Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil (1947)

Most spiritual books promise to make you more. This one asks you to become less, and then less again. Weil called the soul's ordinary motion gravity, the automatic fall toward ego and self-interest, and she called grace the only thing that interrupts it, a force that cannot be summoned or deserved and enters only where the self has been emptied to a void. She named that emptying decreation, and she did not mean it as metaphor. Drawn from the notebooks she left at her death at thirty-four, having limited her food to the rations of occupied France, _Gravity and Grace_ refuses to build: no fragment leans on the one before it, because Weil distrusted accumulation as a way of living. What remains is a mind of terrifying clarity insisting that attention itself is prayer, that to look hard and unselfishly at another person is the rarest generosity we have. You finish it lighter, and unsure that is a comfort.