The Pursuit of a Soul

Tonight, I am captivated by something Simone Weil once wrote, and which I was reminded of when I was browsing Casey's blog (it's his "favorite quote"):

God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to capitvate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightning flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has become entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.

I've always loved Simone Weil, not because I agree with everything she said or did (the girl was a bit nuts, and I'm not just talking about her eating disorders), but because of how passionate and mystical she is, and because I love sensing those kinds of things in a person's language.

And Weil is particularly interesting to me because she embarked, in some sense, on a journey opposite mine. I move from Christianity to Judaism, and she converted to Christianity (she was born into an agnostic Jewish family). Sometimes I do wonder, however, whether we move not in opposite directions at all . . .

Words are . . . everything. And not always because of what they represent, or what they brazenly claim to evoke, but because of how they taste . . . feel . . . sound. I like words that get under my skin and make my heart race. I like combinations of words that leave me feeling chilled. I live for moments within language that cause me, as I sit alone late at night, to close my eyes, smile to myself, draw the palms of my hands up to my cheeks, and press inward with them.

Of course I'd read this quote before, though I can't at the moment recall in which of Weil's works I initially discovered it. But it earned my special reaction tonight as I considered it. It makes me think of Levinas's comments about atheism, and how the path to G-d often takes one through atheism before a true experience of the divine can be embraced. I want to read Weil's moment at which the soul is alone, groping its way back to G-d, as atheism. Perhaps only for this moment.

And for tonight, I think what I love about this is the vision of a god who would wear himself out in pursuit of one soul. And yet, of course, I know that this says much more about me, and the divine entity whom I would like to envision in the heavens, than it does about anything, or anyone, else.