Easter with Simone

All the clouds are in windrow’s this morning. All aligned and symmetrical. It’s like God swathed the sky. Organizing things for a new day. Putting things right, for awhile.

It’s like all the distortion and disarray that I saw walking though the inner-city this morning can be redressed by gazing overhead. As if all the discarded lives, like the man sleeping in the dumpster, are not, in the end, lost. That somewhere there is beauty and harmony and proportion.

However it may seem, Easter is not lost on me. (Quite unaccountably, a rabbit, white with brown patches appearing, just now hopped by the window where I’m writing. One of Edmonton’s downtown jack-rabbits.)

This Easter morn I’m keeping company with a couple of Starbucks barista’s and a few urban waifs, who like myself seemingly have nothing better to do than placate a venti-dark-roast craving.

I’m feeling a flutter of sadness, a slight twinge of missing-out…while others are in church celebrating Easter. Geography permitting, the monastery would suit this morning. But other Easter-venues…not sure.

Besides, someone has to stand with the hoy-poly. And an unwashed one like myself will do. Which brings me to that estranged saint, Simone Weil.

Despite an abiding friendship with Fr. Perrin, a Catholic priest, despite a deep Christian faith, Simone Weil could never bring herself to join the church. She was yet, a Christ-type. She was the saint of the outsider. Tormented, misunderstood, a lover of paradox–that is the Christian faith, and a hater of war and all of its implements.

I return to the only Simone Weil book I have; her "Waiting for God." For me, it’s enough.

For Simone, love and faith are never states. They are orientations. She saw the church as too often state-making. She says, "In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs."

Simone’s own semi-impenetrable life reflected the mysteries she loved. She lived them and kept them alive. Not the least of which, the mystery of the resurrection.

So this is my little Easter celebration in solidarity with Simone.

The sun has come out from behind the towers. The swaths have been harvested and the chaff spread. This morning has it’s history and now its hope: That beyond the tattered street, behind the veil of sky, there lives an organizing principle, enfleshed and alive, signaling to us half-blind urchins that fluorescence has come, and flourishing is on its way.

May blossoms abound. Happy Easter!

Technorati Tags: Simone Weil, Easter, Beauty, Christianity, Peace, Spirituality