Gravity

“For Thou has made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”

~St. Augustine

“God is a looming presence. His very existence instilled in all human hearts (and, indeed, in the hearts of all His creatures, in the hearts of the angelic hosts quite as much as in Augustine) a restless yearning, a sense of being, somehow, forever out of place. This was a sense as universal as the law of gravity, as ancient persons understood that law: that is, not as a law of attraction, so much as a desire for completeness, as fierce and as unfailing as the homing instinct of a bird; a wish to come to rest in the source of one’s being. The heart fretted for God much as the flames of a fire flickered upwards, straining to rejoin the distant light of the stars, or a stone sank, with mute satisfaction, into the embrace of the earth. But why, in human beings, beings endowed with free will, did this take so long? This, and not the obvious facts of a career, had become, for Augustine, the true stuff of autobiography. The Confessions is not a book about what had happened in Augustine’s past. It is a book about why what should have happened took so long to happen.”

~Peter Brown

“Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside [but] . . . Thou didst touch me, and I burn for Thy peace.”

~St. Augustine