Loving A Hidden God
Discovery of Myself
When he was 43 and a bishop in North Africa Augustine looked back to the time he was 32 and not yet converted to Christianity. He described his turmoil as follows:
There were in me two drives... one a friend of old standing, the other just beginning to be born; one coming from my fleshy nature, the other from my spirit. They were in mortal combat and in the process of their conflict they were tearing me apart.
Confessions, 8.5.10
When I was trying to choose to become a servant of the Lord (a choice I wanted to make for a long time), I both willed it and did not will it. I struggled with myself and divided myself from myself. It was not some alien evil force at work in me. It was me.
Confessions 8.10.22
Augustine had come to realize that he (like the rest of the human race) was a beast with dreams who was somewhat "cracked".
The process of discovery of "myself" is not an easy task despite the fact that we are face to face with our "self" every day of our lives. When Augustine first began to cry out to his unseen God:
What am I, O my God? What is my nature?
The answer that he received was:
You are a being with a life of many facets and many twists. You are a remarkable entity far beyond measure.
Confessions, 10.17.26.
Augustine came to see that his "self" was like the bottom of the sea, unfathomable in its far reaches. (Confessions, 4.14.22) Later on he would write:
If by abyss we understand a great depth, is not a human heart an abyss? Can't you see that there is in the "self" a deep so profound as to be hidden even to the person whom it defines?
Commentary on Psalm 41, 13
Once he discovered the teachings of Christ, Augustine was able to discover that he (along with the rest of humanity) was the greatest miracle in creation (City of God, 10.12); but, like all miracles, he remained a mystery even to himself.
And yet through the analysis of "self" supplied by reason and further facts revealed by his christian faith, he was able to discover some indubitable facts about himself and humanity in general. In response to his prayer "Let me know myself" He heard a voice deep inside telling him:
You are a beast.
You are a beast with dreams.
You are a dreaming beast who is
somewhat cracked.
These were the first truths that Augustine came to know about himself. They also are truths about you and me and every human being. We too are beasts. We too have our dreams. And we too are a little bit cracked.
First of all, I must accept the fact that I am a beast. I am part animal but there is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, Augustine tells me that I am crazy if I try to pretend that my body is not part of being me. (On the Soul and its Origin, 4.2.13) I should not be ashamed of being part animal; that is how God made me. Sometimes through pride I may try to ignore my physical nature. When I think of myself as an angel or pretend to be God, I may try deny that like other animals I have physical needs and drives and passions, that like other animals I am gradually falling apart, that like other animals I will someday die.
It is sad when I am ashamed of my body. My body is part of my being and in my body I glorify the God who made me. In taking care of my body I take care of a temple of God. God made me to glorify him and to be happy. And he wanted me to be happy not as some disembodied spirit but as a human being, a being of spirit and flesh and blood. In heaven even Jesus can do no more for me than to make me a glorified (but glorious) animal. Indeed, Augustine goes so far as to say that we humans cannot be fully happy apart from our bodies. He suggests that this explains why the Christian heaven is so much better than the heaven of the pagans. Crossing the river Styx to the place of the dead was not a pleasant prospect precisely because seats on Charon's ferry were reserved for "nobodies", shadowed souls without flesh and blood. Augustine rejoiced in the miracle of Christ's resurrection because it showed that indeed the human body can survive the grave. It gave him the hope that one day he would be able to be in his eternal home with his "flesh and blood". He for one was convinced that he could not be fully at peace until his body rejoined his soul. He believed that those who thought otherwise were quite insane. (Sermon 241, 7) The fullness of heaven will not be in being cut in half but in being "well-tied together". In heaven we will not be alienated from our bodies. We will be their friends (Sermon 155, 14) and, as a result ...
Whatever our spirits decide will be accepted happily by our bodies and our spirits will be careful not to choose anything which would embarrass their good friends.
City of God, 22.30
God made me and you to be beasts and beasts we shall be forever and ever and when we get to heaven we shall be very, very happy beasts. And that's a fact.
