Here are a few more incredible insights from a woman who essentially starved herself to death at the age of 34. The following are from Waiting for God. Replace Catholicism with “Mormonism” or “organized religion” and this expresses many of my concerns beautifully:

[From the introduction:] It was with Father Perrin that Simone Weil argued out the question of baptism: Would she lose her intellectual freedom in entering the Church? Did Catholicism have in it too much of those “great beasts” Israel and Rome? Did Christianity deny the beauty of this world? Did excommunication make of the Church an instrument of exclusion?…Simone Weil finally remained on the threshold of the Church, crouching there for the love of all of us who are not inside, all the heretics, the secular dreamers, the prophesiers in strange tongues.

In spite of her ambivalence towards the Church, there was no denying Weil’s religiosity and spirituality, as unconventional as it might have been. Her first experience praying was through reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Greek. She transformed the rote into the sublime. When she learned it by heart,

The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time…Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention …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…Sometimes, also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.

There is something about Weil’s ambivalence concerning the Church combined with her deep and abiding spiritual experience that speaks to me. Her desire to suffer with others, to hang with the “good thief” next to the Savior–all of this speaks true to me. To me, true love, true compassion, true religion–is the purest form of suffering. How can you love the world without feeling its pain? For all of my rational, skeptical atheistic tendencies, this is one aspect of spirituality that breathes and pulses within me.

I hope you’ll stick with me until I get to some of Weil’s radical yet sublime ways of imagining her relationship to God and to creation. For now, I’d like to leave you with the Lord’s Prayer, not in Greek, but in Aramaic. I never tire of listening to it.