A place of inspiration
More from Simone Weil’s remarkable Waiting on God. Weil was introduced two installments ago.
I do not need any hope or any promise to believe that God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience; I have touched it. What I know of it through actual contact is so far beyond my capacity of understanding and gratitude that even the promise of future bliss could add nothing to it for me; since for human intelligence the addition of two infinites is not an addition.
Simone Weil was introduced in the previous post. In this passage she continues the same letter to Father Perrin. Not all of her statements in Waiting for God are theologically kosher. However, she was the type of seeker and philosopher who insisted on following truth wherever it led, and who can say whether her journey in theological learning was complete when her brief life ended? God uses and blesses imperfect vessels to do his work.
Since that time I have made a practice of saying [the Lord’s Prayer] through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention. Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer pleasure, but I only do it if I really feel the impulse.
The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition.
At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or third degree. At the same time filling very part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence.
In this book Simone Weil writes that she had never read any “mystical works.” She had not, until a few months before this letter, ever prayed to God. This passage shows that entirely on her own, she discovered a practice known to Christians since the early centuries of the church: reaching God by meditating on His word. Such is the grace and power of our Lord.
Continuing from the previous installment and the vision of the 17th-century Moravian educator and bishop John Amos Komensky. Recall that shortly before these mystical experiences Komensky lost his wife and children while fleeing war. We can be sure that, as Frank Laubach expressed it, Komensky had “the heart of his heart cut by suffering.” This passage continues his vision of Jesus Christ.
…Then He, seeing me overwhelmed with joy, spoke further to me: “Where, then, have you been, my son? Why have you tarried so long? By what path have you come? What have you sought in the world? Joy! Where could you see it but in God;
and where could you seek God, but in His own temple, and what is the temple of the living God, but the living temple that He Himself has fashioned—your own heart? I saw, my son, that you went astray, but I want to see it no longer. I have brought you to your own self. I have led you into yourself. For here have I chosen my palace and my dwelling. If you want to dwell with me here, you will find here what you have vainly sought on earth: rest, comfort, glory, and abundance of all things. This I promise you, my son, that you will not be deceived here as you were there in the world.”
Christ’s words to Komensky confirm a concept often repeated in the New Testament letters, “Christ in you” (e.g., Col. 1:17). And it confirms many Old Testament verses too. That is because it may well be said that the entire aim of God as recounted in the Bible is to once again bring human beings into fellowship with Himself as it was—and perhaps even better than it was—before the Fall.
Sorry for the delay; I’ve been traveling and far too busy lately. We return to mystical experiences of the Old Testament. After Jesus, probably the most important and poetic of all the Biblical prophets is Isaiah. But, apparently, he was not always so willing or gifted. This is the famous story of his calling to a new life. It’s a prime example of several elements: 1) the fear that acknowledges God’s holiness, 2) God’s quick forgiveness that follows this recognition, and 3) the resulting eagerness to do God’s will. And if that process reminds you of the New Testament gospel’s effect, it is no accident.
The year King Uzziah died I saw the Lord! He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the Temple was filled with his glory. Hovering about him were mighty, six-winged angels of fire. With two of their wings they covered their faces, with two others they covered their feet, and with two they flew. In a great antiphonal chorus they sang, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is filled with his glory.” Such singing it was! It shook the Temple to its foundations, and suddenly the entire sanctuary was filled with smoke.
Then I said, “My doom is sealed, for I am a foul-mouthed sinner, a member of a sinful, foul-mouthed race; and I have looked upon the King, the Lord of heaven’s armies.”
Then one of the mighty angels flew over to the altar and with a pair of tongs picked out a burning coal. He touched my lips with it and said, “Now you are pronounced ‘not guilty’ because this coal has touched your lips. Your sins are all forgiven.”
Then I heard the Lord asking, “Whom shall I send as a messenger to my people? Who will go?”
And I said, “Lord, I’ll go! Send me.”
–Translated from Hebrew to English in The Message, Eugene Peterson.
Continuing with Frank Laubach’s amazing letters home, introduced a couple of installments ago.
….An hour of any day may be made perfect by merely choosing. It is perfect if one looks toward God that entire hour, waiting for His leadership all through the hour and trying hard to do every tiny thing exactly as God wishes it done, as perfectly as possible. No emotions are necessary.
I have tasted a thrill in fellowship with God which has made anything discordant with God disgusting. This afternoon the possession of God has caught me up with such sheer joy that I thought I never had known anything like it. God was so close and so amazingly lovely that I felt like melting all over with a strange blissful contentment. Having had this experience, which comes to me now several times a week, the thrill of filth repels me, for I know its power to drag me from God. And after an hour of close friendship with God my soul feels clean, as new fallen snow.
Continuing with the letters of Frank Laubach. See previous post for information on Laubach.
This week a new, and to me marvelous experience, has come out of my loneliness. I have been so desperately lonesome that it was unbearable save by talking with God. And so every waking moment of the week I have been looking toward him, with perhaps the exception of an hour or two.