But that is not the whole answer to the question: "What am I?" To be sure, I am a beast but I am a beast with dreams. I dream of being something more than I am. Because I am a being of body I must live in the present, but I also live in the past through memory and in the future through hope. I am a beast with spirit and sometimes my spirit seems to carry me to the very heavens. I am a spirited beast and to ignore this is just as disastrous as denial of my body. To ignore the needs of my body is to die. To ignore the needs of my spirit is to die in a much more terrifying way. It is because of my spirit that I dream of living forever. It is because of the terrible, awesome powers of my spirit that I have the possibility of living forever unhappy. It is because of the wonderful, awe-inspiring powers of my spirit that I can come to recognize the Infinite God and, with the help of his healing grace, to choose to live forever happy. But eternal happiness or unhappiness is not part of my present. Just now I only dream and hope and love and believe. Indeed, I am a beast with spirit and woe to me if I forget it. I am a being who hungers and the hungers of my spirit are eternal and infinite and my eventual happiness depends on their fulfillment.
I can't be happy if I am hungry and the hungers of my spirit are many. Jeremiah had me in mind when he cried:
If I enter the city, look! those consumed by hunger. Even the prophet and the priest forage in a land they know not.
Jeremiah, 14-18
What do I want? Every human can make a personal list of "wants", but some are common to us all. First or all I want to live and this entails more than simple existence. I want to live and at the peak of my powers. I want to flourish and do so forever. I want to do more than just make a living, to have enough bread for my table. I want orchids on my table too. I want to be able to live and enjoy life at the highest level possible and then go beyond that possibility because humans, you see, must die and I truly do not want to die. I want my life-force to be in me without end. Indeed, I hunger for LIFE ITSELF.
It is because of my hunger for life that I do my best to forget about death, avoid pain, and worry about future security. I want to LIVE! and thus I clutch at things that seem to promise secure and comfortable living in the future. I want to LIVE! and thus I avoid taking risks, rocking the boat, sticking my neck out. I avoid taking positions of responsibility because taking charge makes me vulnerable to the envy and hatred of those I must rule. It is so much safer to be ignored, to hide in the anonymity of the masses. But at the same time I want to be more than just a "cog" in someone else's wheel. I want to be a SOMEBODY.
And that is my second great desire, to have my life have some meaning. After so many years as a little kid having people look down on me, now I am finally grown up. I have had enough of being told to go and play, to go to school, to go to bed, to "eat my peas", to "sit up straight", to "stop scratching", to do all sorts of things of no particular importance. Now I want to be treated with respect. I want my life to be of some consequence. And hence each day I analyze my life for its value and try to do things that will make it seem more important. But what gives a human being importance? Certainly it is more than being feared, being a presence in the lives of others. I was that when I lumbered clumsily about the basketball court as a sincere but inept member of my high school team. I was a presence to others. Some may even retain the scars. But the whole affair had little meaning. It was just a game that children play. Is there nothing more to life than that? Augustine observed ruefully that the games boys are punished for are little different from the games of adults which they call "business". (Confessions 1.9.15)
I hope there is more to life than that. I hope that I am not now wasting my life on adult games. I hope that this movement from game to game is not the complete story of my life. I want to be different. I want to depend on no one else. I say to myself:
If only I could stand on my own private mountain, a man of special character and independent means, then the world would look up and I would be important.
Of course it is a fantasy. I cannot exist by myself. To get by I need a little help from my friends. Oh it is true that I want to be free, but the freedom I seek is not the freedom of the solitary. It is the freedom I feel when I am held in the arms of one who loves me. Oh I want to live, and I want my life to have meaning, but more than either of these I want to be loved.
This is my third great hunger. I hunger for love. I want my life ... no, I want ME to be loved. And even more, I want somebody to love. I want to be important for someone else. I want someone to be a fool for. I want someone to look at me and truly know me and still be able to say
My friend, I cherish you.
I want someone so close to me that if I should ever leave I would rip away part of their life and take it with me. I want someone to be so buried in me that when they leave part of me will go with them. I want someone who would be willing to empty themselves and take me into them. I want someone who would be willing to live in me. I want someone for whom I would willingly die. I want someone who would die for me. I know that if I have such a love, whatever else happens to me, my life will flourish and have meaning. In such an eternal, all-embracing love I may even last forever and through that forever will never be alone.
