A Brief Reflection on Gravity (and Grace)

Simone Weil in the afterglow of Holy Week

“We must give up everything which is not grace and not even desire grace” - Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace

Jesus Christ, the living Son of God, was killed by many. He was killed by his apostle Judas, who betrayed him. He was killed by the Roman people, who scapegoated him. He was killed by Pontius Pilate, who gave the final order for his execution. The figures involved in his death are doubtlessly significant - but as I reflected on Christ’s death during Holy Week just a couple weeks ago, I realized the literal sense that Christ was killed. He was killed by gravity. Crucifixion, the most brutal method of execution in Jesus’ time, is not a death done directly by the action of one executioner. It is not one lion mauling him apart, or one man activating the electric chair. Crucifixion is indirect execution: ultimately, it is the weight of the Earth, conflicting with the counter-weight of the Cross (which props the victim up in a devilish mockery, a parody of divine grace and levity) that causes the body to collapse in on itself, causing asphyxiation and the filling of fluid in the lungs - the “water” that the Gospel of John reports spilling from Christ as he is given the final stab to the side.

The story of Christ, as C.S. Lewis said, is a myth-become-fact. In any other story, the literal plot or narrative and the symbolic/metaphorical aspects run in a parallel motion. In the Gospels, the narrative and symbolism are not only inseparable - they are one and the same. This is hard for us to wrap our heads around, but that’s only because we’re used to placing meaning onto events, as opposed to events arising out of meaning itself. When we reflect on Jesus dying not by the hands of one man, but of all the people, including his disciples - when we reflect on Jesus dying from the weight of his own body, of the Earth’s gravity, of his humanity - when we reflect on the shape of the Cross, spreading his flesh in angelic openness and humility - we are not looking at the symbolic anymore. We are looking at reality - the invisible but omnipotent force that drives all weight - whether it be meaning or flesh - towards the ground.

But gravity would have no reality without its equally-real sibling, grace. When Thom Yorke sings “gravity always wins” in Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees, he is speaking (whether intentionally or not) of a world deprived of grace, not the real world. Grace, like gravity, is invisible to the senses, and can only be known through its effects. If gravity is like a curse, grace is like a blessing - and the fratricidal conflict between curse and blessing is one of the most significant hallmarks of the spiritual life. My gut feeling, since a little boy, of being fundamentally different from everyone else, felt like a curse at first, as expressed by my relentless fear, nausea, and self-harm during my middle school years. I still feel the effects of that curse, in my ruminative defensive thoughts and childish fidgeting and inability to sit still. But the blessing is not only close to the curse - they are neighbors, and dare I say, siblings. Through the mystery of grace, the anxieties of my youth  were transmuted into a vulnerability, as well as an introspective forum of consciousness, that opened my heart to Beauty itself. Through its multitudinous temptations, I emerged out of years in the dark woods, tougher yet softer, into the greater light of Goodness and Truth, and inevitably, into the centrality of Christ’s Church. Without the gravity of my trainer-wheels Cross, I would have never discovered that grace always wins.

Simone Weil’s “Gravity & Grace” is such a dense treasure trove of aphorisms that it would be impossible to even scratch the surface of its wisdom here. So let’s end with this: Weil seems to argue that grace always wins because the “reality” of gravity appears more illusory the closer we come to God. Obedience to gravity, she says, is “the greatest sin.”¹ To Weil, gravity is attachment itself, which arises out of affliction and desperation. She writes, “Affliction which forces us to attach ourselves to the most wretched objects exposes in all its misery the true character of attachment.”² Attachment, by definition, is flimsy, fragile attachment. Attachment necessitates its own weakness. She continues: “as soon as we know something is real, we can no longer be attached to it.” If we are free from attachment, we are closer to God, but it also means we are in the place where gravity has no reality anymore. We are in what she calls the void. The void is a difficult place to be, but the void is necessary for grace to enter into the human soul. We often don’t choose our voids, but God grants them to us as a blessing, even when they seem like a curse. “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.”³ 

With Holy Week behind us, we mustn’t forget what we repeated daily from Palm Sunday through Easter - “Christ IS risen.” The grace of Christ’s triumph over gravity is not a moment in history, but something that pervades every time, every space. But of course, it is invisible to our ordinary senses. We repeat these things in church because we not only forget, we withdraw in fear from the void back into our attachments, into our obedience to false love. But even in our fear, our forgetfulness, and our confusions, all objects of gravity eventually descend into the dust, yet all light shines perpetual.

Let grace, the light of thy will, fill our voids now, and at the hour of our death. According to thy word.   

1. Gravity & Grace, pg. 47

2. G & G, pg. 59

3. G & G, pg. 55