Last Thursday night I was listening to a phonograph in Lumbatan and allowing my heart to commune when something broke within me, and I longed to lift my own will up and give it completely to God.
How infinitely richer this direct first hand grasping of God Himself is, than the old method which I used and recommended for years, the reading of endless devotional books. Almost it seems to me now that the very Bible cannot be read as a substitute for meeting God soul to soul and face to face. And yet, how was this new closeness achieved? Ah, I know now that it was by cutting the very heart of my heart and by suffering. Somebody was telling me this week that nobody can make a violin speak
the last depths of human longing until that soul has been made tender by some great anguish. I do not say it is the only way to the heart of God, but must witness that it has opened an inner shrine for me which I never entered before.
Frank Laubach suffered intense loneliness and deprivation as a missionary among the Moslems of the southern Philippines. He wrote letters home to his father and described his “experiment” of living every moment in the presence of God. “I determine not to get out of bed until that mind set up on the Lord is settled.” Things began to change. By the end of his long life he was among the best known and loved men of the world. For one thing, he had been instrumental in teaching millions of people to read.
I feel simply carried along each hour, doing my part in a plan which is far beyond myself. This sense of cooperation with God in little things is what so astonishes me, for I never have felt it this way before. I need something, and turn round to find it waIting for me. I must work, to be sure, but there is God working along with me. God takes care of all the rest. My part is to live this hour in continuous inner conversation with God and in perfect responsiveness to his will, to make this hour gloriously rich. This seems to be all I need think about.
…Perhaps a man who has been an ordained minister since 1914 ought to be be ashamed to confess that he never before felt the joy of complete hourly, minute by minute—now what shall I call it?—more than surrender. I had that before. More than listening to God. I tried that before. I cannot find the word that will mean to you or to me what I am now experiencing. It is a will act. I compel my mind to open straight out toward God. I wait and listen with determined sensitiveness….
But why do I constantly harp upon this inner experience? Because I feel convinced that for me, and for you who read, there lie ahead undiscovered continents of spiritual living compared with which we are infants in arms.
And I must witness that people outside are treating me differently. Obstacles which I once would have regarded as insurmountable are melting away like a mirage. People are becoming friendly who suspected or neglected me. I feel, I feel like one who has had his violin out of tune with the orchestra and at last is in harmony with the universe. 
As for me, I never lived, I was half, dead, I was a rotting tree, until I reached the place where I wholly, with utter honesty, 
resolved and re-resolved that I would find God’s will and I would do that will though every fibre in me said no, and I would win the battle in my thoughts. I do not claim success even for a day yet, not complete success all day, but some days are close to success, and every day is tingling with the joy of a glorious discovery. That thing is eternal. That thing is undefeatable. You and I shall soon blow away from our bodies. Money, praise, poverty, opposition, these make no difference, for they will all alike be forgotten in a thousand years. But this spirit which comes to a mind set upon continuous surrender, this spirit is timeless life.
From Frank Laubach, Letters from a Modern Mystic.
Another entry from Richard Rolle’s 14th century Christian classic, The Fire of Love. A glimpse of the afterlife. There is no greater image of heavenly joy and flourishing than music.
Therefore all those who are filled with love and joy, the seekers after inextinguishable heat, unite to sing in one glorious choir of rich melody; and now this company of friends has the shade of heaven to protect them against the scorching of lustful flattery and ill will. The very fervour of their sweet love ravishes them with the sight of their Beloved. Flowering through this loving flame into all virtue they rejoice in their Maker. Their mind is changed and passes into lasting melody. From now on their meditations become song. Melancholy has been driven out of the mansion of their spirit, and it now resounds with wondrous melody. The one-time torment of their soul has vanished, and now in glowing health they dwell in the heights of harmony, in the wonderful rhythm of sweet and melodious meditation.
–Translation and copyright 1972 by Clifton Wolters. Penguin Classics.
I didn’t know about a connection to the royal wedding until just now. Rev. Michael Curry’s sermon at that historic event has an ancient and deeply spiritual heritage. Here is a second passage from Richard Rolle’s 14th century spiritual classic, The Fire of Love. The prologue is one of the few places where Rolle speaks of the personal aspect of his experience plainly, not using generalities about “they” and “those” who experience the fire of love.
Note the similarities to the brief, intermittent experiences of C. S. Lewis with which I began this blog. Lewis wrote of his childhood experiences of Joy as “…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction…. [I]t might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.” We also cannot ignore the momentous conversion experience of John Wesley, when he felt his “heart strangely warmed.”
I will write more in an afterword below. You want to get right to Rolle.
I cannot tell you how surprised I was the first time I felt my heart begin to warm. It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it! But once I realized that it came entirely from within, that this fire of love had no cause, material or sinful, but was the gift of my Maker, I was absolutely delighted and wanted my love to be even greater. And this longing was all the more urgent because of the delightful effect and the interior sweetness which this spiritual flame fed into my soul. Before the infusion of this comfort I had never known such warmth, so sweet was the devotion it kindled. It set my soul aglow as if a real fire was burning there.