Is such a love possible? Augustine, through his discovery of Jesus, learned that such a love was not only possible it was real. It was nothing less than the love Almighty God has for each and every human being. Love between humans will always be imperfect but the love of God for us is infinite. It is hard for us to return that love because of a third fact about being human. We are dreaming beasts who are half-cracked.
In his struggle for self-knowledge Augustine very early came to realize that he was a beast. As a boy he reveled in the joyous passion of being a young healthy animal living amid the riotous colors and pungent smells and strident sounds of a brilliantly earthy North Africa. As a young man he came to realize that he was a dreaming beast, a beast of spirit drawn irresistibly by the passion to "figure things out", to discover the truth about himself and the universe. It was not until after his conversion that he came to understand the source of his perverse thoughts and actions. Why, for example, as a youth he participated in vandalizing a neighbor's pear tree for no good reason except that he just loved to do something bad. (Confessions, 2.4.9) His explanation for such unreasoned and unreasonable malevolence was simple:
We have all been put into the furnace and we have all come out of it a little bit cracked.
Commentary on Psalm 99, 8
And so it is that I am a cracked pot and must face up to that fact every day. I may be destined for heaven but just now I don't feel that good. I roll out of bed each morning in parts. I have knees that ache and a stomach that gets upset. Just now I sometimes have unreasonable fears for my future. Just now I sometimes have very justified remorse for my past. Being baptized as a christian has not cured my cracks. Augustine once said that when you baptize a drunk all you get is a baptized drunk. (Sermon 151, 4-5) So too, baptize a cracked pot all you get is a baptized cracked pot.
God knows (though sometimes I will not admit it) I am limited. I can't figure out the answers to everything. I can't do everything. But these limitations are not signs of my being cracked. They are simply signs that I am a creature, a being who came from nothing. My cracks show themselves in my sometimes pretense that I know everything, in my sometimes conviction that I am the savior of the world capable of doing anything. The fact that cannot know or do everything is just an expression of being me. Even God could not have made me infinite. Being limited is not a sign of being cracked. It is a sign of being "Donald". Not accepting my limits is a sign that Donald is cracked.
Through his belief in Jesus and the scriptures, Augustine came to understand the source and effects of his "crackedness". In the beginning of time the human mind had been limited but it was still reasonably clear. Through that primordial crack of Original Sin it became clouded. After Original Sin the human will, which before could rush happily towards true goods presented by intellect, was now not so easily influenced. Perversity took on its own fascination. Human beings began to do wrong just for the hell of it, embracing hellishness for its own sake. The innocence of Eden was over. The human race had become ornery. We said to Evil: " Be THOU my good!"
After that first great crack caused by Original Sin the human race became somewhat blind and somewhat dumb. We limited beings began to pretend that we had no limits. We pretended that we knew everything that there was to know. We pretended that we could do anything we wanted to do simply by a choice of our supposedly omnipotent will. And when we found out that we could not do what we wanted (at least without paying the penalty), we wept. We cried:
How unfair it is that I should be held back by my limits!
How unfair it is that I must get sick! How unfair it is that I must die!
If we had not been cracked by that first great sin, we would not have been burdened by our finite powers. If we had remained whole, we would have rejoiced in our limits. We would have been happy with our limited intelligence, knowing that we had infinite time to discover the answers. We would have been like kids giggling as they pieced together a huge jigsaw puzzle because they knew that ultimately they would discover how all the pieces fit together. Without the cracks from sin we would have rejoiced in our limited powers of loving, knowing that our taste for infinite good would be continuously satisfied. Like children clutching giant cups of lemonade, we would have exulted in our limited straws that extended the pleasure of our long cooling drinks.
Our inherited cracks took the fun out of being limited and made our limits sources for new wounds. We have inherited the dulled mind and confused desires of our forebears. We have inherited the effects of their great fall and have made matters worse by new self-inflicted wounds. Our fundamental fault is still pride but our sins do not stop there. As Augustine observed:
Many sins are committed through pride but not all happen proudly. Often their cause is ignorance or human weakness. Many happen as the poor human is weeping and groaning in distress.
On Nature and Grace, 33
Our daily faults now express our weakness as much as our pride. Our anger frequently is a mask for fear. Our excesses in drink and drugs are sometimes escapes from loneliness. We run away when confronted by enemies. We seek any kind of love in any kind of way. We spend our energy envying others rather than doing our own tasks. We give our loves evil rather than saying the truth and making them sad. We dream of greener pastures in some other life rather than grasping with conviction this life that has been given to us by the providence of God.
