From Thibon's introduction to Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace:
Supernatural love...does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel... The hero wears armor, the saint is naked. Armor, while keeping off blows, prevents any direct contact with reality and makes it impossible to enter the realm of supernatural love. If things are really to exist for us they have to penetrate within us. Hence the necessity for being naked: nothing can enter into us while armor protects us from wounds and from the depths which they open up. This law is inexorable: We lessen our own suffering to the extent that we weaken our inner and direct communion with reality.This passage is both beautiful and frightening: part of me is freed by it, and part of me revolts against it. I marked the page because of this line: If things are really to exist for us they have to penetrate within us. And I thought of a conversation I had recently about the way love effaces us, rubs out our boundaries and distinct sense of self. My friend was voicing his fear of this effacement, and I could clearly see that the process wounds him. I look at him with awe--because while I do not wish such wounds on anyone, I believe his experience of love is more pure because of it.
If only we could come without "armor" before each other more often, naked, how much closer we would come to life as it really is, closer perhaps to God. But then I consider the suffering: ahhhh, I do not know!
