Simone Weil’s life flamed like a bright candle before she died at the age of thirty-three. A French intellectual, she chose to work on farms and in factories in order to identify with the working class. When Hitler’s armies rolled into France, she escaped to join the Free French in London, and there she died, her tuberculosis complicated by malnourishment when she refused to eat more than the rations of her countrymen suffering Nazi occupation. As her only legacy, this Jew who followed Christ left in scattered notes and journals a dense record of her pilgrimage toward God.
Weil concluded that two great forces rule the universe: gravity and grace. Gravity causes one body to attract other bodies so that it continually enlarges by absorbing more and more of he universe into itself. Something like this same force operates in human beings. We too want to expand, to acquire, to swell in significance. The desire to ‘be as gods,’ after all, led Adam and even to rebel.
Emotionally, Weil concluded, we humans operate by laws as fixed as Newton’s. ‘All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.’ Most of us remain trapped in the gravitational field of self-love, and thus we ‘fill up the fissures through which grace might pass.’” Philip Yancey
