metaxu (met-ax-oo)

metaxu:
meta (after, behind) - separation
syn (primary preposition denoting union) - union

Only he who loves God with a supernatural love can look upon means simply as means.

All the world is a means. Our only end is God and God alone.

This leads me to platform projects. All should be space for potential and recognized as merely a means. If art were an end in itself, it would be wasteful and detrimental to humanity. Ecclesiastes comes to mind here as well. All is vanity apart from God.

distance

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

The distance between I and Thou is a distance that separates us, but also a distance that binds us together. Love necessitates a distance as well as a binding together. The affliction that separates 'I' and God is distance comprehended which draws me closer to Him. Without distance we are without free will and even more so without the capacity to love God or my neighbor.

I might also question love's purpose when we are in perfect unity with God. Our capacity to love would simply turn into a state of being and definitions based on separation of the like would also crumble. Language plays an important role in between space. what happens when language exists outside of space? jeepers.

look out! this gravity is disguised as grace.

We set things aside without knowing we are doing so, that is precisely where the danger lies. Or, which is still worse, we set them aside by an act of the will, but by an act of the will that is furtive in relation to ourselves. Afterwards we do not any longer know that we have set anything aside. We do not want to know it, and, by dint of not wanting to know it, we reach the point of not being able to know it.

This is where apathy disguises itself as sympathy. We believe we really do care, but in actuality we are feeding the dead. Our motives are disguised as God's and our time is submitted to Gravity instead of Grace- meanwhile we are pulled down and imagine the sky is below us. Often our inversion of this must come about by affliction. Luckily, this affliction, coming from God is Grace.

forgive me joan

We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). A mechanical process. More often than not a dialogue between deaf people.

direct correlation to the I, it relationship in both cases.

We can be unjust through the will to offend justice or through a wrong reading of justice-but the second is nearly always the case.

Joan of Arc: those who declaim about her today would nearly all have condemned her. Moreover, her judges did not condemn the saint, the virgin, etc., but the witch, the heretic, etc.

Working to push against the grain of popular culture is nearly an impossible task these days. Even 'alternative' education, 'alternative' reading, 'alternative' music, 'alternative' lifestyles are running alongside popular culture if not the same grain. There is an important distinction between unnatural and supernatural. All that pushes against gravity is lacking if not by means of divine Grace.

...Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do...(Luke 23:34)

...the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service...(John 16:2)

Readings. Reading-except where there is a certain quality of attention-obeys the law of gravity. We read the opinions suggested by gravity (the preponderant part played by the passions and by social conformity in the judgments we form of men and events).

With a higher quality of attention our reading discovers gravity itself, and various systems of possible balance.

we must move beyond the immediate and into the orient of process. Not all things are certain and it is important to allow our readings to move and change over time. Certainty is a quality of the potentially facist individual, or perhaps a pharisee. People move and change over time as do we.

transparency

The use of reason makes things transparent to the mind. We do not, however, see what is transparent. We see that which is opaque through the transparent-the opaque which was hidden when the transparent was not transparent. We see either the dust on the window or the view beyond the window, but never the window itself. Cleaning off the dust only serves to make the view visible. The reason should be employed only to bring us to the true mysteries, the true undemonstrables, which are reality. The uncomprehended hides the incomprehensible and should on this account be eliminated. (Gravity and Grace, p.132)

on affliction

We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering.

Our spiritual awareness is not necessarily accurate when we reflect on our spiritual life as valleys and mountaintops. Such a description invokes our emotional climate. Rather, if we were to focus our attention skyward, and skyward alone, our position high or low would not affect our perception. Let our eyes remain vertical so that the horizontal will be seen more truly.

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

If suffering ceases to be supernatural, it becomes ours for which we have no cure. We tear it out of the heavenly and throw mud on it. It heals temporarily only to boil moments later. It makes a wedge between man and God. When we give it back to the God (the supernatural), it unites us to Him and our understanding of deliverance is restored. Thankfully we are sealed with the holy spirit and united with God for eternity, but we tend to lose sight of reality in lieu of our desires.

Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality.

If we would tune into God's prompting each and every moment of every day, our sense of reality would be flawlessly joyful. However, our flesh weighs us down and we have to struggle through physical, spiritual, emotional warfare on all fronts, all the time. The mystery of His distance draws us nearer, but it is only through our uninterrupted attention that we would be joyful always...Pick up your cross daily...

Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?

This statement implies that pure suffering may only take place when we are conscious to the fullness of joy found within it. Otherwise our suffering is empty and we can only move downard, where our perception of reality enters into the imaginary (where we believe our suffering is meaningless).

And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.

Just as food is, hunger will forever draw us there. Similarly, Joy is, and suffering is a provision that draws us there also. There being in its only form pure joy, which is supernatural; drawing also into reality.

seeing sin

Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.

the rich believe they are something.
the poor believe that the rich are something.
we are in fact, nothing.
this is the beginning of redemption.

purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

If we only knew how wretched we were, we would truly desire and pay attention to love, purity, and grace.

suffering

If I thought that God sent me suffering by an act of his will and for my good, I should think that I was something, and I should miss the chief use of suffering which is to teach me that I am nothing. It is therefore essential to avoid all such thoughts, but it is necessary to love God through the suffering.

O' what tragedy when suffering becomes about me.

To explain suffering is to console it; therefore it must not be explained.

what more can we do towards healing other than request from God that he might heal us?

consent

Consent to the good--not to any good which can be grasped or represented, but unconditional consent to the absolute good.

When we consent to to something which we represent to ourselves as the good, we consent to a mixture of good and evil, and this consent produces good and evil: the proportion of good and evil in us does not change. On the other hand the unconditional consent to that good which we are not able and never will be able to represent to ourselves--such consent is pure good and produces only good, moreover, it is enough that it should continue for the whole soul to be nothing but good in the end.

similarly, this is also the problem of luxury and necessity. We consent to our version of what we need which in the end produces commodities (for example). Overall the commodity is the least of concern- rather it perpetuates a the reified subject. (subject made object) We get caught in conditional relationships rather than absolute relationships and justify our life through empty promises.

partiality

Judgment is not partiality.

Judgment (as pure judgment) is a calamity regarded as sent by God, by way of recompense for wrong committed; a providential punishment; the mandate or sentence of God as the judge of all. (bible dictionary - I don't know how good of a definition this is, but it's the best I found so far)

Partiality is the act of judging; the operation of the mind, involving comparison and discrimination, by which a knowledge of the values and relations of thins, whether of moral qualities, intellectual concepts, logical propositions, or material facts, is obtained.

Partiality is without God. Our measuring stick is relative, moving and inabsolute.

Pure Judgment is absolute and cannot derive from human cognition. It must be separate, holy and unalterable. (supernatural - working through human cognition.)

More on Kant later. it's much too early.

Furthermore, partiality is favor. We ought not act from or upon favor. Under God we are all undeserving. It is Grace that pushes partiality out of the equation and it is Grace which ought to push against our own relative cognition. How we deliver it is necessarily tied to how we receive it.

supernatural

Impossibility is the door of the supernatural. We can but knock at it. It is somone else who opens.

undefining

It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of divine wisdom. All pleasure-seeking is the search for an artificial paradise, an intoxication, an enlargement. But it gives us nothing except the experience that is vain. Only the contemplation of our limitations and our misery puts us on a higher plane. 'Whosoever humbleth himself shall be exalted.'

Evil is infinite in the sense of being indefinite: matter, space, time. Nothing can overcome this kind of infinity except the true infinity.

An interesting argument can be made- infinite=definite (absolute) and finite=indefinite (fleeting, changing, moving). Tony, I know you had some interesting input about the word define, finite and infinite.

De: [L] Down, from, away, apart.

Finis: [L] An end, conclusion.

