LOOKING FOR SIMONE : Saint of estrangement.

It took twenty-seven years, much longer than I'd imagined when I made this promise to myself, but last October, during my first trip to England, I visited Simone Weil's grave. This is not, I realize, on the standard itinerary for one's first Grand Tour, and it wasn't easy to make the 100-minute train trip from Waterloo Station to Bybrook Cemetery in the suburban town of Ashbrook-on-Kent when London and all its attractions beckoned. My Weil obsession began in a sophomore religion class at Nazareth High School in Brooklyn. A visiting Jesuit held up a picture of a young French woman wearing thick glasses and an unexpectedly girlish smile who'd starved herself to death during World War II by refusing to eat more than what was available to those in Nazi-occupied France. My fascination was quickly fed by a sampling of her work, the enthusiasm of a number of my teachers, some essays about her (the first being Susan Sontag's in Against Interpretation), and the then-recent publication of what remains the best biography, Simone Weil: A Life by her school friend Simone Petrement.

"What is Simone Weil doing buried in England, anyway?" a friend had asked me. Like many of us, she didn't know a lot about this easily misunderstood person; for starters, she wasn't sure how to pronounce Weil's name. It's not "While," or "Wheel"; say "Weigh," then soften the "W" to a "V" ("Veigh") and you have it right. Knowing the proper pronunciation, however, will not help you find her grave: the people of Ashbrook tend to get both names wrong. "Oh! You want See-MOAN-ee While! Why didn't you say so?" The locals didn't know much about her, but were aware she was important, somehow. "She cared a lot for the poor, didn't she?" one asked, and I could have directed her to Ashbrook's town hall, where the hat Weil wore while harvesting grapes near the end of her life is on display. A remnant of one of the several occasions when Weil put aside her protected upper-middle-class intellectual status (discovering in the process how soul-destroying incessant manual labor can be), this small straw sunhat is unremarkable-looking yet oddly touching. What a small head she had, I thought, staring through glass; and how perfectly this hat witnessed its one-time wearer's frailty.

To answer my friend's question fully takes some doing. Weil arrived in England in 1942 from New York, where she and her parents had lived after fleeing occupied France. She hoped the Free French would allow her to return to her homeland as a frontline nurse. Their lack of enthusiasm for her plan led to frustration and disillusionment and, finally, illness and death, on August 24, 1943, at the Ashbrook sanitarium, not far from where she is buried.

Getting off the train at Ashbrook that warm October morning, and finding my way to the cemetery, I realized how many contradictions Weil's life seemed to embody. She was born in Paris in 1909, the younger child of highly intelligent parents, who demanded (and got) brilliant children. Yet Weil thought so poorly of her achievements she once identified herself with the barren fig tree Jesus cursed because it bore no fruit. She studied and wrote constantly--on philosophy, literature, history, social and labor issues--but she cared little for singling herself out, and published very few of her writings. (Today, much of Weil's work is not available in English. Someone should commission a volume similar to the thirteen-hundred-page Weil collection published in France by Gallimard, and return Petrement's biography to print.) Weil stressed self-awareness in her writing and teaching, but her conflicting personal and intellectual responses to Jews and Judaism will continue to leave readers confused, uncomfortable, even enraged. Weil's maddening blindness to the crucial contributions of Judaism to Christianity (she insisted Greek influences were more important than Hebrew) as well as her insensitivity to the suffering of the people she resented being identified with are a major stumbling block to some Weil admirers. (Consider her protest to a Vichy official who refused her a teaching post on racial grounds--she argued that her family had never been religiously observant--as well as the letter in which she insists her brother baptize his future daughter a Christian.) Yet, as Robert Coles and others have insisted, refusing to confront this disturbing aspect of her legacy does the subject and her readers little good.

Since her death, Weil has become an important, if idiosyncratic, Christian voice for many. "I might say that I was born, I grew up, and I always remained within the Christian inspiration," she wrote to the Dominican Joseph-Marie Perrin, one of several priests she went to for counsel. Her meditations on love, on suffering and affliction (a crucial term for her), and on the nature of God have proved extraordinarily rich sources for generations of readers.

Yet Weil hovered at the entrance of Catholicism, refusing to join the church. Being Catholic certainly mattered. "I was filled with a very great joy when you said the thoughts I confided to you were not incompatible with allegiance to the church," she wrote to Father Perrin, "and that, in consequence, I was not outside it in spirit." But she rebelled at cutting her conscience to fit church orthodoxy. She was astonished that, as a Catholic, she would have to accept her newfound religion as the "one true faith." The church's tendency toward exclusivity disturbed her: the Latin term used to excommunicate, anathema sit, made her cringe. It is only one irony of Weil's extraordinary biography that this insightful Christian thinker hesitated so profoundly over being baptized. (Apparently a friend did baptize her, shortly before her death.) But to Weil, being a Christian among outsiders meant more than literally belonging to the church; it's as if she fulfilled her mission by operating as an underground believer in a world at war with its abandonment of faith, just as later, during World War II, she yearned to go undercover as a resistance fighter.

