This reflection was written by Morgan Bell, for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.
We are now a few weeks into the semester, which means that at least a few of you students will be asking yourself some variant of the question “what am I doing here?” Perhaps you’re feeling somewhat breathless as you hasten to keep pace with an academic workload. Maybe you’re worried that you’re the only student who is a little dizzied by the concepts, histories, languages, and new skills that you’re learning (believe me when I write that you are not). Maybe it is increasingly unclear to you why the Church thinks it important that you to understand the Sitz im Leben of Deutero-Isaiah, the psychotherapeutic dimensions of pastoral care, or Koine’s liquid aorist active.
What am I doing here? What is the point of all these studies?
Each year around this time, I recall a brief yet impactful piece assigned to me as theological student: Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.”[1] Born to a well-to-do Jewish family in France, Weil trained as a philosopher before practicing as a teacher and semi-professional anarchist. She was an ardent lover of the poor and the working class, and throughout the 1930s agitated with unions, took up manual labour in a factory, and for a time joined the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. (Luckily for Franco, poor eyesight and a generally clumsy manner kept the Nationalist forces safe from her aggressions.)
But on the heels of a series of mystical encounters in the 1930s, Weil’s passion for the poor blossomed into a rich love of the God who became poor for our sake in Jesus (2Cor 8:9). Weil ultimately resisted baptism, troubled as she was by the Church’s historic treatment of non-Christians (and Jews in particular).[2] Yet Weil fell deeply in love—it is not an overstatement to say she was besotted—with Jesus Christ. Weil’s writings in the period leading up to her death in 1943 convey her deepening understanding of “the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction.”[3]
One of those “afflicted” arenas of life where Weil detected the “possibility of loving divine love” was in academic study. This might not strike us as immediately self-evident. Study may be difficult, but few of us would think it an affliction. But Weil saw the struggle and agonism of study—the disciplined training on the mind on another so to understand it fully—as a training ground for attention, for waiting on the Other. In precisely this way, study serves as a school for prayer since “prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God” (66). Prayer, that is, is the graced training of the whole of one’s focus upon that most sublime Thought: the living God.
Academic study increases this “power of attention which will be available at the time of prayer” (66). Studies will deliver us many goods apart from this, to be sure. But this schooling in attention, in waiting on the object of our focus—that disposition so central to Christian communion with God—is studies’ chief good. Indeed, Weil thought the subjects with which we most struggle, our failures to learn despite all our best efforts, were the most profitable for schooling us in attention. No effort of the attention is wasted; all contribute to the one thing needful that will not be taken away (Lk 10:42).
But while Weil’s vision of study is an ascetical one in many respects, her askesis is not self-willed. Such single-minded attention must not be “confused with a kind of muscular effort” (70). (How many of you have overstuffed your brain before an exam only to panic when your brain was as blank as the exam booklet on the desk before you?) They who “contract their brows, hold their breath, stiffen their muscles” are not truly paying attention; they are not waiting on the object of inquiry in front of them. Attention, waiting on the Other “can only be led by desire” (71, emphasis mine). Attention is a desire, a thirst, a yearning for the thing learned and for the One encountered. Attention is an act of love; a relishing in the Other precisely in their alterity. In study and in prayer alike, we wait upon Truth; we set our hearts upon it.
This does not detract from our efforts as students. Nevertheless, this insight suggests that our studies are a means by which God sanctifies us in the truth to so we can abide in her tenderness, and this insight places my academic struggles in a new and salutary light. I am reminded that my studies, when properly pursued, take me outside of myself and usher me toward God who is the Fount of all Wisdom. My frustrations, my confusions, even my boredom serve an end: a deepening love of the One who is Alpha and Omega.
What is more, to be drawn to pay deeper attention to this God is to discover that our attention must be further extended toward those who are the apple of God’s eye: the disenfranchised, the oppressed, the poor. Not only is my attention for God increased, but also the attention required to truly love my neighbour. So Weil:
“Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, and pity are not enough.”
The things you learn—Koine Greek, the ecosystem of Christian theology, contextual approaches to Christian ethical conundra, so on—these have graces of their own. But to be schooled in these things affords you broader learning yet. To struggle with the Greek text of the Younger Testament until it yields you a blessing can cultivate in you the depth of patience required to share a life of faith with those whose Spirit-born gifts are shielded from your view. Straining to chart the thick interrelationships of Christian doctrines give you something of the wonder required to worship and witness to the Christ in whom all things hold together (Col 1:17). Recognizing the pressures put on Christians across the globe who discern matters of deep ethical concern instils in you something of the neighbourliness required to be Christ’s Body across difference and yet within the unity of his call.
And so I pray that in your study, you discover deepening reserves of attentiveness borne of desire. I pray that even tears born of the frustration and tiredness that sometimes accompanies study will be stored in God’s bottle (Ps 56:8) which is truly God’s ocean of mercy. I pray you find a deeper and greater love for the God whose attentive eye is on even the sparrow and who, in love, numbers the hairs on your head (Lk 12:7).
Morgan Bell
[1] Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Crauford (Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1959): 66-76.
[2] Simone Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting on God, 37.
[3] Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” 34.