gravity and grace

"it is necessary to uproot oneself. to cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it everyday"
-- simone weil

reading weil's "gravity and grace" on a saturday afternoon, blanket-covered and couch-supported, i am wondering about the splinters from these trees that we carry. carrying her cross was a task that weil did in solitude, a solitary seeker of god's grace, avoiding the comforts of community.

uprooted. cut.

how to use this image of her spiritual pilgrimage to drain the desolation i projected unto these two scenes i witnessed yesterday?

an old lady, sophisticated and lucid, whose loneliness was luminous around her, had attached to the gates of the jardin du luxembourg, above the dusty-green metallic folding chair in which she was sitting, a sign with spidery script: "parlez-moi" ("talk to me")...

as i was running around the jardin des plantes and great mosque in early afternoon, around every loop of my self-created track, i watched a moroccan man dressed in his ceremonial djellaba, ready for friday prayers, seated in the bench facing the mosque with unread book in lap, standing up and sitting down, but never getting the courage to go in...

i am reading weil's book like a map to find an answer to how it is that she transforms solitude into her path to god. in "gravity and grace," she writes: "this is how we have union with god - by not being able to approach him. distance is the soul of beauty."

i am in awe of, and troubled by, this single forest on her back which is her communing rod to the divine. this has always been the splinter, the thorn, that i constantly worry and cannot let alone - how distance, and the solitude that it implies, can contain both what is sublime and what is terrorizing. and i confess that i do not understand, so i will continue reading...

weil also quotes a poem from st. john of the cross:

“What is grace” I asked God.
And He said,
“All that happens.”

i need to continue reading...