All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
―Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
I am the screen of heaven,―Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
homely and undone, strand
by strand, whose
scant beauty emits
glare, distracting from
the absence it
would be, and
desires to become.
*
I am the screen of mortality, whose
filaments corrode with rust in
this divine mist.
Each crosshatch, mesh of self,
punished by existence. Theology
is a wrong science, or
wronged:
the space between its assertions
effaced by desire into silence.
*
We levitate by our desire,
desiring beauty
as desire’s
urgency brings God down and,
to our relief, we find God ugly.
After all, one who looks in desire’s mirror
and sees beauty says:
“I am that.”
But when one is another—the other,
a screen worn and frayed—the one who gazes
into the same reflection and
sees irregular features is, in a
word, ugly
and so says:
“I am not
that.”
Whose
presence then looks
down in reflection from
above. Drawn forth:
this unsightly, this
divine.
*
We knew God to be clumsy, like
us. Who walks backward into
gravity. Who stumbles into the
fire and burns. Desiring nothing
less than this. Less.
If the barrier—this screen—cannot be burnt
away, better to
rhapsodize beauty as a scar.
Better that grace be defaced
so as to become a better version of itself.
*
What modest light this presence emitted was a “beauty”
we could not afford in faith.
Awkward God, falling through and into
us. Rupture of desire as
all that desire craves
plummets: demolishing. Desire fulfilled
is erasure, eros, eradication. Who lurches
beneath its arrival?
*
Starvation and the frail body.
Such rescue is so plaintive.
God’s fatigue we cradle within us
whose affliction labors to get away and to stay,
to stay away, to get us, to stay.
*
The fallen God is the God
meant to redeem, the one whose
wronged and wronging science
undoes the empiricism of desire.
No one, therefore, remembers this God
who eschews order,
for what does one remember about having
been when one is no more?
*
Not divine order: divine memory.
God’s starvation, undoer of beauty,
visitation
or affliction, all abolished.
Marred by its perfection except
for the hunger, it is said,
that starved it to death.