The voice, the Word

Yesterday the Office of Readings provided this wonderful reflection from St. Augustine that continues to amaze me every time I read it.

The word in my heart is to convey the love of God. Yet so often the "voice" of my actions falls short of that desire. I become like the mindless babbling into which we so often lapse when we are exhausted or frantic and lose our focus on the purpose of our speaking.

But also, too often I am a selfish voice, wanting to be loved for myself rather than desiring chiefly to let God be loved.

As promised

God, who is faithful, put himself in our debt, not by receiving anything but by promising so much . . . . He promised eternal salvation, everlasting happiness, with the angels, an immortal inheritance, endless glory, the hoyful vision of his face, his holy dwelling in heaven, and after resurrection from the dead no further fear of dying . . . . He promised men divinity, mortal immortality, sinners justification, the poor a rising to glory.
But, brethren, because God' promises seemed impossible to men - equality with the angels in exchange for mortality, corruption, poverty, weakness, dust and ashes - God not only made a written contract with men to win their belief, but also established a mediator of his good faith, not a prince or angel or archangel, but his only Son. He wanted, through his Don, to show us and give us the way he would lead us tot he goal he has promised.
It was not enough for God to make his Son our guide to the way; he made him the Way itself, that you might travel with him as leader and by him as the Way. - St. Augustine, from A discourse on the psalms

Good stuff, St. A.

Victory over temptation

Our pilgrimage on earth cannot be exempt from trial. We progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial, or receives a crown except after victory, or strives except against an enemy or temptations . . . . In Christ you were tempted, for Christ received his flesh from your nature, but by his own power gained salvation for you; he suffered insults in your nature, but by his own power gained glory for you; therefore, he suffered temptation in your nature, but by his own power gained victory for you. - from a commentary on the Psalms by St. Augustine, bishop

I was reflecting during yesterday's men's group about the relationship between the body of Christ, the Church, and our head. This passage from today's Office of Readings seems to fit right in with this idea. I believe I will walk more closely along the path my Savior dreams for me to follow if I allow the Holy Spirit to more consistently remind me of - and more fully transform me in - the relationship that the body - and this member - has with the Head.

More from Augustine on what this feast means

What man knows all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in Christ, concealed in the poverty of his flesh? . . . How great are the blessings of his goodness which he reserves for those who fear him and shows to those who hope in him? Until he gives them to us in their plenitude, we can have only the faintest conception of them . . . from a sermon by St. Augustine, bishop

No matter how much we think we know God, on this earth we remain mortal, finite beings trying to understand the eternal, infinite maker of all things. We try to understand God's love and God's motives in terms of our own, because we have been told that we are made in his image and likeness, and yet our limited time, knowledge and power and our profound selfishness fundamentally distort our experience of love. Thus we reject God because he doesn't do what we think we would do if we were endowed with infinite love, knowledge and power, and if we were unbound by time as God is. If we consider more closely the things that we say we would do (better, of course) in God's place, our stated choices would invariably contravene the free will which he has bestowed on us, unhindered by any fear of us and motivated by a love for us which is greater than we can understand.

. . . but to enable us to receive them, he who in his divine is the equal of the Father assumed the condition of a slave and became like us, and so restored to us our likeness to God. The only Son of God became son of man to make many men sons of God.  

And, again, St. Augustine leads us to the true miracle of Christmas. Too often we focus on the manger, shepherd, angels and wise men, and fail to consider what it means for the eternal Son to become a mortal son. That may be best. Even the most faith-filled mind struggles to understand how such a thing can be. But let us not forget the reason: not just a baby born two thousand years ago, but our own adoption and transformation into what would otherwise always be beyond us.

St. John the Apostle

On this feast day, again so close to Christmas Day, we at least get a taste of the eternal perspective with which St. John begins both his gospel and his first epistle. Though I like the development and the context of the former more than the latter, I am happy that the first reading of the Office of Readings today is brings us a good chunk of the first chapter from this letter. For a moment I felt chagrined, as I misunderstood the beloved apostle as chastising me for still having emotional darkness, but then I saw that he was referring to the darkness of unacknowledged sin.

And I took great encouragement from St. Augustine's reflection on this epistle. What a great work God did in the conversion of this brilliant man's mind from lesser philosophical pursuits to the unfathomable depths of God in Christ Jesus!

