Late have I loved you,
Beauty so ancient and so new,
late
have I loved you!
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being,
were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance,
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being,
were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance,
I gasped; and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.[i]
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.[i]
……………………..
Hymn:
O Beauty, Ever Ancient Robert
O’Connor, Pub. OCP
Oh late have I loved You,
Oh late have I turned;
turned from seeking you in creatures,
fleeing grief and pain within.
Refrain
O Beauty, ever ancient,
O Beauty, ever new;
You the mirror of my life renewed,
Let me find my life in you.
(click on “Standing at the Threshold”
……………………………….
The Confessions of St. Augustine are written
as one extensive prayer from the opening words, “‘Vast are you, Lord, and as
vast should be your praise’—‘vast what you do; what you know is beyond
assaying,’”[ii] to the
final sentence, “Only to you can we pray, only from you can we hope, only at
your door can we knock. Be it granted,
be it fulfilled, be it opened.”[iii]
In preaching about the love of God Augustine
moves seamlessly from theology to testimony to prayer. “Where we are then to
abide and Whence we are to draw Life? Let Holy Scripture speak for us lest we
should seem in mere conjecture to be saying things contrary to the teaching of
the Word of God. Hear the words of one who knew: If God be for us who is
against us? [Rom. 8:31] The Lord, he says, is the portion of my inheritance. [Ps.
16:5] He saith not: “Lord, what wilt Thou give me for mine inheritance? All
that Thou canst give me is worthless! Be Thou mine inheritance! Thee do I love!
Thee do I wholly love! With all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind do
I love Thee! What, then, shall be my lot? What wilt Thou give me save Thyself?”
This is to love God freely. This is to hope for God from God. This is to hasten
to be filled with God, to be sated with Him. For He is sufficient for thee;
apart from Him nought can suffice thee![iv]
(Sermon, cccxxxiv. 3).
There is mingled sorrow, longing, and joy
in his prayer, “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have
I loved you.” Some indeed have never known
at time in which they did not know Love Himself; others share with Augustine
that sense of longing; the wish that they had known Love forever. Many of us, who have walked some years with
the Him still sense that feeling of lost opportunity, “If only… if only, if
only I had known Love sooner,” and the yearning stretches into the future.
“Day by day, dear Lord,
of thee three things I
pray:
to see thee more
clearly,
love thee more nearly,
follow thee more
nearly,
day by day.”[v]
That yearning is what C. S. Lewis
referred to as joy; for there is a joy in our longing for God that is the
leading edge of the prayer of union; those fleeting moments when we are lost in
the God whom we adore. St. Teresa of
Avila exclaims, “Oh, the greatness of God, that a soul should come out like
this after having been hidden in the greatness of God, and be closely united
with Him, for so short a time—never, I think, for so long as half an hour.” [vi] The whole will of the soul is then “set on
desiring to have ever increasing fruition of its Spouse; and His Majesty,
knowing our weakness, continues to grant it the things it wants, and many more.[vii]
Augustine confesses that in his search
for God he was looking in the wrong places.
He says, “Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and
upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong—I, misshapen.” Augustine’s search took him in many bypaths
of sensuality, intellectual enquiry, and into the heresies of Manichaeism. He says, “I had ‘gone down deviant paths’
with the help of a false and blaspheming religion. I did not so much accept it as true—I simply
preferred it to the one I was not virtuous enough to pursue but was viciously
resisting.”[viii]
The problem, as it so often is, is the
surrender of the will. We want to will
the right thing, but we are double-minded, and a double-minded man cannot
receive anything from the Lord.[ix] Augustine says, “For my willing was as
halfhearted as my nilling. I was a war
within, was exiled from myself. My exile
was unwelcome to me, caused not by a second nature within me but by the cost of
sin.”[x] All the while he confesses that God was
within him, seeking him, but he could not find him.
His search among all the shapely things
that God had made was a hindrance and he cries out, “They held me back far from
you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you.’ But what are the shapely things of the world
that hold us back from that surrender?
Is it the delight of knowing, or even the delight in not knowing? Beware, contemporary Christians don’t always
want to be intellectually challenged; and rather than stretch to understand
they sometimes cry out, “Dumb it down, so that I can understand!” Do we search through the shapely things that
He has made; through the beauty of the world; through delights of the flesh;
even through the lesser loves that can supplant the greatest Love when they are
loved without that Love that redeems all things?
It is hard to let go and to cast our all upon the Lord of Love. It ultimately means abandoning ourselves. It reminds me of a Monty Python Sequence,
Bring out your dead . . . bring out your dead…
Here's one -- nine pence.
I'm not dead!
What?
Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
I'm not dead!
Here -- he says he's not dead!
Yes, he is.
I'm not!
He isn't.
Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
I'm getting better![xi]
Right to the very end we struggle
against death to the world and death to ourselves. But the mercy of God is that He continues to
pursue us,
I fled Him, down the
nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the
labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him
Halts by me that footfall;
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstreched caressingly?[xii]
Augustine cries out, “You called,
shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you
lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and
now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
I remind you of something you should
already know. There are two forms of
grace, Infused Grace, and Acquired Grace.
The
distinction between Infused Grace and Acquired Grace is evident in St.
Diodochus of Photiki in his discussion of Initiatory Grace. Initiatory
Grace is itself an Infused Grace. There
are moments of blessed, unsought, unexpected Infused Grace, but a common error
of revivalism is the attempt to relive the experience of Initiatory Grace
instead of humbly accepting the discipline of Acquired Grace. St. Diodochus says,
“If we fervently desire
holiness, the Holy Spirit at the outset gives the soul a full conscious taste
of God’s sweetness, so that the intellect will know exactly of what the final
reward of spiritual life consists. But
later he often conceals this precious and life-creating gift. He does this so that, even if we acquire
other virtues, we should still regard ourselves as nothing because we have not
acquired divine love in a lasting form . . . It is therefore necessary to work
upon the soul forcefully for a while, so that we may come to taste divine love
fully and consciously . . . Those who have advanced to perfection are able to
taste this love continually, but no one can experience it completely until
‘what is mortal in us is swallowed up by life.” (2 Cor. 2:4)[xiii]
C.
S. Lewis differentiates between longing and longing. In a marvellous passage from Out of the
Silent Planet there is a linguistic discussion between Ransom and the hrossa Hyoi who is one of the
intelligent creatures inhabiting the planet Malacandra. “There were two verbs which both, as far as
he could see, meant to long or yearn; but the hrossa drew a sharp distinction, even an opposition, between
them. Hyoi seemed to him merely to be
saying that every one would long for it (wonderlone)
but no one in his senses could long for it (hluntheline). That is to say that there is a longing that
is grace-filled (wonderlone), and a
longing (hluntheline) the end of
which is only a satisfaction of the flesh.
I remember Martin Luther’s expression, junker fleisch, which means roughly, “little lord flesh,’ or perhaps,
“squire flesh,” a term of self-mockery
The
true longing of the soul is to see the face of God, not a longing that the
flesh might be satisfied, but a longing of the spirit that ends in surrender
and union with God, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no avail.”[xiv] The Psalmist prays, “You have said, ‘“Seek my
face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek.’ Hide not your face from me.’”[xv] And again the Psalmist says, “Seek the LORD,
and his strength: seek his face evermore.”[xvi] Our
longing to see the face of God springs from the deepest desire of the human
heart, freed by grace, for union with the Lord whom we love. Augustine gives voice to this longing saying,
“I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst.”
For
me a reductionist interpretation is not adequate. I do not want to avoid the obvious surface
meaning. With Moses I cry, “Show me Your
Glory.”[xvii] My Lord, show me Your face. If it is not possible to see Your essence,
the cry of my heart is at least let me see the “effulgence” of Your glory,[xviii] the
outraying of Your Essence in the face of Jesus Christ. May I see Your glory as the eye
sees. Let me see You with a ‘spiritual
sensing’ even as Paul was caught up to heaven, whether in the body or out of
the body he did not know.[xix] Let me see You as John saw You walking among
the golden menorah of the Churches. Why?
Because I love You? Not a shadow of how
You love me! No! Because You command it, and say “Seek My
face,” and my seeking, which is commanded, will make Your heart glad even as it
leaves me “rapt” in Your love.[xx]
Our
experience of God is uneven because we are uneven. Apart from grace we have no
freedom of will, but like Augustine in his struggle towards surrender, we are
driven by the nature and nurture that we have inherited from Adam and we do not
always wish to be freed from the old Adam. Augustine tells us, that “We can, however,
ourselves do nothing to effect good works of piety without Him either working
that we may will, or co-working when we will.”[xxi] It is grace that sets us free, free to will,
free to choose, free to act. But we must
will, choose, and act, all by our own choice. You will recognize that as an instance of
truth in tension; the human mind is not expansive enough to incorporate even a
fraction of the mysteries of God. That
is why we pray:
O God, from whom all good proceeds:
Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by
your merciful guiding may do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.[xxii]
[i] St. Augustine, The Confessions, Book 10, III,
38
[ii] Garry Wills, trans. St. Augustine, The Confessions.(New
York: Penguin, 2006), p. 3
[iii] Ibid. p. 353
[iv] Augustine: Sermon, cccxxxiv. 3
[v] St.
Richard of Chichester, 1197-1253, Hymnal 1982, Hymn 654
[vi] Teresa
of Avila, The Interior Castle, trans. ed.(E. Allison
Peers, New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 106
[xiii] Kallistos Ware, trans. “St.
Diodochus of Photiki,” The Philokalia, (London: Faber and Faber, 1979),
Vol. 1, p. 289.
[xvi] Psalm
105:4, KJV. The Hebrew word panyim. Is accurately translated as face in the KJV, while other
translations paraphrase it as presence.
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