Finite: [L] finitus, finire: having a limit.

in: An inseparable prefix meaning not.

de-fine: (apart, away)+(end, conclusion). to contain, a distance, between. There is a potential within the word- an infinite character embeded in the definition of it as well as the nature of language. When something is infinite, its definition is unchanging and unchangable; it is absolute. If words and language were absolute, there would only be one pure language. (language perhaps before the fall, before babel).

If we continue to 'de-fine' the world, and place a measured distance unto people, nature and God, we prevent things whatever from actuating their absolute (infinite) character. (tragically followed by people living into the finite character we collectively place upon them; imposition). pleasure seeking is placing your trust in the finite-ever changing material of the world. Moving foundations can hardly build skyward. However, it is when we seek first (the Kingdom of the Lord); the infinite found within the finite material world; the potential found within God's creation- it is then that we may draw nearer to God.

The sticky part is this: We must draw near to God, but we must not try to 'de-fine' God. Allowance of the infinite to remain infinite correlates to the notion of Grace. Imposition is and never was our calling; position however is our place under God, and where we ought remain. This is not to say that a person may or may not perceive our position as an imposition, this person I suggest is not in position under God. If we were all in such a position, perfect harmony must result. There is no need for Grace in Heaven, only here on earth for the purpose of redemption. The cross is infinity meeting the finite. Life breath into the dying.

subjecting subjection

God is crucified from the fact that finite beings, subject to necessity, to space and to time, think.

we are subject to necessity. Luxury is all that we make subject. God crucified was in essence an act of subjection. Rather than being made subject by God, we made God subject. God can only be made subject by his own doing (Jesus on the Cross) and as such can only be made subject to Himself. With this said, our seeming ability to make God subject is really only an ability to make subject a figment or a shadow of what we believe God to be. By this way we are making our own selves subject to a reified subjectivity and fence ourselves into a luxury-necessity trap while making arbitrary the relationships we hold up to things (Man, Nature & God).

transference

"When there is a transference of evil, the evil is not diminished but increased in him from whom it proceeds. This is a phenomenon of multiplication. The same is true when the evil is transferred to things.

Where, then, are we to put the evil?

We have to transfer it from the impure part to the pure part of ourselves, thus changing it into pure suffering. The crime which is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves.

In this way, however, it would not take us long to sully our own point of inward purity if we did not renew it by contact with an unchangeable purity placed beyond all possible attack.

Patience consists in not transforming suffering into crime. That in itself is enough to transform crime into suffering.

To transfer evil to what is exterior is to distort the relationship between things."

Without a direct connection to God and our continual renewal through the purifcation process called sanctification, we can do no good act. Morality is imitation which has carried our world into disillusionment. This also reminds us of why good acts cannot carry us into heaven eternity.

"If someone does me an injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil."

Patience is a virtue that does not disregard self-control. Both must originate from outside our carnal inclinations. Patience without love is patience without God and hence, patience imitated. Rarely does patience of this kind deliver us through self-control.

the question of evil

"Evil is to love, what mystery is to the intelligence. As mystery compels the virtue of faith to be supernatural, so does evil the virtue of charity. Moreover, to try to find compensation or justification for evil is just as harmful for charity as to try to expose the content of the mysteries on the plane of human intelligence."

Evil stands in here as a reminder of our position before God as well as our condition in desperate need for redemption (the religious impulse). The Good news is that we are in fact redeemed and it is merely our flesh that we allow to carry us back down to our temporary carnality.

To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?

Evil is proof that the world is worth something and that our life is worth more still.

evil and the act of creation

"Evil is licesce and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. but it is not given to man to create, so it is a bad attempt to imitate God.

Not to recognize and accept this impossibility of creating is the soruce of many and error. We are obliged to imitate the act of creation, and there are two possible imitations--the one real and the other apparent-preserving and destroying.

There is no trace of 'I' in the act of preserving. There is in that of destroying. The 'I' leaves its mark on the world as it destroys."

