"...[may I] come a little nearer to the instant when [I] will really be the slave-faithfully waiting while the master is absent, watching and listening- ready to open the door to him as soon as he knocks. The master will then make his slave sit down and himself serve him with meat."
The great Jewish writer, Simone Weil, wrote these words. She was, in my opinion, a kind of martyr for the idea of desire for God- more explicitly, a martyr for the baptism of desire. Her writings run with the blood of longing, a longing for truth, and prayer, and beauty. And all this in the world in which we live, where hope is often near-extingushed by the weaknesses and vice of those closest to us: ourselves, our families, and those in the Body of Christ.
In The Republic, Socrates is in dialectic with young politicians over the question of the essence, or eidos, of virtues in the soul. Do they exist? Is there a real, existing good from which these virtues spring? Socrates, I believe, was really asking: does God exist? He asks this question not because he does not know the answer, but because he is one who comes out of the light into the darkness in which his students live and explains to them the things of the light. In reading the dialogues of this great man, one begins to see that, despite the fact that he did not have divine revelation in the same way the Israelites had it, he was given a great grace and gift: he was searching out of the darkness of pagan culture, and yet knew, in some mysterious respect, He who is Goodness. Socrates became the man coming out of the bright light back into the darkness of his culture, and he knew that he could not teach or persuade those in darkness by pulling them into the direct light, by his own efforts, but he must lead, using innate reason and the desire of the soul found in human nature. This is Simone Weil's desire, which comes to life in a watchful, humble, attention: a readiness given by God and nurtured and disciplined by ourselves.
The mission of Socrates, and later, Christian saints (who have the knowledge of faith and sometimes, vision-be it intellectual, spiritual or actual vision) is, in varied ways, to live out that desire for, as Weil puts it, "...the pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared, "I am the Truth.'" This Truth is always bound up with, in the person of Christ, agape and all virtue. The saint lives this out by living as St. Francis did, living to love rather than to be loved.
This way of life is life, true life.
No "but" can destroy this truth, but experiences which come with living in community and with ourselves can chip away at our hope, and faith, and even desire for this truth, and this life: experiences as profound as weaknesses and failures in ourselves, a hard marriage, or failures regarding our children; and things less intense, but nonetheless for a person of love and truth profound- like friendships and community life and our work. For instance, I see within myself always a mixed, an adulterated desire to love my friends, those far and near: I desire their good, but when I am hurt by them, or disappointed, or feel that my efforts on their behalf seem to come to nothing, I immediately sense that my love and efforts are much more tied up with my own ego. Sometimes the feeling of failure and discouragement becomes almost overwhelming. The temptation is to give up-which means that I stop believing in that true life of love and goodness, and beauty.
As Socrates spoke to his students about the education of those in darkness, he- as one who had lived long in the light-used the analogy of a man in a dust storm, who hides under the cover of a wall. He is in the midst of swirling, biting injustice, the violence of society all around, hitting him who is a stationary object in the restless, wind-blown fragments of confusion. Socrates says that he would like to stay under the wall and hope only not to enter into the fray and perhaps do injustice to another; for, to Socrates, doing injustice to another is the greatest evil into which one can fall, and so the temptation for those who understand and desire the life of Truth is to simply "check out"- because the ideal seems so hopeless.
But Socrates did not fall to this temptation, even to his last day, when his own city killed him because of the ludicrous charges brought against him of "corrupting the youth" and "impiety towards the gods". We see in the murder of Socrates an example of those who, lost in the dust storm, themselves became the storm; in other words, those who lived in darkness hated the light and quenched it, and would not be guided. Those who will not be guided out of darkness become a party to and source of darkness, and a terrible source of pain and discouragement to those who wish most of all to love them.
I am not a Socrates; I live in a different universe of intelligence and virtue (translation: I am a lot dumber than Socrates). However, I am, I hope, in my better moments, a working part of the Body of Christ. And Socrates was a kind of forerunner of Christ, who is the Good and the Source of that Truth Socrates was searching for and believed in. Now, because I am a daughter of God through grace, I too can intuit, and desire, like Socrates, to live in Truth. And like Socrates, like the saints, I desire to see both the order of love in my own soul, and to see order writ large on my community and writ in delicate, loving lines within those I know-and those I don't.
