I am captivated by a philosophy that is grounded existentially in real time and space.  Nowhere is Simone Weil more fearlessly alive than in her stubborn commitment to “intellectual honesty” demonstrated by her refusal to be baptized into Catholicism. Her convictions resonate with my own: “If it were conceivable to be damned by obeying God and that by disobeying we are saved, I would still choose obedience.”¹ Weil is tormented to imagine separating herself from the racially, culturally, and religiously diverse masses of suffering humanity in order to enter the Catholic Church through baptism: “I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are.  For if I don’t love them as they are, it wouldn’t be them I love, and my love would not be true.”² She lived out the inclusive, kenotic life which saturates her philosophical writings.  Weil loved her neighbor by denying herself of Church membership through baptism while not denying the Spirit of Christ in love.³

Despite her love for God and Catholic liturgy and ritual, the social power the Church held historically for collective excess and “patriotism” frightened Weil in its capacity for contagion,⁴ something put on full media display in 2021, especially in white evangelical subcultures.  Weil states, “To disappear is not to become a part of it, and the capacity for me to merge into all of them implies that I cannot be part of any one of them.”⁵  Weil’s desire to disappear into the marginalized masses of suffering humanity not only activated her own embodied expression of Christian orthopraxy beyond the spectrum of class stigma.  Her desire to merge carried over into defying the dividing lines between Christian distinctions signified by baptismal identification.  Her intellectual honesty made her a “stranger in exile”,⁶ capable of relating to any human culture; the effect displayed was a unifying Christian ethic.  Weil is a harbinger to challenge contemporary Christendom to “make the possibility of a truly incarnate Christianity apparent to the public”—something more truly catholic as a “universal receptacle” of faith.⁷

While I greatly admire and resonate with Simone Weil’s “intellectual honesty”, her scrupulosity triggers me.  I do not have a strong inner critic, but hers has the effect of unnerving me on every page.  I am a mystic, yet I wonder if I could ever be that attentive, to myself and to others, to formulate and to live out a consistent spirituality as Weil does with such lucid honesty and sheer grit.  Her critical thinking is immaculately cohesive, and her actions are painstakingly intentional.  Weil’s rigorous attentiveness in thought and subsequent action exhausts me; my impulse is to rush pragmatically into unsustainable activity.

But Weil whispers to my own contemplative heart subversively, reminding me that “the whole world knows there is only truly intimate conversation between two or three.  As soon as there are five or six, the collective language begins to dominate.”⁸  Like Weil, I have not been able to align my own heart fully with any specific church, because to do so would be exclusivist and unloving toward others who are included by Jesus.  Like Weil, I long for a universal incarnational expression of Church which displays the loveliness of Jesus.  Underneath Weil’s scrupulosity, her affinity for Pythagorean friendship⁹ harmonizes a contemporary Church vision. 

Weil states, 

The Pythagoreans say friendship is an equality made of harmony because there is a supernatural unity between the two contraries of necessity and freedom, those two contraries combined by God in creating the world and humanity. There is equality because each one desires the conservation of the faculty of free consent in themselves and the other.¹⁰

Weil implies that “two or three gathered together” are transformed supernaturally in face-to-face intimacy by Christ’s presence in their midst when he says, “Love one another” as “Christ in us” together.  Christ lives in us, and “in his integrity—in his indivisible unity—[Christ] becomes each of us in a sense.”¹¹

Transformation happens intimately in the smallness of two or three gathering in Jesus’ name, imaging trinitarian love, no matter their differences.  Whereas the “natural tendency of every collective, without exception, to abuse power”¹² has occurred throughout Christian history, Weil believed that “it is good for some sheep to be left outside the fold to testify that the love of Christ is essentially a completely different thing.”¹³ 

The institutional Church may well be the collective “guardian of dogma”;¹⁴  meanwhile the yeast-like kingdom hidden in the culture of pandemic, grows organically in gatherings of two or three as Weil prophetically described. Perhaps, like Weil, not a few of us belong outside religious camps, thereby merging with all of them, to bear prophetic witness to a more expansive, generative, self-giving love than can be contained, preserved, or institutionalized.  In the humus of cultural diversity, enriched through Christ-in-us, a smaller yet burgeoning alternative community pulsates with life.  Birthed deeply through attentiveness to our present-day realities of suffering brought on through necessity by global pandemic isolation, this beloved family is limber, forming with relational freedom and intimacy everywhere.  Deeply rooted underground, yet rapidly growing like grass, a mosaic of neighbors connected through co-suffering divine love meet together to centralize what once were our margins.  Perhaps the Church with emptier post-pandemic pews will recognize this organically growing expression of kingdom life as legitimate and valuable… perhaps not.  Regardless, Weil models the intellectual honesty that orthodoxy in its brightest light aligns with an orthopraxy of kenotic love, inclusive of all and transcendent of barriers.  Will the Church today maintain an attentive posture long enough to reimagine church dynamically, with humility, in this less grandiose way with Weil?  If so, we will also need less of her scrupulosity in order to compassionately contend with the messiness that we have created amidst our societal and religious divisions.

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