**Note: This post originally appeared on Navigating Mansions on August 30, 2015.

The beginning of a new semester is exciting.  Interesting books are arriving on your doorstep from Amazon, and your course syllabi are brimming with interesting topics and questions to be covered in the semester ahead.  But, only a few weeks in, one remembers: the idea of studying is quite different from actually studying.  Actual study is hard work, usually done alone, and not immediately gratifying.  So, we must prepare our spirits for the semester ahead.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a brilliant spiritual writer and can be a great help to us today.  An agnostic Jew, turned unbaptized Christian, she found herself caught up in the cultural, political, and spiritual turmoil of the Second World War.  Unlike many of her Jewish and Christian peers (and superiors!) she was not satisfied fleeing to America and quickly returned to Europe to live in solidarity with her countrymen in occupied territories.  This practice soon led to her death at age 34.  But, long before that, she was a precocious schoolgirl planting the seeds for the spirituality of study she would one day write.

Simone Weil did not consider herself to be particularly intelligent.  With an older brother who happened to be a math prodigy, it was easy to feel overshadowed.  In “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” she writes of studying as someone who had to work at it, if only in comparison to her exceptional brother.  In this essay, as the title suggests, her basic insight is that one’s school exercises should be a preparation for loving God.

With that goal in mind, Weil gives us two recommendations.  First, we should use our studies to learn to pay attention.  She writes, “Of course school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention.  Nevertheless, they are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer, on condition that they are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone.”¹

Second, she insists that we examine our failures in order to grow.  She not only tolerates but actively seeks out the humility that comes from recognizing one’s own mediocrity.  On this she writes, “It is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. . . . When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence.  No knowledge is more to be desired.”²

As one progresses in one’s ability to pay attention and learn from one’s errors, school exercises become a sacrament—a way of encountering God.  But, a further benefit is gained (as if a benefit beyond encountering God is needed!).  Reminding her readers that love of God and love of neighbor are ONE love, Weil concludes that school can also teach us to pay attention to each other.  She writes, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: What are you going through?”³ in other words, to offer our attention.

As the semester continues, and the hard days of study come upon us, I suggest we keep two things in mind.  First, do not be afraid to look your mistakes in the eye and learn from them, as painful as that can be.  Second, do not forget that all the knowledge in the world is useless if we forget to pay attention to our neighbors.

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¹ Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,”in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Perennial Classics, 1951),  58.

² Ibid., 60.

³ Ibid., 64.