I do not see truth well, but I desire this. In this world, what follows this desire is the suffering(as it was for Socrates and anyone who desires love, and truth, and beauty), the burden, of seeing most often the opposite of these: selfishness, rationalization and banality. It seems that there is little truth and honor within the average community, and this is but mirrored in my own, often tepid and wicked soul. I cannot speak to my friends, my family, in a truly honest way; for most often, they cannot hear it, nor do they have the profound trust for me needed for hearing hard truth in my words, because they see the same hypocrisy in my life, and they will see this as long as my ego and my self are tied up in my efforts towards the true, good, and beautiful. Also, when do I hear the truth about myself? And if I do, what is my reaction? Most often, to rationalize it into oblivion, either to myself or to the unfortunate person who tried to speak the truth.
It often seems hopeless. One friend believes in Christ but lives a life centered around having the most pleasure possible with the least trouble, even to the point of hurting those who have placed their lives near to his; another will not hear that her children are cruel at times to other children because she feels the fear of being imperfect or ridiculous; in the academic community in which I live and work, there are those (me, too?) who think they are Christians but are living and behaving more as if they are in an intellectual and spiritual class above everyone else; and worst of all, are the times when I've let my own identity be squashed in the desire to maintain social ties- ties which, without love, and truth, mean nothing. And finally, the times when I've committed the worst evil: injustice towards the other, the most important Other being God. The worst sins we deal with in this life are our own, and they are the things we are least able to see, and the things we most refuse to acknowledge even if we do see them. We become our own prisons, and the potential for real evil increases, sometimes, in proportion to the intellectual, physical and spiritual gifts we are given.
We are all, it seems, the blind guides which Socrates warned his interlocutors about: the solution, perhaps, is a radical one. It seems to me that a true guide is one who follows St. Francis' prayer: May I seek more to love than to be loved; may I seek to understand rather than to be understood. This simple desire has a great and deep foundation: the death to oneself. Christ said it a different way: If you seek to save your life, you will lose it. The result of the death to self, the uprooting of self-absorbed, fearful 'love', is the beginning of humility. It is like when one must first dig a deep hole in order to then build a solid foundation. The hole must be there, and deep, and complete, before the virtue and grace of humility can be poured within it. Then on the rock of humility(personified in Christ), and no other, can a house of love, and truth, and beauty be built, a house fit for the Master to enter. And when He does enter, He serves his own servant. This is the way of love.
Only then, when the Master lives in our houses, can we become places of light in a dark cave, and strong bulwarks in the sand storm, and true guides for ourselves and others. Only then will we build true Christian communities, because we will provide a locus and source of grace, and light, and beauty around which a real community can be built. Of course there will always be suffering, and often these communities will in the end be destroyed by the trilogy of selfishness, rationalization and banality (the deflated desire for less than the best good). I think of the pain of St. Francis as he watched his order fracture into contentious camps of the more and the less worldly. But hope lives, because there is another world, the world which Socrates caught a glimpse of, and which we see everyday in the Mass; and as St. Francis knew, when he retreated into his mountain cave and received the wounds of Christ, it is in one's own soul that the light must first penetrate. Therein lies hope. In one's own soul, in that quiet place where the Master waits.
A last word from Simone Weil:
" To be sure in the realm of action we have to do all that is demanded of us, no matter what effort, weariness, and suffering it may cost, for he who disobeys does not love; but after that we are only unprofitable servants. Such service is a condition of love, but it is not enough. What forces the master to make himself the slave of his slave and to love him, has nothing to do with all that. Still less is it the result of a search the servant might have been bold enough to undertake on his own initiative. It is only watching, waiting, attention [desire- my sic]."
image: www.newcatholics.com/library/protestent/saints/francis.jpg
