Simone Weil, Waiting for God, page 62, "Spiritual Autobiography" Harper & Row, NY, originally published 1951 by G. P. Putnam's Sons

published in +Time; perhaps on Facebook for the rest of the afternoon