     Someone might interpret the phrase the Word of life to mean a word about Christ, rather than Christ’s body itself which was touched by human hands. But consider what comes next: and life itself was revealed. Christ therefore is himself the Word of life.
     And how was this life revealed? It existed from the beginning, but was not revealed to men, only to angels, who looked upon it and feasted upon it as their own spiritual bread. But what does Scripture say? Mankind ate the bread of angels.
     Life itself was therefore revealed in the flesh. In this way what was visible to the heart alone could become visible also to the eye, and so heal men’s hearts. For the Word is visible to the heart alone, while flesh is visible to bodily eyes as well. We already possessed the means to see the flesh, but we had no means of seeing the Word. The Word was made flesh so that we could see it, to heal the part of us by which we could see the Word. - from a treatise by St. Augustine on the (first) epistle of St. John

A voice with a mind of its own

I still love the second reading from the Office of Readings for Gaudete Sunday.

What if, when we opened our mouth to convey our word, our voice refused to speak? We find it so very frustrating, on those occasions when we become ill, to be unable to convey our thoughts.

What if our voice instead spoke something very different from what we intended, if when we attempted to give voice to the word of our love for another our voice instead spoke out contempt or hatred? Would we not clamp shut our lips and refuse to give any utterance at all?

It occurs to me again how unknowably humble and patient God is with us!

St. Augustine and the Charisms

Hmmm.  Maybe that should be the name of my next band.

It was another example of the sort of timing that I have come to recognize as God's direction and work in my life. The Baptism in the Holy Spirit resource I'm reading has been the sort of thing that I read until I find my mind drifting away from it somewhat, then carefully mark my place and pick up in that same spot. Unlike Death on a Friday Afternoon, which invariably always inspires me to write within every couple of pages, this book has been thoroughly validating many of the spiritual experiences of my adulthood. The section I've most recently completed dealt with the charisms as documented in the patristic period of the Church, following the section on their scriptural references.

So in that most recently completed section, the very first paragraph where I left off reading last week addresses the change of heart which St. Augustine had with regard to the gifts of the Holy Spirit as a result of miraculous events that occurred during his ministry at Hippo. The providential timing comes from my having just seen Restless Heart, bringing me a closer sense of kinship with this great Doctor of the Church whom I have long held in such high esteem. I realize I don't really know Augustine any better than I ever did before, but reading his own wondering eyewitness account of what happened in his church, reading his accurate description of the same phenomena which I have experienced, make me feel more as if I am being gently affirmed by someone in whom I have a deep sense of trust.

This isn't the only way God's Spirit has worked to affirm me, nor the most powerful. I am convinced that the affirmation of my friends whose spiritual judgment and maturity I have come to recognize and respect is likewise a gift of God to buttress me in my weakest moments.

And lead us not?

He made us one with him when he chose to be tempted by Satan. We have heard in the gospel how the Lord Jesus Christ was tempted by the devil in the wilderness. Certainly Christ was tempted by the devil. In Christ you were tempted, for Christ received his flesh from your nature, but by his own power gained salvation for you; he suffered death in your nature, but by his own power gained life for your; he suffered insults in your nature, but by his own power gained glory for you; therefore, he suffered temptation in your nature, but by his own power gained victory for you.  
If in Christ we have been tempted, in him we overcome the devil. Do you think only of Christ's temptation and fail to think of his victory? See yourself as tempted in him, and see yourself as victorious in him. He could have kept the devil from himself; but if he were not tempted he could not teach you how to triumph over temptation. - Saint Augustine

I haven't opened Death on a Friday Afternoon yet, but I've found no lack of things to reflect on in the Office of Readings thus far this Lent. The thing is, I really don't have to many of my own reflections to add to St. Augustine's excellent words. They're just pretty much a reminder for me.

(That said, of course I've thought of something to say . . . )

I think that sometimes we think of our own temptations as being greater than what others face, or maybe of less importance to deal with, so that we either excuse or accommodate our failure to triumph over them.  Or perhaps we think that the grace that was present for Christ to draw upon in the face of his temptation is less available to us.  Both of these strike me as a sort of reverse pride, as a way of exalting our sinfulness to the status of something we can't do anything about.  It takes one sort of humility to acknowledge that, no, my temptations really aren't all that especially unavoidable, and another sort - one that we don't often think of as being humility but I think it is - to realize that I have the same grace at work in me that enabled Jesus to resist the devil.

I realize that it was Jesus himself who taught us to pray to the Father to lead us not into temptation, but we should remember that we're going to encounter it anyway, and we can count on him to lead us through it when we do, if we'll just turn to him and acknowledge our need for him in that moment.

