Steve Bell

“In any case, when I imagine baptism as the next concrete act toward my entry into the Church, no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need — and I think I can say the vocation — to mingle with people and various human cultures by taking on the same ‘color’ as them, at least to the degree that my conscience does not oppose it. I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me, because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.

It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.”
― Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind

“All things carefully considered, I believe they come down to this: what scares me is the Church as a social thing. Not solely because of her stains, but by the very fact that it is, among other characteristics, a social thing. Not that I am by temperament very individualistic. I fear for the opposite reason. I have in myself a strongly gregarious spirit. I am by natural disposition extremely easily influenced in excess, and especially by collective things. I know that if in this moment I had before me twenty German youth singing Nazi songs in chorus, part of my soul would immediately become Nazi. It is a very great weakness of mine. . . . I am afraid of the patriotism of the Church that exists in the Catholic culture. I mean ‘patriotism’ in the sense of sentiment analogous to an earthly homeland. I am afraid because I fear contracting its contagion. Not that the Church appears unworthy of inspiring such sentiment, but because I don’t want any sentiment of this kind for myself. The word ‘want’ is not accurate. I know— I sense with certainty— that such sentiment of this type, whatever its object might be, would be disastrous in me. Some saints approved the Crusades and the Inquisition. I cannot help but think they were wrong. I cannot withdraw from the light of conscience. If I think I see more clearly than they do on this point— I who am so far below them— I must allow that on this point they must have been blinded by something very powerful. That something is the Church as a social thing. If this social thing did such evil to them, what evil might it not also do to me, one who is particularly vulnerable to social influences, and who is infinitely feebler than they?”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“‎God is boundless, and so is never a boundary: God's music possesses the richness of every transition, interval, measure, variation - all dancing and delight. And because God is beautiful, being abounds with difference: shape, variety, manifold relation. Beauty is the distinction of the different, the otherness of the other.”
― David Hart