Palm Sunday is not supposed to be like this: rainy, cold, miserable. The expressions tell the whole story: we’re not pleased with the lack of spring. It makes the whole process somehow just a touch gray, literally and figuratively.
It’s hard to smile when the temperature outside never rises above the low forties, and the rain has been puttering down, on and off, for three days.
Even the Boy, not feeling 100%, got a bit of the Polish-American Gothic vibe.
“We want everything that has value to be eternal.”
“Now everything that has a value is the product of a meeting, lasts throughout this meeting, and ceases when those things which  met are separated.”
“That is the central idea of Buddhism (the thought of Heraclitus). It leads straight to God.”
“Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death.”
“Is there a single thing in me of which the origin is not to be found in that meeting? Only God. And yet again, my thought of God had its origin in that meeting.”
And looking at our children, I have to think it was more than chance that led to my and Kinga’s meeting, but doesn’t every parent think that?
If God is, then everything else is not, writes Weil:
If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought. And this knowledge is extended to your sensibility only through suffering and death (84).
If God is, then everything else — including our suffering and death — is not. It’s a paradox of monotheism in general and Christianity in particular: when we speak of “God being,” we’re not using the verb “to be” in the same sense we do when speaking of our everyday reality. God’s “is” is not the “is” of the book that “is on my table.” God’s “is” is the “is” — the ground of every other “is,” and perhaps more appropriate written “Is.” Thomas Halik, explaining Meister Eckhart’s thought, expresses it thus:
He is “nothing” in a world of beings, because God is not a being among beings. And Eckhart goes on to declare that you must become “nothing” if you wish to encounter him. If you want to be “something” (that is, mean something, have something, know something, in short, be fixated on individual beings and the world of things), then you are not free to encounter Him (Night of the Confessor, 22).
God’s “is” can only be thought to be “nothing” in terms of our “is” because His is outside ours, the grounding of ours, the “Is.” Thus God gives Moses the name, “I Am.”
Redemptive suffering is the shadow of the pure good we desire.
Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary society.
I was never really all that comfortable with math. One would think, given the turn my theological predilections in my mid-twenties, that I would eventually have changed my mind on the topic. Not so. Math and I simply don’t get along.
Conceptually, it’s very appealing: no gray, all black and white. No maybes in math — unless there’s uncertainty in abstract math, which I can paradoxically both imagine and not imagine. The suggestion that it could be a monster of contemporary society strikes me as perhaps the first (coming 95% into the book) and only joke in the entire work. That it comes so late and stands alone as the sole example of humor makes me think perhaps she wasn’t joking.
One could argue that there is a clear line between the three in contemporary society: complex math leads to greater mechanization, which leads to a greater divide between the human producer and the money produced. That’s a very Marxist filter, though, and I’m not sure Weil would approve: she became increasingly critical of Marx as she entered her thirties.
And quite frankly, as I was last night, I’m too tired to think more of it. Oh for the end of Lent and 40 things…
Weil on transposition:
We believe we are rising because, while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others), we have given them a noble object. We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.
My thoughts — bed…
(Yet another cheat…)
I’m certain that somewhere, in all the notebooks she kept, Simone Weil wrote something applicable to today, something that I could pair with the pictures of the Boy and the Girl playing on the kitchen floor, the Girl pretending to teach E how to bake.
Perhaps she wrote something about the importance of play, the relationship of siblings, or something equally profound. She does seem only to write about profundity in the journal excerpts collected in Gravity and Grace. With a title like that, though, one could hardly expect much frivolity. And considering her biography, it’s hardly surprising.
Still, it would have been convenient to look at the topical index and find “Play” instead of just topics like “Evil” and “Illusions” and “Self-Effacement.” How can I find any suitable quote from such topics to go along with the day’s pictures?
Perhaps if she’d had kids…
It’s been some time since the whole family was together — Nana, Papa, the Girl, the Boy, K, and I. But with a prognosis for wonderful weather and a completed recovery, there was only one thing to do: pack up the family and meet Nana at Papa’s “spa” to have a mid-March picnic.
We took the kids’ bikes (though E tends to use his four-wheeler more as a walker than anything), some sandwiches, a fresh Polish spring salad, some mango juice, and made an afternoon of it.
Beauty is the harmony of chance and the good.
The element of chance in our lives would probably overwhelm us if we knew its extent. A decision not to go with a newly-founded school’s students on a field trip to the Baltic might lead to a chance invitation to a bar where one meets a new friend. A chance meeting of one’s student with the friend’s neighbor might get you both invited to an eventual wedding, where one suddenly discovers that the friend is really someone more wonderful than one imagined.
And from that string of chance — or is it more? — comes good. And so beauty.
A chance walk on an uncommonly warm February day might lead to a meeting that leads to a dear friend.
Monotony comes in many forms.
Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. Never anything real, everything about it is imaginary.
It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Celimene), etc. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
This is becoming one of those forms.