Memo #5 ~ Simone Weil and Stringfellow

The nature of Love is, enigmatically, found in perpetual Act, defined in the solitude granted within the oneness of intimacy, elusive as vapor and yet as ever-present and powerful as well. The nature of Love is dialectical, overpowering and underwhelming at the same time, in the tiny details and thus almost unnoticable yet all-pervasive, both overflowing with Life and drawn to death, giving life and accepting death, transformative and restorative, peacable and yet bearing the Sword of Truth, both strong and broken. Power under control. Meekness. Like a body-builder holding a premature newborn gently in his arms.

Simone Weil’s conception of the madness of love and the role of consent within it made me want to dance and run and skip like a toddler. Her thoughts on relationship between us and God as being centered so around consent was such a monumental shift in language to me– she was not talking about choice, she was not talking about petition, about power, about free will; none of the structurally hierarchical language that dominates the conversation about our relating to God today even makes an appearance in her work as important or relevant. The relational language of love dominates in her writing, and rights are not the issue; sacrifice is. Listening, understanding, accepting, sharing burdens– it is the language of conpanionship: friendship. He has called us friends.

We are so easily side-tracked with squabbles and fighting (without His aid, I might add) the influences other than Him in the world. We feel we have the power ourselves to subvert Death, when really we need Him, because Jesus Christ is the Life. He is the Sword of Truth that will cut flesh from soul and expose the deceptions at work for Death in our lives for what they are. I feel that Simone would tell us to sit down with God and consent as consciously and wholly as we know how, as honestly as we can and with as much internal awareness and attention as possible, to His influence in our lives. She would tell us to open ourselves to Truth as an active Being, to trust its ways, mysterious though they are, and dedicate ourselves solely to Truth, who is was, and will always be God’s Word. The Word of Love.

Stringy wants us to be human in this world, in the midst of chaos, in the face of the fallen principalities and powers, to separate ourselves holy people by small efforts of Resistance to Death ~ most especially the death of conscience. Step by step, like Paul Farmer fighting all his life a long defeat with no logical hope of victory– and yet not as we might think, because Stringy believes the requirement of consistency not to be born of the biblical mind. . . this is simply because the spontaneous nature of Love is something only God can sustain, and only when we are truly and fully rooted in Him do we have the power to sustain it as well. That is not entirely possible in this world Love cannot happen, the Jerusalem church cannot happen, those moments of Life— they originate in Him. The thought that we have power over them is yet another deception that Death twists to his taste and our own failures serve to immobilize us with despair and make us forget where our power actually stems from.

Both Simone and Stringy wish for us to seek Christ. Simone says seek the Truth with rigorous intellectual honesty. Stringy says seek Life with the Word of God as He speaks. For both, the result is a familiarty with Love. Christ says if you know me, you know my father, and if you know my father you know me. There is nothing that sword cannot cut– if you’re not with Him you’re against Him, and if you’re not against Him, you’re with Him.

The 2nd Adam.

The Word Incarnate:

Humanly Lived Life.

We have to be ready to consent with Him.

To life.

To love.

~Marykathryn Huffman 10/6/05
c. Mary Kathryn Gough (Huffman, maiden)