My heart is cluttered with desiring-the chaos of it is almost more than I can endure at times. Sometimes I lose any sense of a meaningful story being lived out in my life. Life becomes a series of snapshots at which time I “felt good” or I “ felt bad.” The pain of misdirected longings leads me to often long to feel nothing.
It is the struggle of misdirected longings within my heart that has led me again and again to listen to my brother Augustine (354-430). He became a Christian at age 32, after decades of praying, “Make me pure but not yet.” He became bishop of North Africa and wrote his Confessions in 401, looking for patterns that might make sense of his life. Instead of always asking where was God? He often asked himself, where was I? “Where was I when I was seeking you? You were there in front of me, but I had wandered away from myself. And if I could not find my own self, how much less could I find You?” (V.2).
He lives as do I not remembering my own birth and not seeing with my human eyes my final destiny. “What I want to say to you, Lord God, is nothing but this, that I do not know where I came from into this world, into this—what should I say? —this deathly life, this living death; no, I do not know.” (I.6) His honesty drives him to center on the image of a homecoming. Unless there is home in God, a final enduring relationship with God nothing now has any real meaning.
Yet he knows the light and love of God is somehow making a wonderful story out of the chaos of unhappiness, homeless wandering, pain and sin in his life. So he fearlessly explores all the way back to his childhood, not to discover how much he was victimized, but to understand his human story in it’s fullness as he rests in the palm of God’s hand. He knows, though our knowledge of God in this life is broken and partial, we do know God because his Spirit lives in us crying “Daddy, Daddy.”
He famously affirms as he lives the redirected longings of liberation in Christ, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” (I.1) These words have arrested many a wild ass temptation in me. And as I stop and identify the greatest longing of my heart I sense the yet unwritten chapter of the story I live in. Now the call to live by Faith “in the valley of the shadow of death” becomes the greatest adventure for me. For now I am called to live a wide awake life of trust and faithfulness through the groanings, the shadows and the God eclipses that intermittently bedevil me. The Lord God will write the final chapter. As Augustine says, “What I do know of myself I know because you shed your light on me; and what I do not know of myself I shall still not know until ‘darkness shall become noonday’ in the vision of your face.” (X,5)
Since the close of the scripture’s canon no one has spoken with more Spirit inspiration than did Augustine in the unforgettable twenty-seventh chapter of Book 10 of the Confessions:
“How late I came to love you, O beauty so ancient and
so fresh, how late I came to love you! You were within me
while I had gone outside to seek you. Unlovely myself,
I rushed towards all those lovely things you had made.
And always you were with me, and I was not with you.
All those beauties kept me far from you—although they
Would not have existed at all unless they had their being
In you. You called, you cried, you shattered my deafness.
You sparkled, you blazed, you drove away my blindness. You
shed your fragrance, and I drew in my breath, and I pant for
You. I tasted and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and
Now I burn for longing for your peace.”
Amen and Amen!