Lord, what a mess! We are dreaming cracked beasts and we are stuck with this imperfect life. We cry:
God, how could you DO this to us?
And God answers:
You forget. This is not the world that I
wanted.
And that's the truth. The Lord God did not want Adam to sin. He doesn't want us to sin now. He did not want a world in which there would be human wounds and human pain. We humans made this world of fact. We have made it a world that is somewhat cracked.
Now we must live in this cracked world. We must live with our own cracks. We must live with the fact of our daily wounds and with the consequent fact that on some days we will not feel so good. We must live with the fact of our sinfulness and with the consequent fact that on some days we will not do so good. We must live with these facts and move bravely on and not despair.
There is reason for hope. After all, we are alive and Augustine tells us that we need not despair of any human as long as there is life. (Commentary on Psalm 36/2, 11) Despite all our wounds we are still the best things on this earth. Even cracked, we are the greatest wonders of the world. (City of God, 10.12) It is true that we are wounded but there must be some good left in us otherwise we would not be at all. Augustine assures us:
God never completely destroys in us all good given by nature. Even though some good is lost, some good remains. Indeed, because of the good left in us we are able to weep for the good that was lost. Our sadness is a witness to the fact that even though we are touched by some evil there is still some good left in us. The pain of the man who has lost good health is a sign of the goodness that still remains.
City of God, 19.13
What Augustine is saying is that there must be some good left in us even though we so often do the bad because if there were no good left we would not be able to do anything at all. Granted that if we were not bad we would not need to straighten out our lives, but if we were not somehow good we would not want to. If we were not somehow good, we would not feel so bad about our wounds. If we were completely lost, we would not weep so much.
We are cracked but we can still hope. We are still alive and there is some good left in us. These two facts combined with a third fact insure that healing is possible for us. And the third fact is the greatest of all. It is that Jesus is not only our Lord-God, he is also our Doctor. He comes not to condemn us but to heal us. As we continue to exist as dreaming wounded beasts, we can still look to the future with hope in the conviction that Jesus is our healer and that he will cure us if we let him. This powerful image is an integral part of the "Good News" of Christianity. Augustine repeated it again and again to his people in words like the following:
The important thing is not to give up in the midst of the healing process. Remember that Jesus loved you when there was really nothing lovely about you at all. You were loved when you were ugly and deformed. You were loved before you were worthy of being loved. You were first loved and only afterwards did you become lovable. As the Apostle says: "Jesus died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6) Can you imagine what Jesus will do for you when you are cured, considering that he died for you when you were still sick and ungodly? (Sermon 142, 2-7)
We are all cracked pots: that was the final fact that Augustine learned about being human this side of death. But we can be repaired. Our dreams of being happy forever are not impossible of fulfillment. The problem now is to live in such a way that our wounds do not make our dreams impossible. How can we live through our woundedness and attain our dreams? There are some guidelines:
1. We must hold ourselves ready for healing, fighting the temptation to pride and the temptation to despair.
2. We need to pray to God, lest we forget who he is and where we are going.
3. We need to be kind to each other. We are all in the same boat and it is a hospital ship. We differ only in the nature of our wounds.
4. We need to work to bring the Lord to others. We are cracked but there is no use in letting that fact dominate our lives. We must get out of ourselves and try to "act" as though we were saved.
5. We need to persevere. We must not give up as we get worn down by the daily burden of living.
6. Finally we need to be joyful, dreaming cracked beasts that we are. We need to sing. And not the sad words of the somber Dies Irae ("Days of Wrath"). Rather we should sing a song like the hymn Augustine once wrote to the only doctor he ever trusted completely, Jesus the Lord:
O Wonderful Healer, you care for us all:
Soothing our painful swelling,
Supporting our fading strength,
Cutting away the useless in our lives,
Keeping only the truly necessary,
Saving those given up for lost,
Giving beauty to those warped and bent by life.
Who can despair of life
Seeing how the Son of God has come down to help us?
The Christian Combat, 11.12
All of us are cracked but who cares? Jesus lives! And he can heal even crazy dreaming beasts like you and me.