Gravity and Grace

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Lika svårt är det för den fattige, ty han förleds nästan oemotståndligt att tro att den rike och mäktige är något. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.

Complex personality notwithstanding, the staggering force of Weil emanated from her insistence to live within the boundaries of her beliefs while simultaneously refining those boundaries.Unfortunately, this tendency increased as the book went on and I found it harder to take her seriously. But as a result, they can also easily conform to what you already believe even if that is not Weil's intention. My one consolation lies in the certainty that through the inevitable profanation of publicity her testimony will reach other kindred souls.

If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Dieva, uzdaryta tame gyvenime, jauciu kaip grynai zmogiska jega, nesusijusia su jokia dangiska sritimi, kaip Dieva, kuri ji sukure savyje savo pacios jegomis. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. If one wants to believe that Weil says something profound, then you can fool yourself into thinking that she does, when in fact there are times when there is simply no substance to her writing.All of the things that I see, hear, breathe, touch, eat; all the beings I meet - I deprive the sum total of all that of contact with God and I deprive God of contact with all that in so far as something in me says 'I'.

Her asceticism might seem exaggerated in our century of half-measures where, to use the words of Léon Bloy, ‘Christians gallop with due moderation to martyrdom’ (and, indeed, how great a scandal would be caused today by the eccentric practices of certain medieval saints? In these private reflections, at once pregnant and precise, and all springing out of painful depths of experience, mental pride is transmuted into spiritual insight. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. Her life was short, yet remarkable for many reasons, and her writings are always, at a minimum, intriguing. In her writings she continually argues against the situation where people are just cogs in a machine, pointing out how such an approach “empties the soul of everything unconcerned with speed.Att se och äta är två olika slags verksamhet – det är människans stora sorg, som börjar i barndomen och varar tills hon dör. Quizá en cualquier contexto histórico su voz está condenada a ser desatendida, como la de los profetas. Harkening back to the myth of Semele, Weil compares suffering to a “screen” standing between humankind and God. Thinking Christians will value Weil’s contributions here, in her most accessible work that inspires spiritual pondering more than preaching.

Among her contemporaries I can only think of Paul Valéry, and of Koestler in the Spanish Testament, of which she spoke to me with unmixed praise.

John Paul II’s thoughts in his encyclical Laborem Excercens on human work, where he speaks of “elements for a spirituality of work. by undertaking the brutal and menial work (considering she was a brilliant mathematician) of wartime factory labour in France. The danger, Weil cautions us, lies in forgetting that the purpose of window-washing is not to make the window more visible, but to make the landscape beyond the window more visible. We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.