"I was alone,” Simone Weil wrote. “It was evening and there was a full moon over the sea.” In August 1935, Weil was in a small Portuguese village, on “the very day of the festival of its patron saint”.
She describes the scene in Waiting for God: “The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”
