Simone Weil was not a mystic in any conventional sense. She was a philosopher, a political activist, a factory worker by choice, a person of almost frightening intellectual rigor — and she arrived, without intending to, at a vision of the spiritual life that is among the most original and most demanding of the twentieth century. The core of that vision is attention: not mindfulness in the contemporary therapeutic sense, but something much more austere. Attention, for Weil, is the complete suspension of the self before what is real. It is what genuine prayer is made of. It is also, she argued, what genuine love, genuine justice, and genuine thought are made of. There is no separation, in her account, between the contemplative life and the life turned toward the world.

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This retreat takes Weil's essays and letters, gathered in Waiting for God and The Need for Roots, as its primary texts. She is a particularly useful guide for people who have found conventional religious frameworks unsatisfying but who sense that a purely secular account of life leaves something essential unnamed. She was Jewish by birth, never baptized despite a profound attraction to Christianity, suspicious of institutions, and formed by the Greek philosophical tradition as much as by the Gospels. She fits no category comfortably, which is part of what makes her so honest a companion.

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Each weekend takes one of her central ideas as its focus, moving from attention through affliction, beauty, and rootedness toward what Weil calls the love of God implicit in every genuine act of love toward the world. Participants will work between sessions with practices drawn from the contemplative tradition she drew on, adapted to the texture of ordinary working life, which is precisely where Weil insisted the spiritual life must be lived.

 

No prior knowledge of Weil or her work is assumed. The retreat is open to people of any religious background, or none.