Reflections: Why We Aren't Saints

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Having yesterday finished Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s lyrical novel about a woman who has undergone a violent spiritual crisis which she is attempting to explain to herself, The Passion According to D.H. , it has occurred to me that if Simone Weil had chosen to write narrative fiction, she might well have written a book much like this one. Here is a long excerpt by which to remember it:

XXXBut listen a minute: I’m not speaking of the future, I’m speaking of a permanent nowness. And that means that hope doesn’t exist because it is no longer a deferred future, it is now. Because God doesn’t promise. He is much greater than that: He is and never ceases being. It is we who cannot bear this ever-now light, and so we promise it for later only so we do not have to feel it right now, today. The present is God’s today face. The horror is that we know that it is right in life that we see God. It is with our eyes truly open that we see God. And if I put the face of reality off until after my death—it is though guile, for I prefer to be dead at the time of seeing Him, and so I think I won’t really see Him, just as I have courage really to dream only when I am sleeping.
XXXI know that what I am feeling is serious and has the power to destroy me. Because—because it is as though I were telling myself that the kingdom of heaven is now.
XXXAnd I don’t want the kingdom of heaven, I don’t want it, I can bear only its promise! The message I am getting from myself sounds cataclysmic to me, and once again close to the diabolical. But that is only for fear. It is fear. For doing away with hope means that I have to begin to live and not just to promise myself that I will. And that is the greatest fright I can have. Before, I waited. But God is now: His kingdom has just begun.

I don’t know if this is good theology. But I do know that it is powerful, visionary, writing.
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