Stan Grant asks the ‘holy question’ at the heart of compassion

Now in its 25th year, the annual Simone Weil Lecture in Human Value, hosted by Australian Catholic University’s School of Philosophy, was presented in two parts this year by prominent journalist, public intellectual and Wiradjuri man Prof Stan Grant. The first lecture, delivered at ACU’s Brisbane campus on 12 August, explored how the current context of populist politics and the dehumanising effects of technology constrict our ability to speak. At the Melbourne lecture on 20 August, the focus was on how we might together reclaim a higher order of humanity, and the crucial role that faith plays in this.

With 30 years’ experience in broadcast news and current affairs, Prof Grant, who is Catholic, also holds a doctorate in theology and has held academic appointments at Griffith University and Charles Sturt University. His recent book Murriyang: Song of Time is a marked departure from the political commentary for which he is perhaps best known, offering instead a very personal exploration of his Wiradjuri heritage and Christian faith in light of the events that caused him to resign as host of the ABC’s Q&A in 2023, ‘a year when Australia struggled with its soul, [and] I felt my own slipping away’.

The philosophical and spiritual insights of 20th-century French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil have played a central role in this ongoing exploration, and Prof Grant’s lectures drew particularly on Weil’s essay Human Personality, written in the final year of her short life.

What are you going through? ... when I no longer ask this holy question, when I can no longer hear the other, I’m no longer human.

Prof Grant began his Melbourne lecture by recalling the ancient grail myth and the suffering of the wounded Fisher King, who finds himself without hope as his body and land waste away. It is a myth that ‘takes us to the heart of compassion,’ he said.

‘What can heal him and restore his kingdom? Only the goodness of a knight without ego or desire, one who may ask the holy question: What are you going through?’

Expanding on this theme, Prof Grant said that ‘If Simone Weil teaches me just one thing, it is this: when I no longer ask this holy question, when I can no longer hear the other, I’m no longer human. She means truly hear—not selectively, not hear the cries only of those we call our own, those we choose to recognise, but to hear even the cry of those I might call my enemy. This is the gift of sainthood that Weil places before me, before all of us.’

This deeply uncomfortable question, he said, forces us to confront the affliction that is right before our eyes, as well as our own indifference to it. ‘Affliction is a word that Weil takes and sears into our minds,’ he said. ‘Never again will the mere word suffering suffice. Affliction is degradation, humiliation, tinny coldness and—most chilling of all—indifference. The human is not hated or even pitied, not worthy of human emotion, not human at all, merely a thing.’

For most of us, he said, it is easier to treat the afflicted as though they are invisible. ‘In any major city on any day, human misery is simply factored in. Confronting the face of suffering, we cross the street or turn our heads, or maybe reach into our pockets for the least we can afford.’

I sit in a train carriage of people who avert their eyes from a woman with no toes, frostbitten and bedraggled, a woman whom we call ‘a beggar’ because our words for ‘human’ are exhausted. We look away, and I look away too.

Admitting his own complicity, he recalled a day in New York, when, in his ‘reassuring affluence’, he dropped a glove and had it returned to him by a smiling stranger. ‘Yet on the same day, I sit in a train carriage of people who avert their eyes from a woman with no toes, frostbitten and bedraggled, a woman whom we call “a beggar” because our words for “human” are exhausted. We look away, and I look away too. Weil’s shocking truth is that the beggar could so easily be us; the beggar could so easily be God.’

Weil’s approach, said Prof Grant, insists on the centrality of the cross, and it takes Christ’s cry of dereliction seriously, ‘a question that shall remain unanswered through all times on this earth: “My God, why has thou forsaken me?”’ Weil’s description of this anguished moment, he said, ‘puts the tortured face of Jesus, like the beggar, before our gaze in a way that dares us to look away’.

Prof Grant is dissatisfied with the kind of noisy, grandstanding activism that focuses on faraway conflicts and conveniently distant injustices. Like Weil, he increasingly looks to the life of the spirit, and to music and silence, rather than politics, for a more meaningful response.

‘I don’t question the motives of people who want to take to the streets and protest the travails of people far away,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that comes from a very good place, but there are cameras there, and there is noise there, and you never have to touch the hands of the people that you’re protesting for ... I have walked through all of the war zones of the past 20 or 30 years, and I didn’t see people there who called for me to speak for them. I saw people who just wanted me to sit with them.’

Simone Weil called for a “mystical activism. ‘It is an activism of attention,’ he explained. ‘For Weil, to attend is to wait upon. We wait upon the afflicted as God waits upon us. Mystical activism asks not “How can I fight for you?” but simply—and this is so much harder—“What are you going through?”’

