There is also a light of promise in all the scriptural texts as well as in the writings of Weil.  All of them seem to say that the experience of affliction is not one that completely heals, yet there is comfort and solace possible in the wounding. The experience of affliction is not vanquished, it will always be there. But there is a deep hope even in the harsh image of a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul. It is in the fact that the soul is pierced and nailed to the very center of the cross – our Christian symbol of hope, resurrection and redemption.

The Franciscan tradition makes the same claim. Bonaventure employs the idea of the journey. The journey is expressed in Bonaventure’s writings by the symbol of the circle. It is not the circle of the endless cycle, but, as used by Bonaventure, there is an absolute point of origin in creation and an absolute end point of the journey’s completion—and Christ occupies each point; absolute origin as the eternal Word and end point as Christ crucified and glorified. The trace of the circle marks the journey. For the eternal Word, it is the Incarnation; it expresses the fact that each individual proceeds from God through a history of growth so as to return to Him as an actualized, finite, personal being; in other words, to return fulfilled and complete – even if the passage is one marked by affliction.

In the fall of humanity the line of egressio carries away from God, but by Christ’s obedience unto death, the movement is redirected into reditus, and the circle closes. Thus Christ traces for us the path to God. So, just as Christ’s life is a perfection and completion of the cosmos, so we are to follow Christ as the means of reditus to God.  At each point of the journey, our trail is blazed with Christ such that our movement toward God is realized as conversion and deepening of our growth into the imago Christi. Bonaventure clearly understands the world as graced, yet nonetheless fallen. The pathway is only restored and clear when the center of the circle can be located. For Bonaventure the circle is defined (restored) by the two lines intersecting at right angles, forming the cross, and locating the center. It is in the cross that the relationship with God is restored (Collationes in Hexaëmeron. 1.24, 13). Thus it is especially in Christ crucified, as the very center of the circle of life, that the Christian journey is located.  There the pilgrim finds Christ as a center of conversion and contemplation.  Not just the afflicted ones, but all Christians.

Bonaventure sees the Cross as the center of contemplation. In contemplation we are drawn, by grace, into the center of the mystery of Christ crucified, toward the source of the divine self-diffusive good. That is, we are mystically drawn through the Cross into the heart of the Trinity. There we are transformed into the image of the heart that is the uncreated Word who expresses the fullness of the love relation of the Trinity in receiving and in giving.  The end of contemplation is the “passing over” as though dying, into transcendent union in love. Christ crucified is the perfection of self-gift poured out for the world. “This is the capacity that lies at the heart of the human order.”

That is Simone Weil’s perspective also and her own experience. When she realizes that there is no way out of the affliction, she turns into it, towards God.  For her, contemplation is described as the soul “ever turned toward God,”  ever turned to encounter divine love. “The soul does not love like a creature with created love. The love within it is divine, uncreated; for it is the love of God for God that is passing through it. God alone is capable of loving God. We can only consent to give up our own feelings so as to allow free passage in our soul for this love. That is the meaning of denying oneself. We are created for this consent, and for this alone.” (Waiting for God, 133)