A Letter to Simone Weil, on distance

Simone,

I came to you through a question about language and stayed because of one word I thought I already understood: grace. I grew up among Catholic masses. Eventually got tired of it and led me toward atheism. A decade later I sat through the preaching at Victory, where I found a more grounded theological application of faith, finding my own ideas being uttered to me in a context and tone I didn't expect to receive. In both places grace was a gift that brought us home, albeit me realizing that came with time and age. We could not earn it, but we always knew where it was taking us.

When I tried to say what was different about yours, I said it badly, and I want to keep that negative. I said that I also think the reverse is possible: that our being born in the image of God is a perpetual distancing of us from him, that in the end we are destined to be far away from Him, because of creation, because of the Fall. I said that your grace can be undeserved, that it can only be given, that from a human standpoint we can never expect to receive it, and that this is why the trajectory of your grace is always moving farther from God.

What I meant was that the distance is what being made consists of. We are far from Him because we exist at all. And grace, if it comes, comes down into that farness and stays there with us.

For an evening I thought I had found something of my own. Then I read you more closely. You had written that God, in creating, gave up being everything, that creation is an abdication made out of love, a withdrawal so that something other than God could be. You called the universe the distance put by Love between God and God. I had come close to a sentence you wrote some eighty years before me, without having read the page it was on.

It seems right to me that the thought came the way you say grace comes, into a place that something in my life had already emptied out for it. I recognized it before I knew whose it was.

I suspected your grace could be found in scripture, and I named the two places I could feel it without having read them closely: Job, and Abraham on the mountain with Isaac.

I have to admit there is another way to read the mountain. Kierkegaard's Abraham climbs believing, against all reason, that he will receive Isaac back in this life. His is a faith with a promise in it, a return expected even while it is renounced. If he read Abraham rightly, then the mountain belongs to the grace I grew up with and not to yours. I cannot settle which reading the text supports, and the one I lean toward may only be the one I needed.

My way of reading these stories came late, and from a strange direction. Church came first, but it was Dante who taught me, through what I can only call a negative theology, an architecture of descent, that a lot of the biblical stories are better explained by what cannot be said of God than by what can. I could only hold your contradictions because I already had a way of reading that does not ask for them to resolve. I said once that I'm not sure how much of that is true or aligned with what the objective things are when it comes to religious or theological studies. I am still not sure.

You would see the danger in this faster than I do. Once I say I understand grace through negative theology, not-knowing has become a kind of knowledge, a doctrine I keep, and keeping it undoes what it was asking of me.

So I will tell you only what I have lived. I told my wife recently that I feel like Job, though I had not read the book, because I have a sort of passivity with what life gives, I offer so low resistance to what life offers me, and I just try to make the best out of it. I do not know whether that is your concept of "attention" or only my temperament. I think you would say the two are different, and I think you would also say I am the last person able to tell them apart.

You wanted grace without the promise of consolation. I think I want it too, or want to be someone who could bear it. I can no longer read Job as a lesson in patience, or the mountain as a test that was passed, and the thought about distance I will have to leave with you, where it was first.