Holy Christmas season!

"Beloved, our Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal creator of all things, today became our Savior by being born of a mother. Of his own will he was born for us today, in time, so that he could lead us to his Father's eternity. God became man so that man might become God. The Lord of the angels became man today so that man could eat the bread of angels." - from a sermon by St. Augustine


I love how our celebration of the Christmas season allows us time to examine the mysteries of Christ's incarnation over the space of a few weeks.  Those who don't celebrate a formal season of Advent often use the couple of weeks before Christmas to a similar purpose, but I truly appreciate the way that the anticipatory nature of our reflections during that period, focusing on themes of prophecy, waiting, longing and need, prepare us to celebrate more fully this season of joy and fulfillment, wonder and awe.  Advent becomes an annual John the Baptist in our lives, preparing our hearts for the coming of the Lord.

Thus the Christmas season becomes full of more than historical images of mangers and shepherds, angelic heralds and wise men from afar.  Those ancient images hold great meaning for us; they're important for us to revisit each year, but they're not the end.  The beginning and the end are found more fully in John's account, which our parish has quit using over the last several years, to my frustration.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." - Jn 1, 1


The light had come into the world, yet the world did not recognize it, a statement that remains true today. Yet these weeks are filled with reasons why we should recognize it, or perhaps with the results of recognizing it. And so we finally arrive back at St. Augustine.

I love how he uses irony and contrast to cast light on the wonder of Christ's coming to us. St. Paul did this, too, in elucidating how Jesus fulfills the age old longing of the Jewish people and extension of his salvific kingship to all peoples. And I love how the weeks of Christmas allow us to reflect on the implications of the Incarnation.

Too often we treat the holy days as if they are isolated.  I think this is because of our experience of the world in time, one event after another, which often appear isolated from each other.  But the best reflections on Christmas make the clear link between Jesus' birth and his mission, and treat his Nativity along with the rest of his earthly life, his death and resurrection, in the context of the difference they make for us. Too many of us are trying to be god in the wrong way, defining for ourselves good and evil (the original sin), seizing control of our lives in any way possible, interpreting the circumstances around us in whatever light best allows us to make the choices we think will have the best outcome for us. After all, if we are god in the same way as Jesus, it is up to us to make of ourselves what we may.

Indeed, I have a good friend who tends to view the nativity as a historical event that has had great impact on the world solely because of how Jesus lived and died, and what his disciples believed about him. He considers that Jesus was no more God than you or I, but recognizes that those who have believed otherwise have had a profound, mostly positive and lasting impact on human affairs.

But St. John and St. Augustine propose that Jesus Christ is God in a far different way, by his very nature before he was ever conceived in the womb for us. Indeed, they posit that, unlike every other person ever born, Jesus' birth was the result of a decision for the timeless creator to step into time in a unique way, so that he might deliver us into his love for eternity. The role of the ancient prophecies is not then to create a set of circumstances which Jesus must fulfill, but to allow us to recognize him because he fulfills them. Is it that sacrifice is necessary to appease an angry God, or that God who has seen all time knew that we would kill
the savior, and prepared us to recognize him by presenting centuries of law and prophecy that his life and death would fulfill alone out of the billions before or since?

Whatever is built upon fallacy eventually falls apart. Even the Jewish leaders who The Acts of the Apostles tells us whipped the disciples for preaching Jesus as risen from the dead said that if it was built on falsehood, this new movement would collapse. Christianity is built on the Godhead of Jesus, and has not only stood for two thousand years, but has transformed the world around it in the process. Yet this is temporal. Its true magnificence and miracle is how Jesus of Nazareth draws us into the eternal life for which we are created. The bread of heaven was conceived a zygote in the womb, and born in a manger for us, so that as we partake of him we are transformed by and into what we ingest.

A carefully embedded gem?

I'm trying to mine a meaningful nugget from St. Augustine's reflections in today's Office of Readings. It isn't that there isn't anything there, or that I can't get to it, but seems more the case that so much of it is so closely interrelated that any piece seems to lose its power when removed from what surrounds it.  I thought that I could grab an idea from the end that really resonated with me, but soon realized that its impact had only happened because it had been worked up to.  The beginning material hadn't seemed to do anything for me, but when I returned to it I saw how it had laid a foundation for what came throughout.

So read it for yourself, and see if it has any value for you!

But I find very powerful this idea of God giving us something we can handle to embrace in preparation for what we're not quite ready for as of yet.

