Waiting for God

By: Simone Weil

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This book reveals the true meaning of the illumination that led Simone Weil from anticlerical agnosticism to a religious quest that continued until her death.

It also provides answers to questions that an ever-growing audience, from all over the world, has been asking itself as it has read the various posthumous publications that have followed one another (haphazardly) over the last fifteen years.

The title Attente de Dieu aptly describes Simone Weil's fundamental spiritual attitude. Provided we understand it, not in a passive, definitive sense, but as the ardent "vigilance of the servant stretched towards the return of the master", as the provisional stage of a search that prefers listening to the truth in intimate communion to the pleasure of the hunt. In these pages, inner experience is expressed with the double accent of intensity and incompleteness. It's a dialogue with oneself, with others, with God, right down to the deepest, most moving levels of existence, in which the reader feels constantly challenged and drawn in.

Born in Paris on February 3, 1909, Simone Weil was raised a complete agnostic. She has a keen sense of human misery, which engenders in her the keenest sense of compassion for the poor, the workers, the disinherited. She was anti-religious, a militant trade unionist, in love with the proletarian revolution, but independent of any party. A young associate professor of philosophy, she shares her salary with the unemployed. In 1934, she gave up her professorship and became a worker. In 1936, she joined the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, an epiphany transformed his life: "Christ came down and took me.". In 1941, as a refugee in the south of France, she met the Dominicans of Marseille and Gustave Thibon; she distributed Témoignage chrétien. In 1942, she embarked for New York with her parents, and continued to serve in London, arriving there at the end of November 1942. But moral, intellectual and physical suffering soon sent her to hospital, then to the Ashford sanatorium, where she died on August 24, 1943.