Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

THE CROSS
From “Gravity and Grace” by Simone Weil5
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Christ healing the sick, raising the dead… that is the humble, human, almost low part of his mission. The supernatural part is the sweat of blood, the unsatisfied longing for human consolation, the supplication that he might be spared, the sense of being abandoned by God. The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides! ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’ There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine… The cross…

The tree of life was a wooden beam. Something which does not give fruit, but only vertical movement. “The Son of Man must be lifted up and he will draw all men unto himself.’… Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if our only wish is to rise. Adam and Eve sought for divinity in…fruit. But it is prepared for us on dead wood… where a corpse is hanging. We must look for the secret of our kinship with God in our mortality.

God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightning flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has become entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross… We are what is furthest from God, situated at the extreme limit from which it is not absolutely impossible to come back to him…

In order that we should realize the distance between ourselves and God it was necessary that God should be a crucified slave. For we do not realize distance except in the downward direction. It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified…

Of the links between God and man, love is the greatest. It is as great as the distance to be crossed. So that the love may be as great as possible, the distance is as great as possible. That is why evil can extend to the extreme limit beyond which the very possibility of good disappears. Evil is permitted to touch this limit… How could that which is good love that which is evil without suffering? And that which is evil suffers too in loving that which is good. The mutual love of God and man is suffering…

For if he had made the best of all possible worlds, it would mean that he could not do very much. God crosses through the thickness of the world to come to us…
Suffering is at the same time quite external with regard to innocence and quite essential to it. Blood on snow. Innocence and evil… An innocent being who suffers sheds the light of salvation upon evil. Such a one is the visible image of the innocent God. That is why a God who loves man and a man who loves God have to suffer…

5 Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. 79-83.