2,000,000,000,000
Early morning is my only thinking Time and my only reading Time. I have long past issues of wonderful magazines that I've not opened even to read the bright title of the wonderful front cover, even less thumb through the cartoons, and not at all read the intelligence within. Instead, I open something that's waiting on my computer desktop and stored inside. Again this morning as often, "Waiting for God," my English translation of Simone Weil's thoughts, and especially her letters to her friend Father Perrin. The nod to Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" is not coincidental.
She struggles for Truth, even for the Truth. Born and raised a secular Jew, she is outside the church but she identifies with the Christian message as she understands it, that God is love and that God's will for us is love; but she struggles with her certainty that God calls her to deny herself baptism into the Christian community but to remain outside as a self-identified Christian who, because of Truths in other, even all, religions, cannot enter the one religion because that would be denying the others; so she remains outside not the Faith, but the membership, the belonging. She refuses to belong, because belonging to one community would deny her the sense of the Truth and value of all other communities.
She understands that those who were born into and grew up accepting the dogma of the Christian community do not have her sense of being outsiders. She considers herself an outsider, and I don't recall ever reading her acknowledging that being born Jewish made her a Jewish community insider even though she was raised in a secular Jewish family. To herself she's simply an outsider.
Simone writes long and philosophical, and she is acclaimed not only because of her mind boggling eccentric brilliance, but because her writing is convoluted and difficult. So, if you read and don't want to dig in and understand her, you proclaim her brilliant; because it might mark you yourself as a simpleton, you don't add that she can be intellectually overbearing, you close her book, and you go on to something else.
I try to stick with her.
Simone is not simply struggling with or for Truth itself, she is struggling with herself in her struggle. She doesn't have answers as would be expected of a philosopher or, especially, a systematic theologian. Her struggle is with herself, and that she is, without realizing it, because of her deep exposure to it, trapped in regarding Roman Catholic dogma as Christianity that she cannot sign up for, while knowing that Christianity is love God love neighbor. She's into the message but not the media, so to speak, so she stays outside as a believer.
My problem with Simone is that reading her struggle, and her writing itself takes the reader into the struggle, brings me into my own struggle. She identifies with the Universe as she knew it in her Time. I can and might identify with Simone, but, born in 1909, she is a generation before my living into new knowledge of the Universe because of our deep space exploration telescopes. Simone's is a universe with a blue sky that you can look out into and struggle with the idea of God's heaven as one's own future dwelling place. My universe is "you are here"
Also, Simone speaks repeatedly of "Christ" in a specifically closed Christian sense that "Christ" is Jesus' last name, instead of the Greek translation for Jewish "messiah" or English translation "anointed one." She can't become an insider baptized Christian in a dogmatized community. Without the dogma she might be baptized into, except for the issue of putting her outside all other religions.
Linda now sits down with her coffee and asks, "Are you blogging?" and I answer "Yes," then recognize that it's probably the singularly most nonsensical wandering of all +Time's (2010 - 2025) almost daily fifteen years this month.
Sorry bout that.
But not very.
In fact, it doesn't bother me in the least, nomesane?
RSF&PTL
T90