To preserve or to destroy? As artists, our question about the act of creation becomes a vital one if we are to serve God and make. In past conversations we have discussed the act of creation as not necessarily creation as one might think, but rather extending ones self as God would intend for us to. Can we really 'create' anything (or more importantly it seems, create anything original) if scripture tells us there is nothing new under the sun? In this way we must not continue to exhaust our selves trying to create something new, unique or original. Creation as such is a form of destruction. Rather, we must labor over God's work through us and extend our creativity by His power and unique originality. Creation as follows is a form of preserving.

on love part IV

"The beautiful takes our desire captive and empties it of its object..."

"Everything which is vile or second-rate in us revolts against purity and needs, in order to save its own life, to soil this purity.

To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil.

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."

I was walking down the street yesterday and I saw a beautiful tropical flower emerging from under a thick brush, pinned against an iron gate. Immediately I wanted to pick it, perhaps to save it or maybe I just wanted to have it, but I plucked it out of the soft earth. I held it carefully almost taking on the persona of the flower. bold yet delicate. I made it home safe and placed the flower into a glass of water for it to drink. Naturally I had to find a place in my home where the flower could be seen and assure its compliments to the interior. The antique end table found in the ally next to my vintage couch was the perfect pedestal. It looked more beautiful than it did pressed against the cold iron gate moments ago. I rescued it.

Soon to watch it die.

on love part III

"To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts, not as their object. If there are grounds for wishing to be understood, it is not for ourselves but for the other, in order that we may exist for him."

Love in its purity has no chance to be prejudice. To love one and to deprive the other is no way to live according to scripture. Love permeates all things as its root derives from God alone, we cannot choose the objects of our love, but simply choose to love or not to love. By choosing love and the objects that receive it, we are in a sense empowering ourselves with the ability to love [purely]. This is an extension of our possessiveness. We are pulled in the direction of objectification. This is gravity- a battleground for Grace to win out. And as it is written, Grace will win out.

The question then arises however, when we must not choose the objects of our love, how can we then 'hate' what is evil. My response to this is when our love is pure and deriving from God alone, evil is stripped of its power and ceases to have any authority.

Evil is that which has not the capacity to receive love for love in its fullness is a mutual, reciprocal relationship. (e.g. non-christians know not, and by extension, have not pure love.) The moment reciprocity ceases, gravity, flesh, temptation, sin, and evil is given authority. God's love will continue pour upon us, but man in his self-centered universe can exist for an entire lifetime and not 'receive' and ounce of that love. Again, the tragedy of love as imitation.

on love part II

"This need to be the creator of what we love is a need to imitate God."

what does this mean for artists? Do not imitate God but allow God to work through you - embody the word.

When we place ourselves in the middle, all else can only stem out from us. we place all else under our subjective lens so that we can bear to love. Through this desublimative process, we create all things anew- removed and superficial. furthermore, we fulfill the need to be the creator of what we love and in turn imitate God (instead of drawing love from God). This is no love at all.

"Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discover that
through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It
is much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved
from having lived.

That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination."

Reification, when imitation becomes status quo. absolute love is impossible to understand in the form of a reified subject. To counter the reified is to remove self from the center. Sometimes violently: love at its greatest hour. Grace is supernatural, but for God it is only natural.

on love part I

it will take me a bit to get through this section, but it is certainly rich and worth dwelling on.

God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves. How could we love without this motive?

It is impossible for man to love himself except in this roundabout way."

Otherwise our love would derive from our own capacity which is stale and tragically finite.

"To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger."

self-objectification
self-desublimation
de-humanization
the reified self

you are a process
unknowable
malleable
changing exterior (self), unchanging interior (God)
connected to all things
rhizomatic interconnectedness

so have grace with yourself
as well as other selves.

nobility

"Transposition: we believe we are rising because while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance; the desire to triumph over others) we have given them a noble object.

We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects."

