LOST IN THE DESERT … LOOKING FOR SAND

It very rarely happens that I start reading a book, and find myself deeply immersed, involved in the contents, the arguments, or maybe the reasoning of the author … that I find it impossible to let go that book. This is happening to me right now; I am completely ‘lost in a desert’ whilst trying to enter Saint Augustine’s frame of mind, when he wrote his “Confessions”. I suggest one and all, not to read the book, but to digest this work and try to follow Augustine’s treatise on God.

I would like to reproduce some paragraphs from Section Two:                               “How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord? For when I call Him, I ask Him to come into myself. And what room is there in me, where my Lord can come – God who made heaven and earth? Is there anything in me, O Lord my God, that can contain You? Indeed, do heaven and earth, which You have created, and in which You made me, contain You?

Or, since nothing could exist without You, does every existing thing contain You? Why, then, do I ask that You to come into me, since I too exist – I, who could not exist if You were not in me? Why do I say this? Because even if I were in hell, yet You would be there also. For if I go down into hell, You would be there too. I could not exist then, O my God, could not exist at all, unless You were in me.

Or should I not rather say, I could not exist, unless I were in You, from whom all things, by whom are all things, and in whom are all things. Even so, Lord, even so. Where do I call You to come, since I am in You? Or whence can you enter into me? For where beyond heaven and earth could I go that my God might come there into me, Who said: ‘I fill the heavens and the earth.’ ”

We have enough ‘Food for Thought’ for a whole lifetime. For this reason I wrote in the first paragraph, ‘I am lost in a desert … looking for sand’, but I am completely surrounded by sand, I’m breathing, tasting, smelling sand. But of this I am not conscious. DO take time to digest what Saint Augustine wrote. It’s pure reasoning with natural conclusions. YET, how much do we miss of all this truth, in the rush and tension of every day life?