I brought with me to Bybrook Cemetery that day a new biography by Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil (Viking Penguin). Gray is a serious, elegant writer. Her biography is a good introduction, but suffers from the ambivalence frequently noticeable in discussions of Weil. Gray cannot accept the spiritual fullness and mystery of Weil's engagement with faith, and the ways it manifested itself in the philosopher's life. Weil's impulse to mortification--refusing the comforts her society and her status allowed her; her stubborn, even punishing insistence at finding her own difficult way to the goal her intelligence and spirit envisioned and yearned for--seems to frighten and anger Gray. She responds by pathologizing rather than exploring (or accepting) the mystery at the heart of her subject. Despite questionable evidence, Gray diagnoses Weil as an anorexic (the jacket copy even cites it as the source of death, not mentioning Weil's tuberculosis), as though she would prefer her subject be psychologically afflicted rather than spiritually engaged. Frustrating as Gray's struggle with Weil's life can be, it is at least goodhearted: at times she seems to care so much for Weil she wishes to rescue her from her own destiny.

I had no thought of rescuing Simone Weil; I just wanted to find her in Bybrook Cemetery--and couldn't. I followed the directions I'd been given at the town hall, but Weil's grave wasn't in the indicated area, or anywhere nearby. For about twenty minutes, increasingly agitated, I searched, thankful no one was nearby to see how angry and embarrassed I was. As I was about to give up, I tripped, covering my trousers with mud, then calmed down and decided it didn't matter if I found Weil's actual grave or not. I knelt down, looked for my rosary, realized I'd left it at my hotel, said some prayers, walked a bit, looked down--and there she was. "We must not want to find," Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace; "as in the case of an excessive devotion, we become dependent on the object of our efforts....Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it."

I knelt again, my mind clear of nerves and embarrassment, surprised by the flat grave--no tall marker, no flights of angels in stone--and the silence. A few flowers lay withering by the headstone, near a damp envelope containing a note written in ink sent running by the rain. Apparently many make this pilgrimage. But why was I there? I have returned to Weil's work at crucial junctures in my life. I've tried to understand her words, her work with students and workers, her rejection of the modish radicalisms of her time, and her search for answers, as perhaps the modern example of a spiritual conscience refusing to be seduced by the common solutions of her day, or frightened from answering its crises. I kept her in mind in the 1980s and 1990s, when I volunteered and then worked for an aids organization, wondering how she would have handled her friends' and coworkers' vanishing one by one. As she had wrestled with reconciling her beliefs with her commitment to the church, so did I. I consulted her letters and journals as I attended Mass and ACT-UP meetings, reread her magnificent essay on the Our Father as I obeyed the requests of people with aids who'd secretly asked me to pray for them at their deathbeds even though their lovers and families strenuously objected, and thought of Weil's fortitude at following her own religious lights as I shuddered at the sight of the late Cardinal John O'Connor's face on television.

I came from a generation of Catholics brought up amid uniforms and catechisms, many of whom still look for ways to reconcile their faith with an institutional church that seems to feel the only way to "come back" is by putting those old uniforms back on. Through Simone Weil's example I understood we were the believers and witnesses the church needed in such perilous times: she taught us not to be alienated from our faith, but to use such conflicts to deepen it. I came to know others, most of them Catholic but not all, who saw her as a model for modern believers, maybe because Weil, believing deeply, struggled with belief's daily expression. Like Jacob, she wrestled with her own angels--and not only with divine ones: the priests she went to for religious instruction simply had no way of joining hands with their pupil's active social and religious conscience. (And yet Weil inspired not only intellectuals like Flannery O'Connor and Albert Camus and activists like Dorothy Day but Popes John XXIII and Paul VI.)

Simone Weil's life offers an example of belief in estrangement, of faith blossoming without the buttressing of inclusion. At a time of a fractured, deeply challenged church, hers is an example worth attending to. In her life she absorbed and testified to the suffering her world endured (or, perhaps more honestly, inflicted upon itself); and in her example she is a figure that a wiser, more expansively accepting church would do well to embrace. Weil didn't write much about death and immortality. "When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy," she once admitted; but leaving Bybrook Cemetery last fall I was filled again with the conviction that her work has proven to be an extraordinary spiritual resurrection.

Patrick Giles writes about literature, culture, and politics for a number of newspapers and magazines, and is associate editor of Interview magazine.