We permit our imagination to determine what is noble by relative objectification. In all that is relative we can only put ourselves in the middle. Let us remove our rule and hold all things up to the perfect rule (detached, holy, and separate). Nobility is not a conscious act, for the virtuous man must not know he is virtuous.

(more on this later I am sure)

superficiality

"Work is needed to express and receive what is true: also to receive what is true. We can express and receive what is false, or at least what is superficial, without any work."

"...In the same way as pretexts are necessary for unjust wars, a promise of some false good is necessary for sin, because we cannot endure the thought that we are going in the direction of evil. It is not the flesh which keeps us away from God; the flesh is the veil we place before us to shield us from him."

Upon the moment of salvation, we are left with two routes; we can either expose our flesh to the light, which wounds us and is difficult to endure but ultimately heals. Or we can protect ourselves by using our flesh as a shield to continue on in comfort, but die both spiritually and physically. This is the tragedy of superficial Christianity- we don't like getting hurt and somehow along the way we thought this was about us. May I put myself in a place where God can take me by force. What am I trying to preserve here other than my own flesh? Superficiality is a sickness and we have reached pandemic apathy in lieu of it. More guilty are those who have seen the light and choose to remain hidden from it.

"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams."

illusion

"We are drawn towards a thing because we believe it is good. We end by being chained to it because it has become necessary.

Things of the senses are real if they are considered perceptible things, but unreal if considered as goods.

Appearance has the completeness of reality, but only as appearance. As anything other than appearance it is error."

The moment of perception is a definitive moment in understanding reality, for once we perceive and object we can do only one of two things. We can either consider it a good (objectification) or consider it as an appearance (non-objectification, or Grace).

Weil also refers to the partial aspects of goods- reminding me of Guitarri and the partial object which led me into the proposition for partial spaces

Furthermore, to say something is good and draw our selves nearer is also a form of objectification. Good being a category only projected out of our own subjectivity can only be good as appearance- as shadowy representations in the cave. God is the only declarer of what is and what is not Good. So it is those things we attach our own subjectivity to (self-projective identification) which we ultimately become slaves to (attachment). And slaves we have become without knowledge of here nor there only by means of relating to these things as "necessity." This illusion has fostered our culture industry and separated us from reality to such a degree, that even our relation to God has suffered violently.

necessity and obedience

"Obedience is the supreme virtue. We have to love necessity. Necessity is what is lowest in relation to the individual (constraint, force, a 'hard fate'); universal necessity brings deliverance from this"

Necessity is a force that is drowning in our culture industry where luxury permeates all things. If one is to understand necessity it is only a moment's glimpse before he or she resurfaces to see hope in the imaginary (suffering disguised as relief); it keeps us under the force of gravity (imaginary hope in material). Gravity is a communal struggle. If all were to understand necessity simultaneously as suffering, perhaps this would be our deliverance from the force of Gravity (working against gravity only for our imaginary relief).

"We should not take one step even in the direction of what is good, beyond that to which we are irresistibly impelled by God, and this applies to action, word and thought. But we should be willing to go anywhere under his impulsion, even to the farthest limit (the cross)....To be willing to go as far as possible is to pray to be impelled, but without knowing wither."

Response: self motivated or God motivated. If God motivated, we aren't even aware of our impulsion, it just overflows from us. Illustration about Paul and how he did not merely preach the word, he embodied it and it overflowed from him....correlation to our creative activity as artists. We must not create, but extend ourselves from God's impulsion through us. Once we think about it, we put ourselves into the center of it and taint God from moving through us.

Love does not involve me whatsoever, but God through me. Pure Joy does not come from me but by God. My circumstances have no bearing on the Joy that flows through me. When God is at the center, all is supernatural.

"Detachment from the fruits of action. To escape from inevitability of this kind. How? To act not for an object but from necessity. I cannot do otherwise. It is not an action but a sort of passivity. Inactive action.

The slave is in a sense a model (the lowest....the highest...always this same law). So also is matter."

