Love Bade Me Welcome . . . I Did Sit and Eat

How a 17th-century poet led a 20th-century philosopher to a mystical encounter with Christ

[Photo by Karen Swallow Prior]

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil

Today is the day The Evangelical Imagination is officially released into the world! This post isn’t about that, but of course I need to let you know (as if you didn’t already!)—and to celebrate and rejoice! (Will you join me?) As anyone who has published a book knows, release day is not only the culmination of much effort and work over much time, but it’s also a day in which sales can make or break a book’s success. (Take that as a hint if you like!) 

The real topic of this week’s post is the one I promised last week: Simone Weil and her mystical experience with Christianity. (If you didn’t read last week’s newsletter—my first—I urge you to do so as it will help you see what I’m up to here.)

Weil was born in France to well-to-do agnostic Jewish parents. She and her family had to flee the German armies several times in the 1940’s. Weil eventually landed in London where she died after being hospitalized with tuberculosis in 1943 at the age of 34. It is unclear whether Weil died of the disease or from her refusal to eat (or, most likely, a combination). Weil had long adopted an ascetic lifestyle as a form of identification with workers, the poor, and the oppressed for whom she advocated in her lifelong political activism. 

Weil is a fascinating (and controversial) figure, one who cannot be placed in any political or even religious categories. Of course, she died so young that her body of work is underdeveloped, much of it left untranslated into English for some time. My reading of and about Weil is rudimentary (although I’ve been dipping into her work for several years). All I can do is briefly introduce her here. (I draw upon her work a bit in my chapter on the virtue of patience in my book, On Reading Well.) 

[By Unknown photographer - File:Simone Weil 04.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29683316]

Weil studied languages, religion, and philosophy, receiving a graduate degree in philosophy, and eventually teaching the subject at a girls’ school. But she spent much of her time supporting workers’ strikes and protests and even joined the anti-fascist side as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. 

Despite being raised as a secularist, Weil was drawn to religion from early in life. She was drawn to Christianity in particular because of its teaching to love one’s neighbors.¹ As an adult, Weil had several profoundly spiritual experiences that drew her to Christian mysticism and to the Catholic church, although she never became a confirmed member of the church. 

It is one of these mystical experiences that is the subject of this post.

In a letter written a few years after this mystical encounter, Weil explains that in 1938, during a period when she was suffering intense headaches (probably migraines), she was introduced by a Catholic priest to the work of the seventeenth century metaphysical poet George Herbert (1593-1633).

In reading Herbert, Weil discovered his poem “Love (III)” and memorized it. She made it a practice to recite the poem when she was overcome by one of her debilitating headaches.

During one of these recitations, and amid her suffering, Weil recounts, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”²

Through poetry, the philosopher encountered Christ. Through pain, she found love.

Weil explains further that “in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.”³ 

A few years after this mystical encounter, Weil says, she prayed for the first time. She prayed The Lord’s Prayer. This, too, she memorized and recited (in Greek). “The infinite sweetness” of this prayer “so took hold of me,” she writes, “that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time.” Through her immersion in this prayer, she explains, “Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.”⁴ 

In reading one of Weil’s books, I wrote a note in the margin asking myself why I always find it easier to believe the reality of my own mystical experiences more easily than those of others. 

I suppose it’s that word mystical that is a stumbling block for many within my own more systematic, programmatic, dogmatic faith tradition. 

But Christianity without mystery isn’t Christianity at all. 

We believe in a God who works supernaturally within and outside the natural world. We believe in a God who intervenes in human affairs. We believe in a God who became a human being and defeated death and sin once and for all. What could be more mystical than that?

Weil confesses that she had never sought God on her own, never even thought that experiencing him was possible,⁵ not until this encounter with Christ through the poetry of George Herbert.

It makes sense in a way. For Weil believed that a “mysterious unity” links “perfect beauty, perfect truth, perfect justice.”⁶

There are fewer poems that express this unity better than Herbert’s “Love (III). Here it is. If you don’t know it (and even if you do), I beg you to read it slowly, attentively, and more than once: 

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back 

                              Guilty of dust and sin. 

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack 

                             From my first entrance in, 

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, 

                             If I lacked any thing. 
 

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: 

                             Love said, You shall be he. 

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, 

                             I cannot look on thee. 

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, 

                             Who made the eyes but I? 

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame 

                            Go where it doth deserve. 

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? 

                             My dear, then I will serve. 

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: 

                             So I did sit and eat. 

Just as Weil experienced, Love (a metaphor for God in the poem, or, perhaps more accurately both poetically and theologically, synecdoche⁷) is the initiator.

Love is also the gracious, accommodating host. “Host,” of course, is a word that has particularly resonant meaning for liturgical Christians such as Herbert. Love is “quick-eyed” in seeing the hesitancy and shame of the undeserving guest. What more poignant quality of love is there than in seeing right away the heart and needs of the other? Love not only serves, but pays the cost, bears the blame, takes the hand, serves the meal. 

Notice the structure of the poem: it begins with Love and ends with a feast. In between is a dialogue—a debate even—between the speaker and Love (God). Love (God) welcomes the wrestling, even while gently correcting. Love serves, not only food, but questioning souls.

Sit. 

Taste. 

Eat. 

This is what perfect Love invites us to do. 

Why he does so is a mystery. But it is the heart of mysticism.

Bernard McGinn, the foremost scholar and historian of Christian mysticism explains that mysticism isn’t as esoteric or weird as many think. “The essence of mysticism,” McGinn says, “is a deep inner sense of God’s transforming presence in your life that increases your love of God and your love of neighbor.”⁸

Simone Weil knew this love. George Herbert knew this love, too.

After spending the first part of his life serving in public and political life, Herbert took holy orders and became an Anglican priest in 1630. He ministered faithfully and humbly in a rural parish until his death just three years later at age 39. His poems, all centered on Christ and the Church, were published in a collection called The Temple in the same year in which he died. His poetry is rich, beautiful, good, and true.

But there’s another strange aspect to this story.

Herbert died of tuberculosis at a young age. Weil could not have known as she was reading and reciting his Love poem, the one that brought her near to Christ, that the same fate awaited her.

In Herbert and Weil, the metaphysical and the mystical met. And, oh, they did eat.

Let us, dear reader, join the feast.

1. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, translated by Emma Craufurd. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 2009), 24.

2. Waiting for God, 26-27.

3. Waiting for God, 27.

4. Waiting for God, 28-29.

5. H. Roberts, “Simone Weil and George Herbert on Love through Poetry,” Forum for Modern Language Studies (Vol. 59. No. 2), 3.

6. Qtd. In Roberts, 1.

7. Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part is used to refer the whole, as for example, when one takes another’s “hand” in marriage or when a car is referred to as a “set of wheels.” Nothing is more a part of God than love.

8. “Lived from the Heart: an interview with Bernard McGinn,” Commonweal, Jan. 19, 2022.