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Religious Freedom Day was established by Congress in 1992, and a presidential proclamation has announced its arrival on January 16th every year since. It celebrates the enactment in 1786 of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson, who asked that his tombstone recognize that he was the author of the bill, along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia, as one of the three things for which he wished to be remembered. He drafted the bill in 1777, but it took a decade to be finally pushed through by James Madison, who was at that time a member of the House of Delegates. It is regarded as the root of how the framers of the Constitution approached matters of religion and government. The bill not only disestablished the Anglican Church as the official state church, but it provided that no one can be compelled to attend any religious institution or to underwrite it with taxes; that individuals are free to believe as they will and that this "shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." Late in his life, Jefferson wrote that it contained "within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination."
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I had never heard of Simone Weil until I read this poem:
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Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work
(1934-1935)
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by Edward Hirsch
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A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.
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She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:
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The irreducible slavery of workers. “To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work.”
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She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,
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In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples
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Ten hours per day. She doesn’t eat.
She doesn’t sleep. She almost doesn’t think
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Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now
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That the furnace has labeled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave’s.
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Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled
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Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbins from the flames.
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Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted
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Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.
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Proposition: “Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.
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Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed.”
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We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit
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To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,
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To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.
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She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat . . .
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Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.
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Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.
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Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.
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“Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)” from For the Sleepwalkers, © 1981 by Edward Hirsch– Alfred A. Knopf
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Simone Weil philosophized on thresholds and across borders. Her persistent desire for truth and justice led her to both elite academies and factory floors, political praxis and spiritual solitude. At different times she was an activist, a pacifist, a militant, a mystic, and an exile; but throughout, in her inquiry into reality and orientation to the good, she remained a philosopher.
–Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy