Our Need for Roots and Its Connection to the Bible

Simone Weil on the Human Need for Roots

Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

(a quote)

The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable".

Cf: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/#! . Accessed 2019-08-28

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 (another quote)

And yet, as the French thinker Simone Weil indicates, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define.” Weil rightly notes that we feed these roots through “real, active and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future” (The Need for Roots, p. 41).

Cf: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/deuteronomy-16-18-21-9-quest-for-rootedness_b_1813589

Some Thoughts of Mine Related with 'Roots' and the Bible

Simone Weil's assertion of the "need for roots" is a foundational idea for the book that I'm writing at present (during this sabbatical year). The work is about ... of course... the Bible and how we could ... better yet, how we should relate to it as something like "the village that raised us." In other words, for many of us, for better or worse, Christianity and its heart (which is the Bible) acts (in an abstract sense) like the Tradition in which many of us were raised. Put in a more concrete image, the Bible, I would like to suggest, is something like the village which raised us. This image is rooted in my Asian-North American identity... (This would especially resonate with you if you come from Asia, from a context like the Philippines where family and its extended network of so many people such as uncles and aunts [tito and tita], cousins [pinsan], god-fathers/mothers [ninong and ninang], "extended" siblings [kapatid] and so on and so forth, virtually form a whole village that raised you and continually supports you and interacts with you through all the vicissitudes of life.)

However, at present, many of us who are located in secularized, Western(ized) contexts can be said to feel estranged and alienated from our religious, particularly, biblical roots because we are either not familiar anymore with the Bible and its main stories, characters, concepts, and messages or we have acquired the idea somewhere along the way that all that religious and biblical stuff is no longer relevant to us today, maybe even detrimental for us today.

I strongly feel that this kind of alienation from our religious roots, in short, this kind of "rootlessness" has quite a negative effect on us in the sense that philosopher Simone Weil pointed out. Many of us don't know where we came from; for this reason, we likewise don't know where we're going. 

We have to tap into our roots (a significant portion of which are religious ones) in order to know where we came from, where our traditions lie, where/what our original village was. By doing this, maybe we would know better what direction we're supposed to go. 

This village image is not meant only for people like me who come from an original context in which the 'village ties among people' are really strong. The village image is meant for everyone, even in this Western context where the emphasis is on rugged individualism. I contend that if we dig deeply enough into our traditions and, dare I say, into our common humanity itself, we all come from a place like a village because, as philosopher Simone Weil argues, we all need roots! Hence, I would like everyone to discover their roots and when they do, they will find out that religion has been and is an important part thereof, something that each one will have to accept in order to find out more deeply who they really are.

By "re-rooting" ourselves in our biblical traditions and relating with them as if they were vital members of the village in which we were raised, I don't really mean to say that we have to be "religious" in a way that is childish - that is, uncritically accepting of any or all of our religious traditions. By religious "re-rooting", I mean instead, we become, first, familiar once again with the big plots and the important stories (and the ideas behind them) that comprise our religious traditions. Next, because we ourselves are now grown-ups, we can have a critical sense toward the village that raised us, a village which we didn't choose but we're just simply born into! That means (put in technical language) applying both a hermeneutic of trust-retrieval as well as a hermeneutic of suspicion; put more simply, we ought to have both an attitude of trust and openness to rediscovering whatever is life-giving in our traditions but, at the same time, also have a healthy dose of suspicion, of wariness to spot and call out the things that are inimical to our holistic flourishing today. This even entails rejection of parts of our religious traditions that are not beneficial to the wholesome development of our common humanity today.