Yet as some may well remind us, there are people on fire with love for Christ, for we can see how utterly they despise the world, and how wholly they are given over to the service of God. If we put our finger near a fire we feel the heat; in much the same way a soul on fire with love feels, I say, a genuine warmth. Sometimes it is more, sometimes less: it depends on our particular capacity.
What mortal man could survive that heat at its peak–as we can know it, even here–if it persisted? He must inevitably wilt before the vastness and sweetness of love so perfervid, and heat so indescribable. Yet at the same time he is bound to long eagerly for just this to happen: to breathe his soul out, with all its superb endowment of mind, in this honeyed flame, and, quit of this world, be held in thrall with those who sing their Maker’s praise.
But some things are opposed to love [caritas, i.e., divine, unselfish love]: carnal, sordid things which beguile a mind at peace. And sometimes in this bitter exile physical need and strong human affection obtrude into this warmth, to disturb and quench this flame (which metaphorically I call “fire” because it burns and enlightens). They cannot take away what is irremovable, of course, because this is something which has taken hold of my heart. Yet because of these things this cheering warmth is for a while absent. It will reappear in time, though until it does I am going to be spiritually frozen, and because I am missing what I have become accustomed to, will feel myself bereft. It is then that I want to recapture that awareness of inner fire which my whole being, physical as well as spiritual, so much approves; with it it knows itself to be secure.
–From Prologue in The Fire of Love by Richard Rolle. Translation and copyright 1972 by Clifton Wolters. Penguin Classics.
Rolle says here that he uses “fire” metaphorically because it both burns and enlightens. Who would want to experience a “burning” sensation? Yet when we desire something or someone deeply, the sensation is more like a burning than anything else, isn’t it? —As thousands of poems and pop songs testify. Not a “heartburn” that you simply want to go away; more like a boiling that says “Something has got to happen; either I am going to explode in song and dance or I am going to quench this fire.” God is the greatest object of desire, the deepest satisfaction of the soul. It makes sense that desire for Him would be greater than any other desire. I tend to think of desire-love as eros, following C. S. Lewis’s description in his book The Four Loves, and thus second-rate compared to agapé or divine, self-sacrificing love, which does what is best for the beloved, not seeking satisfaction of one’s desire. But Rolle and similar mystics bring me up short. How can this fire of love be a divine form of love if it is desire?
So this is a paradox. Perhaps we might say that this “fire of love” is a kind of “eros” transfigured, desire for something that nothing in this world can satisfy but still cousin in its bodily sensations to earthly desires.
And this seems to be what Rolle is indicating. Augustine or others are often credited with writing “Each person has a God-shaped hole that only God can fill,” and Pascal did say something along these lines. But actually, the thought originated with Rolle in this book: “Since the human soul is capable of receiving God alone, nothing less than God can fill it; which explains why lovers of earthly things are never satisfied” (chapter 11).
And this is a fire that drives us to agapé, which is action not feeling. It drives us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Have you every experienced the fire of love?
P.S.: I began this series not having watched any of the Royal Wedding. I just learned that the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church Michael Curry gave a “fiery” (at least for a royal wedding) sermon on The Fire of Love. Though his focus was not our love for God, many of his thoughts are still relevant. And since I will probably get 396,481 new visitors to this site, I will link and tag it here, nudge nudge, wink wink. (“OMG, he’s sold out.”)
One of the most astonishing accounts in modern times is Dr. Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. It made a splash when published in 2012, because this was a near-death experience (NDE) unlike any other. Beforehand, Alexander was a skeptic about the after-life and about NDEs. He was an unsentimental and successful neurosurgeon who believed, like many in the medical community, that NDEs were hallucinations created by neuro-transmitters continuing to fire in the brain when consciousness ceased. But his own illness seemed specifically designed to undermine that theory. He was suddenly overcome by a rare meningitis that not only placed him in a coma but shut down his brain. All the specialists involved told his family that if he ever recovered from his coma he would be a vegetable. After a week they were just about to “pull the plug” when he opened his eyes and began talking. He was completely cured and no one could understand how. But we might understand the why. I have not finished the book yet much less rendered a decision on how kosher its theology is. But Alexander’s life since then reminds me of Mark Helprin’s epigram to Winter’s Tale:
I have been to another world, and come back. Listen to me.
Near the beginning of his experience, Alexander finds himself flying without an aircraft over a paradisical land. Assuming it is true and not a hallucination it reminds us that mystic wonder has more to do with people than place. And it gives a rock solid glimpse of what “higher and holier” means.
Someone was next to me: a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes. She was wearing the same kind of peasant-like clothes that the people in the village down below wore. Golden-brown tresses framed her lovely face….
The girl’s outfit was simple, but its colors–powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach–had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else in the surroundings had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for a few moments, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it is so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these…beyond all the different types of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being more genuine and pure than all of them.
In the end of the book, Dr. Alexander, who was adopted as a baby, is given an old photo and discovers this girl is his birth-sister whom he never knew.
Mystical Wonder 