The Gaze of God
In her little book Waiting for God, the philosopher, Simone Weil writes about our capacity for attentiveness. Simone Weil lives between 1909-1943. She died at a relatively tender age, but during her lifetime she established herself as a philosopher of extraordinary intellectual power characterised by a fierce independence of mind. The book is largely made up of letters she wrote to a Dominican priest as she wrestled with the demands of Christian belief and commitment. She may not be the most ‘orthodox’ of thinkers, but she remains a fruitful conversation partner for any Christian who takes the life of prayer seriously.
Weil wrote that attentiveness consists not simply in our capacity to close down any possible distraction so that we can attend to another. Much more is expected of us. Attentiveness is one of 'the greatest forms of generosity'. It requires empathy, understanding, recognition, compassion, even love. We are not simply dispassionate observers. To be attentive, we need to make ourselves vulnerable to the object to which we turn our gaze, whether that is our neighbour, or even God. Attentiveness touches the heart. As we turn our gaze to God, we are caught up in the gaze of God.
As we prepare for All Saints Day next week, I find myself wondering if this is perhaps the quality that we see in so many saints. Indeed, I might be so bold as to say that we see this in all the saints, a capacity for attentiveness to God and to neighbour, which is the prerequisite for all prayer and the ground of all love:
‘Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our Heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. Our intelligence too should have the same complete impartiality. Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God’s creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love into his with regard to all things here below.’ (Simone Weil, Waiting for God (Routledge, 2021), 35).