Weil is calling us to be more like matter...but to what extent are we neglecting the gift of free will? Free will being an gift, what purpose does it serve other than to prove our faith, love and grace genuine? matter does not have free will and therefore no capacity to return love.

(does our free will ever align with God's will or is it only when we surrender our free will to God and act in obedience, that let God work through us?)

"Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not 'What is the aim?' It is 'What is the origin?'"

Why must we create? What are we trying to accomplish? - these questions can be answered two ways. "To glorify God" seems to be the correct answer, but in actuality, it is an inversion of motive..."[For me] to glorify God." Instead, we ought to respond "[For Him] I must." Not because we have an end goal, but because we know nothing else other than what flows from us. We know not what God plans to do with what we create, we know only that he has given us a capacity and compels us to make.

"Goodness is transcendent. God is goodness."

"'We are unprofitable servants': that means we have done nothing.

In general the expression 'for God' is a bad one. God ought not to be put in the dative." ...rather "By God..."

"We cannot under any circumstances manufacture something which is better than oursleves." (it must come from outside ourselves- God)

(hence the call for platform-projects to allow for Goodness to arrive at a place beyond my own doing.)

"Divine Emptiness, fuller than fullness, has come to inhabit us."

Berger's theory of relativity and absolute and it's impossible union. (argument: it must be supernatural...from on high) The intersection of the divine with base. Horizontal meets vertical.

Two kinds of obedience, obey the force of gravity, or obey the relationship of things.
She sort of sounds like Buber in this section. She diverts a little bit in the sense that she has more of a base understanding of our relationship to things (as matter would), but similar nonetheless.

"Obedience is the only pure motive, the only one which does not in the slightest degree seek a reward for the action, but leaves care of reward to the Father who is in secret and who sees in secret."

Can we act in obedience through our free will or must we surrender that free will in order that God may act through us. Giving man free will was also a gift of subjectivity. Also diversity and pluralism and humanism and universalism which is the secular byproduct of free will and recognition of such a gift removed from its origin, God. How appropriate that the gift of Free will was God extending love, but severely misunderstood and re-appropriated for our own gain. Our entropic tragedy to a bittersweet ending. I only pray God impels me to act by him alone.

contentment

"For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either. If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content." (1 Timothy 6:7-8)

Contentment is a choice, not a feeling.

"Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed.

O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called "knowledge" - which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith. Grace be with you." (1 Timothy 6:18-21)

discontentment in the fleeting is a burden we choose to carry - to seek it is our greatest empty promise. To know discontentment is to know contentment and we ought to choose satisfaction which dwells within us. When we do this, our words, our actions, our thoughts and our emotions will automatically take hold of the eternal life to which we were called.

self-effacement or self-denial

"The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a being.
Even if we could be like God it would be better to be mud which obeys God."

It seems pretty obvious that Weil has a very somber view on humanity and our relationship to God. I question how she would respond to God's "intention." Who is Man before and after the fall. I wonder if there is a term called extreme total depravity, or hyper-depravity. God did instill in us certain capabilities to think, learn, grow, create, experience. Our senses are proof of that. If God wanted us completely out of the picture so that he might do his will, why give us the ability to touch, to smell and sing. These abilities are ultimately to glorify him. He certainly doesn't need us to complete his will, but he takes pleasure in his creation and self-effacement seems contrary to the dispensation of Grace. Whether Grace was part of God's "intention" or original plan, you can argue if you want to, but the reality is that living under Grace is our current condition (or position) before God. The Gospel is about God's Grace. To ignore this is to misunderstand not only God, but Man and therefore, the Self.

Yes, we must die to ourselves daily. We must battle our flesh, temptation, lies, adultery, deceit, hatred and evil. This doesn't make us less human, but more human. We are not in God's way, and by no means are we preventing him from working out his plan. We are his plan. The story of creation is a story of Love- not between God and the Earth, but between God and Man. Weil takes on an extreme sensitivity to our fallen nature and too easily dismisses God's authority as well as His love for us. (which only makes sense when you take Christ out of the picture).