Book: Waiting for God

Overview
Simone Weil’s Waiting for God (1950) is a posthumous collection of letters and essays that maps her passage from philosophical rigor to a stark, Christ-centered mysticism. Written mainly during 1941–1942 and addressed in part to the Dominican priest Joseph-Marie Perrin, the volume traces her conversion, her quarrels with institutional religion, and her sustained attempt to articulate a spiritual life defined less by possession than by consent, attention, and patient expectancy. The title names a stance: rather than grasping at God through consolations or concepts, one waits, stripped of self-will, until grace descends.

Context and Composition
The pieces arise from Weil’s unusual path: a brilliant French intellectual from a secular Jewish family, factory worker and political activist, wounded by history and personally marked by affliction. She recounts decisive encounters with the living reality of Christ, moments of prayer and presence that came unasked, yet refrains from baptism, insisting on solidarity with those outside the Church’s walls. The letters to Perrin show both intimacy and combativeness. She seeks counsel, tests doctrine, and exposes her conscience with unsparing precision, refusing any spiritual shortcut. Alongside the correspondence stand compact essays that distill her metaphysics of attention, her analysis of suffering, and her sense of how beauty and necessity can become avenues to God.

Themes of Attention and Decreation
Attention is the central discipline. Weil treats it as a purified, patient seeing that suspends the ego’s demands so that reality can disclose itself. Intellectual work, prayer, and love of neighbor share this same posture; by training attention, even in study, one learns receptivity to grace. Closely allied is her notion of “decreation”: the deliberate consent to become less so that God may be. The world, governed by necessity and distance, is the stage for this consent. God’s apparent absence is not a defect to be solved but the very condition that makes free love possible; waiting accepts this distance and keeps the soul open without forcing a response.

Affliction, Neighbor, and Mediation
Weil distinguishes ordinary suffering from affliction (malheur), a crushing, impersonal blow that can wreck the soul’s foundations. Such affliction often silences the afflicted; love of neighbor therefore begins in a form of attention that hears the voiceless. She is wary of mediations, institutions, rituals, symbols, that can become idols if mistaken for God, yet she also believes that created things can bear divine radiance when approached without grasping. Beauty, mathematical necessity, and the order of the world can pierce the heart and orient it toward the Good, provided they are not turned into objects of possession.

Church, Sacrament, and Universality
The letters record her fierce love for the Catholic tradition alongside grave reservations about membership. She criticizes coercion and triumphalism, refuses any boundary that would deny grace at work outside visible Christianity, and argues for “implicit love of God” in those who serve truth, justice, and beauty without naming their source. She reveres the Eucharist yet fears enclosure; she longs for communion yet stands with the excluded. This tension is not resolved; it is borne, as a form of waiting.

Style and Legacy
The prose is pared, exacting, and aphoristic, moving from metaphysical axiom to pastoral urgency without sentimentality. The book offers no systematic theology; instead it models a life of radical consent to reality, where prayer is attention, love is objective justice for the afflicted, and faith is a steadfast waiting under the weight of God’s silence. Waiting for God endures because it marries intellectual austerity to compassion, giving a grammar for desire that neither evades suffering nor idolizes it, and teaching a way to hold absence until it becomes the place where grace can freely arrive.