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January 7 - January 13, 2025
It follows that any notion of God that is static is—since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge—blasphemous.
Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.
Intellectuals and artists concerned with faith tend to underestimate the radical, inviolable innocence it requires. We read and read, write long, elaborate essays and letters, engage in endlessly inflected philosophical debates. We talk of poetry as prayer, artistic discipline as a species of religious devotion, doubt as the purest form of faith. These ideas are not inherently false. Indeed, there may be a deep truth in them. But the truth is, you might say, on the other side of innocence—permanently. That is, you don’t once pass through religious innocence into the truths of philosophy or
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To be innocent is to retain that space in your heart that once heard a still, small voice saying not your name so much as your nature, and the wherewithal to say again and forever your wordless but lucid, your untriumphant but absolute, yes. You must protect this space so that it can protect you.
Something in you must remain in you, voiceless even as you voice your deepest faith, doubt, fear, dreams …
Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.
Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life, these rare times in which you are utterly innocent.
The frustration we feel when trying to explain or justify God, whether to ourselves or to others, is a symptom of knowledge untethered from innocence, of words in which no silence lives, of belief occurring wholly on a human plane.
The spiritual efficacy of all encounters is determined by the amount of personal ego that is in play. If two people meet and disagree fiercely about theological matters but agree, silently or otherwise, that God’s love creates and sustains human love, and that whatever else may be said of God is subsidiary to this truth, then even out of what seems great friction there may emerge a peace that—though it may not end the dispute, though neither party may be “convinced” of the other’s position—nevertheless enters and nourishes one’s notion of, and relationship with, God. Without this radical
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And perhaps the relation of theology to belief is roughly the same as that between the mastery of craft and the making of original art: one must at the same time utterly possess and utterly forget one’s knowledge in order to go beyond it.
Solitude is an integral part of any vital spiritual life, but spiritual experience that is solely solitary inevitably leads to despair.
this is how you ascertain the truth of spiritual experience: it propels you back toward the world and other people, and not simply more deeply within yourself.
There is no clean intellectual coherence, no abstract ultimate meaning to be found, and if this is not recognized, then the compulsion to find such certainty becomes its own punishment. This realization is not the end of theology, but the beginning of it: trust no theory, no religious history or creed, in which the author’s personal faith is not actively at risk.
If the disciples of Christ could doubt not only firsthand accounts of his resurrection but the very fact of his face in front of them, then clearly, doubt has little to do with distance from events. It is in some way the seed of Christianity itself, planted in the very heart of him (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?) who is at once our God and our best selves, and it must be torn terribly, wondrously open in order to flower into living faith.
To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you—not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct.
I distrust those skeptics who admit no spiritual element into their most transfiguring experiences because I am so easily and so often one of them, stepping outside of my own miraculous moments to inspect, analyze, explain.
But what sort of understanding could be emptier than one that diminishes or erases the moments that made understanding essential in the first place? What discipline more dubious than learning to see every logical flaw in the light that once mastered you?
devotion to God, for modern believers, involves learning to inhabit—rather than simply trumping with dogma or literal scripture—those elements of our existence that seem inimical to his: limitedness, contingency, suffering, death.
God exists apart from our notions of what it means to exist, and there is a sense in which our most pressing existential question has to be outgrown before it can be answered.
At such moments it is not only as if we were suddenly perceiving something in reality we had not perceived before, but as if we ourselves were being perceived.
For a Christian—which I think Weil was, although poignantly (tellingly?) she could never quite bring herself to be baptized and formally enter the church—this means believing in a God who is not apart from matter (or not merely that) but part of it, a God who does not simply enjoin us to participate fully in life, and specifically in the relationships within our lives, but a God who inheres wholly within those relationships.
that is another aspect of God’s nature, which is human nature, embodied in, and suffered through, Christ.
I felt almost as if God had been telling me, as if Christ were telling me (in church no less): get off your mystified ass and do something.
How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name.
Life passes and we do not recognize it.
How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? It is one thing to encourage contemplation, prayer, quiet spaces in which God, or at least a galvanizing consciousness of his absence (“Be present with your Want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne put it), can enter the mind and heart. But the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that this consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and
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Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety.
The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself.
Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.
Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person.
Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not. There is always some leap into what looks like absurdity, and there is always, for the one who makes that leap, some cost.
is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music that, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult to learn to hear it as music.
It is the soul that turns perception into communication, and communication—even if it’s just between one man and the storm of atoms around him—into communion.
But God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment.
To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence.
In the end, if we are to integrate our anxieties into our spiritual lives and thereby alleviate those anxieties, any merely intellectual understanding of them is inadequate.
You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is unsure.
Art, like religious devotion, either adds life or steals it. It is never neutral. Either it impels one back toward life or is merely one more means of keeping life at arm’s length.
Death is the only lens for true transcendence, but paradoxically, transcendence is possible only when we cease being conscious of our own deaths.
I believe there is a kind of existence in which meditation and communication, epiphanies and busyness, death and life, God and not—all these apparent antinomies are merged and made into one awareness.
Why should existence be arranged so that our alienation from God is a given and we must forever fight our way not simply toward what he is but toward the whole notion that he is?
Faith is not faith in some state beyond change. Faith is faith in change.
Refusing heaven can be a form of faith if it’s done to give God his true and terrible scope.
Check out this quote.
It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him.
Silence is the language of faith. Action—be it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation.
I should never pray to be at peace in my belief. I should pray only that my anxiety be given peaceful outlets, that I might be the means to a peace that I myself do not feel.
But faith is not a new life in this sense; it is the old life newly seen.
Religious despair is often a defense against boredom and the daily grind of existence. Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that we are distant from God and then seek to make that distance into an intense experience.
One must learn to be in unknowingness without being proud of it.
Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when we are standing squarely in the midst of the other.