God, love, truth, justice—they’re words of the higher order. No one talks about that. The media doesn’t. They’re far too dangerous. That’s where I want to go.

Noting that it has become fashionable for many commentators to speak of Weil without referring to her Christianity, Prof Grant said he ‘cannot speak of Weil without speaking of God. She would have it no other way. She would rather that is all I spoke about. As she wrote, only God is of concern.’

Weil placed concepts like democracy, rights, recognition and politics in ‘the middle region’, he said. ‘Let the world have that. That’s okay. But God, love, truth, justice—they’re words of the higher order. No one talks about that. The media doesn’t. They’re far too dangerous. That’s where I want to go.’

One of the best ways Prof Grant has found to approach such transcendent themes is through music, and references to music and musicians—from Bach, Schumann and Beethoven to Arvo Pärt and even Oasis—ran through the lecture.

‘Music exceeds poetry because it transcends the limitations of speech. At its best, when it hews to silence, music needs no translation,’ he said. ‘In our silence, we hear the distant voice that does not come from a far-off land; it comes from inside us. It is the inaudible voice of absence. Silence is the true response to the cry ‘Why are you hurting me?’ Silence is the language of the saint.’

The best music, he contended, ‘says “yes” to the world, all of it, and calls me to say “yes” too’.

By way of illustration, he described the experience of finding himself recently ‘with 100,000 people in London’s Wembley Stadium, all singing with one voice to the rock band Oasis … a more profane artistic experience than the music of Bach or Arvo Pärt, but … no less sacred.’

The artist honours the audience by disappearing. He’s not singing to us; we are the song.

Oasis’s songs, he said,‘speak to the joy of being alive’, turning us ‘away from the mirror to look into the eyes of each other. Here, together, we find our souls, our chosen land.’

He described how the brothers Gallagher, in ‘a song of regret, of a word spoken that should never have been said, of life, little by little, draining away’, took the ‘monstrous voice of their raging father’ and sang it to 100,000 people. The crowd, in turn, responded by singing the next line in unison. It was, Prof Grant said, a profound moment of healing and solidarity.

‘It’s okay, Liam’s saying. We hurt too. All of us. We’ve all lived with that pain. All of us have tried to hide, but not now. We hear you. We are all released. We are all forgiven … The artist honours the audience by disappearing. He’s not singing to us; we are the song.’

Here, in a stadium of strangers, he said, words made ‘another stand’, and he discovered ‘none of us are alone.’ When his sons convinced him to go to the concert, he was not prepared for how profoundly he neededit. ‘I needed other people so badly.’

He told another story of profound human connection through music from his time as a reporter in Afghanistan. ‘When the Taliban took control, they silenced everything,’ he explained. ‘No music other than the human voice. No instrumentation. All the music stores were shut down. Musicians were murdered.’

We started improvising. We couldn’t speak to each other in our languages. I’m a Catholic and he’s a Muslim. Here we are separated by history and the world, and he’s playing and I’m playing together, speaking to one another, and God was everywhere in that room, everywhere.

After US troops overthrew the Taliban, he found himself in Kabul, in a music store that had recently reopened. On the wall was an old battered guitar, which he was told had been left in Afghanistan many years ago by a departing Soviet soldier. He asked the owner to get it down for him.

‘I tuned it up as best I could with these rusty old wirey strings,’ he recalled. ‘And what do you do in a guitar store? You play “Stairway to Heaven”.’

As he played, the store owner got down a rubab, a traditional Afghan instrument. ‘He’d never heard this song before, and he started picking out the melody. I was playing, and he was playing, and then we started improvising. We couldn’t speak to each other in our languages. I’m a Catholic and he’s a Muslim. Here we are separated by history and the world, and he’s playing and I’m playing together, speaking to one another, and God was everywhere in that room, everywhere.’

As technology offers limitless distractions and attempts to reinvent the human, and as the future ‘comes at us at warp speed, Prof Grant believes many young people remain hungry for beauty, and for connection with each other and with God, even if they can’t articulate it.

Every morning, there are young people, and they’re all together and they’re looking for the sunrise ... If I spoke to them about God, they wouldn’t have a language for God … but in their heart, they know.

Every morning when he’s in Sydney, he explained, he gets up at 5am and walks along the beach for a couple of hours. It’s his ‘holy time’, when he prays and thinks and tries to be close to God. And ‘every morning, there are young people, and they’re all together and they’re looking for the sunrise. They need it, even if they don’t know they need it. If I spoke to them about God, they wouldn’t have a language for God … but in their heart, they know.’