The Formerly Communist Saint Simone

The Simones, as I call them.

No, this is not a French rock duet.

Simone Signoret and Simone Weil.

If you’ve only read The Ordinary Miracle II, you know of my romantically obsessive love for Simone Signoret.

You may not even know of Simone Weil but, in light of the Christmas Tree nightmare we have had in America’s White House, a bulb with the image of Mao Tse Tung, you must become acquainted with her.

I’m obliged to warn you, however. Whereas embracing Simone Signoret is a highly tactile and emotionally thrilling reality within a movie theater, attempting to embrace Simone Weil is trying to wrap your mind around an intellectual and spiritual Rock of Gibraltar.

Before I bid au revoir to Simone Signoret, I must say that she and her husband, Yves Montand and their love affair with Communism was vastly, yea profoundly surpassed by that of Simone Weil. I doubt if these two, temporarily godless goddesses of mine, Les Simones, ever crossed paths.

Ms. Weil, a much more ardently impassioned Communist than even that over-rated, sour grape of a mind called Jean Paul Sartre, was a slave to Marx until a miracle happened and, I must say, not an ordinary miracle.

She read the poems of the Metaphysical genius, John Donne. Those and Apophatic theology … hmmm … briefly, discerning God through what he is not … converted her to Catholicism.

Hmmm … yes.

The power of her life and that eventual love affair with Christ led one of the greatest English-speaking poets of all time, T.S. Eliot, to pen a preface for one of her classic examinations of Mankind, The Need For Roots.

Weil sayings:

“When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.”

Ergo, the Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion.

“But the works of authentic genius from past ages remain, and are available to us. Their contemplation is the ever-flowing source of an inspiration, which may legitimately guide us. For this inspiration, if we know how to receive it, tends – as Plato said – to make us grow wings to overcome gravity.”

Eventually this fact makes great art not a luxury but a necessity.

Here is my favorite, perhaps:

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

Another one, short but dense:

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Here are the beginnings of her controversial life’s journey:

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

One can see in these words her pilgrimage from Marxism to Catholicism quite clearly. There are few contradictions.

The one quintessentially American ingredient to all this, individual free will was perhaps a peripheral concern in the tangles and webs of her genius. Yet no one in that era stuck to her individual principles more fiercely than Simone Weil. In that sense, she was hardly French but in some ways belligerently American.

Yes, her pronouncements can sometimes give you a headache.

The cure for that is your own, deeper understanding of things as a result of that “rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“Attention!”

What is Simone Weil doing on Big Peace? It is pure instinct on my part to feel that she, Ms. Weil, is the only one with some of the most important answers to America’s most troubling questions.

We are now drowning in a debt accrued by not one but three Presidential administrations and their policies, from Clinton to Obama. In the midst of a seemingly unstoppable effort to expand the reach of abortion by subsidizing it with American tax money, we’re virtually lost.

“The needs of human beings are sacred.”

If the very right to life is regularly and increasingly denied Americans by the Roe v Wade Decision, not only is the nation on the road to suicide, its very identity, its “inalienable right to life” within the Declaration of Independence is as profoundly desecrated as its “inalienable right to liberty” was denied by the Confederate South and the Supreme Court’s Dredd Scott Decision.

Hmmm … the word “sacred“.

There really is nothing sacred left in the United States of America after human life has been treated with such homicidal contempt for the 37 years of Roe v Wade.

Must we now believe that the Spotted Owl is more sacred than a human being?

“No, but equally as sacred!” say the Progressive Environmentalists.

But you don’t ever murder what is sacred.

“You’re only sacred when you are an endangered species!”

Oh … hmmm, again … so, when will the government begin to consider human beings an endangered species?

“Oh, we’re a long, long, long way off from that!”

Do you think we’ll ever get to that point?

“Once we get this population problem under control …”

This population problem?

“Oh, there are way too many of us right now!!”

Really.

“Yup, the Chinese, you know, are having a terrible time with overpopulation.”

They can’t feed themselves?

“No, but there are just too many of ’em, you know? Gets too crowded.”

Like New York City, right?

“Right! Millions of people crammed onto a small little island?! It’s insanity!!”

It can also be pretty exciting.

“If you’re into that sort of thing.”

What if I am? I mean, what if I like a city with millions of people?

“Oh, there’ll be cities … but not like Manhattan! That’s ridiculous!!!”

Oh.

Do you think this new health care bill of President Obama’s has anything to do with lowering the population?

“Just between you and me, yes. I certainly hope so.”

How old are you?

“29!”

How long do you want to live?’

“As long as I can!”

Do you think your Progressive Government and Healthcare Program will help you do that?

“Sure!!”

Hmmm …

The needs of human beings are sacred.

That’s what Simone Weil said.

Perhaps too many Americans don’t know the meaning of the word sacred.

We no longer have any example of something sacred … except perhaps money and power.

Right.

Only when you become “too big to fail” are you sacred.

When money and power become the only sacred things in a society, “too big to fail” becomes a religion and that society must inevitably become a tyranny.

“Whattaya mean?! President Obama is here to redistribute the wealth!”

You mean redistribute the sacredness?

“Right!!”

Right.