It was inevitable that I encounter Simone Weil. Our souls were intended to meet, despite our separation of time and place. In fact, regardless of our not ever meeting face to face, Simone and I found each other through the experiences and lives of many others who have been influenced greatly by her inspirational thoughts and works.

To frame the influence of Simone Weil on my life, I would identify silence and relationship as two main themes for hers and my journey together.

Silence. Often perceived as a state that is lacking or is creating absence, silence has become for myself a place of solitude and rest. Inattentive and often negligent of my soul, I discovered Simone along a journey of quiet desperation and unawareness. My soul being divided in its attention found comfort in Weil’s writings in Waiting on God.

For Weil, attention is the “sole interest of [our] studies” (p. 70) for it facilitates the orientation of the soul to prayerful stillness. Attention is not, as she describes a “kind of muscular effort” where concentration is gauged by squinting eyes and a “stiffening [of the] muscles” (p. 70); rather, attention teaches us how to find union with our task, “suspending our thought” and leaving behind the desire to be “too active” (p. 72).

Attention LEADS to waiting in silence. My restlessness is replaced by desperate patience, when my attention is married to my thirst for wholeness. The gifts of wholeness, bestowed upon the soul, are not obtained by “going in search of them”; rather, they are granted to us as we silently “wait for them” (p. 73). For Weil, “waiting is the ‘Mystical Way’” (Simone Weil Reader, xxviii), which I have discovered is a worthwhile. Waiting in silence and patience has generated, what I truly believe to be a more abiding peace, within my soul. When experiences in my life cause frustration, confusion or dissonance, patience and an increasing awareness of peace both guide me to truth. While my cognitive senses are driven to sort through information, analyze experiences and comprehend my reality, I am learning to rest in prayerful silence and waiting. In all this, my silent attention positions me towards truth, offering myself to the beautiful landscape of wholeness.

Similarly, silence has led me to a place of richer understanding of myself, others, and the divine. While I may not be able to describe this mysterious process, my attention has been drawn to the deep reality of the divine, living WITHIN and THROUGH humanity. Edward Kruk writes, “Weil did not consider the spiritual as an autonomous realm, but rather as something whose reality is expressed in the relations between people.” Silence, then, is an orienting agent TO attention for the greater value of relationship. More recently, I have grown in my understanding of the divine’s indwelling – within myself, and within others. The silent space of the soul connects me to the sacred environment surrounding me each day, recognized primarily through relationship. Evelyn Underhill, fellow mystic, clearly confirms this outward orientation of the soul in her work, The Spiritual Life. Here she writes that our cooperation with God is essential in being “agents of the Creative Spirit in this world” (p. 78) where our souls can most “truly and really interpenetrate” (p. 89). The spiritual life can no longer be isolated from the “ordinary mixed life of every day” for we actively collaborate with both the divine and others. The sacred otherness, found in human relationship, guides us in humility and grace. I am confident that this journey is worth traveling, as I recognize a richer joy in each day’s encounters with others.

Guided by my practice of silence and solitude, I have begun to recognize the profound beauty of attending to the needs of others. My “deeper silent core,” as Martin Laird describes the soul, is better able to receive the many good gifts of God (Into the Silent Land). I am then joined to humanity, wounded and groaning, requiring true compassion and sincere attention. This “saving action of love” is a “form of sacrifice” where my attention becomes “deeply satisfying” as well as “mingled with … pain” (Waiting on God, p. 90). Weil, along with Underhill, did not divorce this spiritual poverty from the certain reality of human suffering. Our attentiveness will most certainly bring the Eternal into time, and the spiritual world is lived out through relationship. Weil writes, “The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth” (Waiting on God, 64). I am transformed by these experiences of relationship, when my guide is attention. Knowing my own brokenness, my soul can most authentically empathize with others. I am daily challenged to give my attention wholly to those with whom I interact.

My honest desire is that I would never lose the desperation to love. In silence, I have learned that my relationships with others are most beautiful when my love is raw, vulnerable and true. In silence, I have found fullness.