love in the void

I reviewed Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, a recently published Plough Spiritual Guide on Simone Weil, for The American Conservative: 

The great value of Weil, and something Love in the Void highlights well, is that in standing opposed to our historical moment, she advocates for a deeper moment of grace. The void in ourselves where God finds us is also a temporal void, not entirely disconnected from but absolutely transcending the events of our anodyne lives. Weil tells us in the final chapter of the book that “There are two forms of friendship: meeting and separation.” “When two beings who are not friends are near other,” Weil explains, “there is no meeting.” Likewise, two beings who are not friends don’t feel the pang of separation. This metaphor of distance in relation to an “absent” God is perhaps Weil at her finest. “Even the distress of the abandoned Christ is a good,” she contends. “God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth. That is why the cross is our only hope.”

here.