12/10/22

When I was in Seattle a couple of months ago, I picked up a copy of Waiting for God, a collection of letters and essays written by Simone Weil. Her life story is incredibly interesting and I think of her as one of the unnamed saints of the church, living a life of service to others with a faith deeper and more expansive than many of the saints who are named. There are many gems in this book, like the part of one of her letters to Fr. Perrin where she talks about the dangers of the church as a worldly institution and how things like feelings of patriotism can easily be caught and compel one to do and support things that are otherwise evil. One example she gives are saints who approved of the Crusades and Inquisition (12-15). And I think she's correct that there's a real danger of becoming absorbed in the social, being swept away into evil because that world is the domain of the devil, or from the Buddhist view, the domain of the defilements of greed, aversion, and delusion. I think that's why many mystics tend to turn away from the world and live in solitude or communal communities of like-minded people. She also speaks of truth in a deeply profound way, suggesting that she could never be a part of something, no matter how much she loves it, if it limits her intellectual search for truth, "that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms" (27). And I think her essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School with a View to the Love of God" gets to the heart of prayer and meditation, as well as the important role of education in developing our powers of attention, that "prayer consists of attention," the "development of attention forms the real object" of education (57), and "students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examination, to win school success; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of attention" (59). Even if we're not good at something and fail, such as trying to solve a geometry problem, the effort of concentration and attention that we devote to trying is never wasted as "we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension" and "this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul" (58). (And I think this is even more important now, in a time where the speed of technology and our daily lives makes it even more difficult to cultivate this kind of attention.) In terms of prayer and our developed faculties of attention, she write that, "It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God" and "the higher part of attention only 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" (57). In this, I very much see a connection between attention in Christian prayer and mindfulness in Buddhist meditation, with mindful awareness and concentration leading toward the absorption found in deep states of meditation (jhana) and union with 'the deathless.'