Slightly edited from an email to my friend Ken today:

“I’m glad you liked [my writings].

You know, I used to talk to one of the priests at [a church in Lower Manhattan] for a while, right after I entered the Church and I was going to daily Mass there all the time. He was a guy with some philosophy background. I sent him some of those writings, because he was interested in my conversion. I sent him That which is impossible…, What happened, and Transparent.

I was so surprised by his reaction to them. He found them to be so full of pain and suffering, and he didn’t really see what relevance they had to my eventually entering the Church. For me, when I re-read that stuff, it seems totally infused with joy. It’s odd, thinking about what different people see in writings like that… I know my own reaction to writings on this topic has changed a lot with experience.

Maybe this also has something to do with why I feel such a kinship with Simone Weil. I think there are many paths, many doors to understanding. One of them is through suffering. This is, of course, the one that Christ illuminates so well. It’s the path Simone took (and why she was so attracted to Christianity, I’m sure). It’s the path I took . . . but it’s not the one everyone takes. There are many people, even people with considerable spiritual insight, who don’t see beauty in suffering at all.”

Meanwhile, Mitsu quotes Simone on evil, in relation to the current situation in Iran; a Flannery O’Connor fan-blog quotes Flannery on Simone; my friend Suzanne from Corpus Christi finds a plaque on the front of her apartment building in Morningside Heights saying that Simone lived there in 1942; and Bill keeps reminding me that to draw attention to one’s own suffering is a form of vanity.

And then there is Faulkner:

“I know the answer to that and I know that I can’t change that answer and I don’t think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.” — The Wild Palms