Books Sarah Coakley discusses Waiting on God Words Stephen Wilson Steve Bond
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ith its pale blue cover and distinctive typography, the 1959 Fontana edition of Waiting on God by Simone Weil is a magpie find. “I bought it at a church bookstall, All Saints’ Blackheath in London, aged 16,” says Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, Sarah Coakley. “It cost three and sixpence and I wrote my name – I was Sarah Furber – inside in my adolescent italic hand.” This slim volume of essays made an immediate impact on the then A-level student in Classics. “The first essay I turned to, probably her most famous, is on the ‘right use’ of school studies, and in it she makes two really breathtaking moves.” Weil begins by saying that the key to a Christian approach to study is the realisation that prayer consists of attention. The undertaking of any study at school is therefore a training in the contemplative capacity; study is training you for God. “But then she says that even a Latin prose done wrong may be of great service one day, providing you devote the right kind of attention to it, because it can make you better able to give ‘someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him’,” says Coakley. “At the time, I had begun to feel that what we were doing in these prose exercises was irksome, even pointless, so for someone to suggest that there was something in such study that could lead you to prayer and to God, and from there to help someone else, was just amazing.” But relief that Latin translation wasn’t entirely pointless wasn’t the only reason for Weil’s impact, as Coakley explains. “It was definitely the right moment to discover her. I had conceived a secret desire to be a theologian while being prepared for confirmation. Although the confirmation classes were unimaginative, I could tell that the content of the question being asked was completely captivating,” she says.
‘The year changed my life. Because when you are working with people in a situation of grave distress and despair it is the quality of your attention which is what ministry is about.’
“But as I looked round for models of women theologians, there literally weren’t any. So along with Evelyn Underhill, and in a completely different mode, Dorothy Sayers, Simone Weil was a true discovery.” Weil was a philosopher, trade unionist and Christian mystic. She was also an extremely troubled spirit. “But I wouldn’t call her mad,” says Coakley. “She might today have been called bipolar. She had a terrible self-loathing, she was anorexic, she was Jewish but antisemitic. Reading her now, I am simultaneously
electrified but also appalled – she is an inverse paragon of everything you want to hold up as a model for women’s flourishing.” Happily, the centrality of self-hatred in Weil’s thinking passed the young Coakley by. “I intuitively got that this was a voice of immense originality and I was captivated by it because her animating intellectual force was Plato – that immense erotic longing for God and for truth was what interested me.” Nonetheless, it was Weil’s writing on affliction that made Waiting on God a lifechanging book, rather than a teenage intellectual fling. In 2010, while Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard, Coakley began training for the priesthood (something she admits was considered “very peculiar” by her academic colleagues). In preparation, she spent a year with people “in intense poverty and pain” – teaching silent prayer to young black men in a jail in Boston, and working with patients in a psychiatric ward and with people suffering with acute psychotic Alzheimer’s. “The year changed my life overall and especially my life as a don,” she says. “And during that time I came back with new understanding to Simone Weil and her remarks about attention, study and affliction. Because when you are working with people who can no longer speak, as is often the case with advanced Alzheimer’s, or in a situation of very grave distress and despair in jail, it is the quality of your attention which is what ministry is about. Oddly, this also changes you as a philosophical writer and thinker yourself. “And while Weil remains a deeply paradoxical role model, and I find her in some ways repulsive but alluring and brilliant in others, I realised then that there must have been something sown when I was 16 that had come to fruition.”
God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’, by Sarah Coakley will be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2012. She will give the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in April 2012 on Evolution, Cooperation and God.
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