Simone Weil

We went to the video presentation of “Encounter with Simone Weil” at the Sugar Club on Leeson Street. This was an evening with a difference, as the presenter/researcher Anna Brown, struggled to understand this brilliant, young, French woman, who literally gave up her own life in sympathy with the suffering and exclusion of others.
Simone’s was a complex mind, well trained in philosophy, history, politics and literature, but her consuming passion was for the wellbeing of manual workers and those alienated in any way.  She even took up arms herself at one stage, in the cause of justice as a volunteer in the Spanish civil war.  She strove to understand even the Nazi mentality which was causing so much evil and oppression to her own people.
In a video conference after the screening the audience had an opportunity to put questions to the American researcher.  So I was able to ask her about Simone’s strong identification with the sacrifice of Jesus, she who remained deliberately outside the ‘security’ of any church to the end.  This was also despite her mystical experience, in which she admitted to indentifying with the pain of the suffering Christ, when she felt that “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”
Her love reached out to the soldiers dying awful deaths in World War II trenches for whom she wanted to establish some necessarily extreme nursing services.  She was convinced that human presence and attention to another who is suffering, is of foremost importance even, and especially, where there is nothing else that can be done for them.
Coming home on the bus I reflected on the later development of this philosophy within hospice care, pioneered by Mary Potter and others.  Compassionate presence at the deathbed is crucial and this was modelled for us by Mary the mother of Jesus on Calvary.  Fortunately today we can learn to be that kind of presence and are not called in conscience, as Simone Weil felt she was, to deny her own strong longing for communion.  She was made of stronger stuff; and we can only admire how she lived out her vision.
(Cover Picture from ‘Gateway to God’, Simone Weil, Ed. D Raper et al, Fontana, Glasgow 1974)

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