Augustine and Me - Brian Zahnd

It was June 4, 2000. A beautiful Sunday afternoon in early summer. I was sitting on my front step reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions. At that time I hadn’t yet begun to explore the Church Fathers, that would come four years later. But I was reading classic literature. I had given up on the trite tomes of pop Christianity. I already knew what they said. In a desire to read something of worth I had returned to the treasures of classic literature that I had first learned to love in Mrs. Zaft’s high school literature class. I had read a fair number of the classics, but I had never read Confessions — the first, and perhaps greatest, spiritual autobiography in history. I had decided to read Augustine’s Confessions for basically the same reason that I read Milton’s Paradise Lost or Melville’s Moby Dick — because it was an established classic in the canon of Western literature. And it is a remarkable book. The whole autobiography is a 350-page prayer. The book begins with this prayer:

You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised: Great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable. Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being bearing his mortality with him, carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you resist the proud. Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

“Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Those words resonated with me. Sure, I was a Christian. But I was also a man with a restless heart. A year earlier I had turned forty while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Now I was beginning to think about the second half of life…and I was restless. I had plenty of success, but I was restless. I was still searching and the clock was ticking. I feared I was running out of time. As I read Confessions Augustine told me his story.

 

Comments

[StanRockPatton]

Nice post.

There's this analogy of the existential pigpen. The pigs are anchors (things that sustain prospects and rain meaning) and distractions (things that occupy your brain, whether TV shows or theology or drugs). The size of the pigpen grows the more "mental time" you have, which is a function both of the raw time you have, plus the amount of mental space you've cleared by resolving questions that vex the lower-level journeymen (which is a function, in turn, of age, mental aptitude, education, etc.).

If your pigpen is bursting with pigs (a fact which is a function of both your pigpen size and the amount of pigs therein, and their size), then you tend to feel satisfied and content. But if there seems to be a lot of empty room -- the product of a generous pigpen with few pigs left -- it can yield existential crisis, like an out-of-control high school senioritis.

It seems to me like God's omnipresence finds a way to occupy all pigpens, no matter how large. He provides copious meaning, purpose, and hope, as well as numerous and challenging avenues to explore. He's the only anchor and distraction (or, to put it in more neutral terms, "mental occupation") supplier that can bear all loads and fill all pens. "Our heart is restless until it rests in you" reminded me of all of this.