detachment and obedience

Actually, my recent feelings of "my life is perfect, please freeze everything as it is" are not too good. There's a definite anxiousness there. Which I think is partially explained by Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace: "Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions... [Reality] is only perceptible through total detachment."

Attachment that distances us from reality also distances us from God. It stirs in us desire and willfulness and ambition, all of which make us less obedient, less submissive to God's will--in other words, less open to God himself. In contrast, Jesus described himself as close to God because...

"I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him." (Jn 8.28-29)

And I like Weil's understanding of obedience. It reminds me of Jesus' words, "So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, 'We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'" (Lk 17.10) Here's some of what she wrote:

Every creature which attains perfect obedience constitutes a special, unique, irreplacable form of the presence, knowledge and operation of God in the world.

The slave is in a sense a model. So also is matter.

The words of the Breton ship's boy to the journalist who asked him how he had been able to act as he did: "There was nothing else for it."

Good which is done in this way, almost in spite of ourselves, almost shamefacedly and apologetically, is pure.

We should not go to our neighbor for the sake of God, but we should be impelled towards our neighbor by God, as the arrow is driven towards its target by the archer.

To eat when we are hungry, to give a wounded man, dying of thirst, something to drink when there is water quite near. Neither a ruffian nor a saint would refrain from doing so.

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well directed attention [i.e. prayer], we should always keep on increasing the number of those things which we are unable not to do.