Waiting is also a central concept in Simone Weil’s mystical philosophy, and she takes us way back to the root of reality. She takes it back to what she calls the’moment of creation’ when God spoke and it came to be, everything came into existence. God emptied himself of his divinity, she says, and filled us with a false divinity. It’s a curious idea so let’s just stick with it for a moment. God emptied himself of his divinity, in order to create the space in which the world, the cosmos could exist. Otherwise, there would only be God. There has to be this withdrawing of God, a very key idea in mystical Judaism. God has to withdraw or empty himself in order for a space to be created for something that is not yet fully God to exist. And what occupies that space is us, for example, and we are filled with a false divinity, she says. I would associate this idea with virtual reality, the ego perception of reality, and the imagined picture of the world. And we have to empty ourselves of that, just as God emptied himself to create us. We have to empty ourselves of our false sense of reality in order to be divinised, in order to become, to fulfil the purpose of our existence, which is to be, as St. Peter says, ‘to share in the very nature of God’ (2 Pet 1:4), the very being of God.
(The Art of Waiting by Laurence Freeman OSB)