The Joy of Christmas

"For what greater grace could God have made to dawn on us than to make his only Son become the son of man, so that a son of man might in his turn become son of God?
"Ask if this were merited; ask for its reason, for its justification, and see whether you will find any other answer but sheer grace." - from a sermon of St. Augustine


I wanted to record this thought from Christmas Eve here, too, along with this:

"Dearly beloved, today our Saviour is born; let us rejoice. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness.
"No one is shut out from this joy; all share the same reason for rejoicing. Our Lord, victor over sin and death, finding no man free from sin, came to free us all. Let the saint rejoice as he sees the palm of victory at hand. Let the sinner be glad as he receives the offer of forgiveness. Let the pagan take courage as he is summoned to life." - from a sermon of St. Leo the Great

I must remember to focus on these things when I am  in the midst of things that crush my spirit.

The humble voice

I thought this from St. Augustine was worth sharing in its entirety:

John is the voice, but the Lord is the Word who was in the beginning. John is the voice that lasts for a time; from the beginning Christ is the Word who lives for ever.

Take away the word, the meaning, and what is the voice? Where there is no understanding, there is only a meaningless sound. The voice without the word strikes the ear but does not build up the heart.

However, let us observe what happens when we first seek to build up our hearts. When I think about what I am going to say, the word or message is already in my heart. When I want to speak to you, I look for a way to share with your heart what is already in mine.

In my search for a way to let this message reach you, so that the word already in my heart may find place also in yours, I use my voice to speak to you. The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away. The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet it is still also in mine.

When the word has been conveyed to you, does not the sound seem to say: The word ought to grow, and I should diminish? The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying: My joy is complete. Let us hold on to the word; we must not lose the word conceived inwardly in our hearts.

Do you need proof that the voice passes away but the divine Word remains? Where is John’s baptism today? It served its purpose, and it went away. Now it is Christ’s baptism that we celebrate. It is in Christ that we all believe; we hope for salvation in him. This is the message the voice cried out.

Because it is hard to distinguish word from voice, even John himself was thought to be the Christ. The voice was thought to be the word. But the voice acknowledged what it was, anxious not to give offence to the word. I am not the Christ, he said, nor Elijah, nor the prophet. And the question came: Who are you, then? He replied: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way for the Lord. The voice of one crying in the wilderness is the voice of one breaking the silence. Prepare the way for the Lord, he says, as though he were saying: “I speak out in order to lead him into your hearts, but he does not choose to come where I lead him unless you prepare the way for him.”

What does prepare the way mean, if not “pray well”? What does prepare the way mean, if not “be humble in your thoughts”? We should take our lesson from John the Baptist. He is thought to be the Christ; he declares he is not what they think. He does not take advantage of their mistake to further his own glory.

If he had said, “I am the Christ,” you can imagine how readily he would have been believed, since they believed he was the Christ even before he spoke. But he did not say it; he acknowledged what he was. He pointed out clearly who he was; he humbled himself.

He saw where his salvation lay. He understood that he was a lamp, and his fear was that it might be blown out by the wind of pride.

The gift of humility is to recognize the source of our gifts and to remember that their purpose is to glorify God, not ourselves.

Feed my sheep

When those who are tending Christ’s flock wish that the sheep were theirs rather than his, they stand convicted of loving themselves, not Christ. And the Lord’s words are a repeated admonition to them and to all who, as Paul writes sadly, are seeking their own ends, not Christ’s.
 
Do you love me? Tend my sheep. Surely this means: “If you love me, your thoughts must focus on taking care of my sheep, not taking care of yourself. You must tend them as mine, not as yours; seek in them my glory, not yours; my sovereign rights, not yours; my gain, not yours. Otherwise you will find yourself among those who belong to the ‘times of peril,’ those who are guilty of self-love and the other sins that go with that beginning of evils.”

So the shepherds of Christ’s flock must never indulge in self-love; if they do they will be tending the sheep not as Christ’s but as their own. And of all vices this is the one that the shepherds must guard against most earnestly; seeking their own purposes instead of Christ’s, furthering their own desires by means of those persons for whom Christ shed his blood.

From a treatise on John by Saint Augustine, bishop

Although the audience of this writing appears to consist of pastors within the Church, this section from today's Office of Readings reminds me of an important and easily-forgotten truth. As a husband, I must think of myself primarily as shepherd of the flock entrusted to me: my family. It is far too easy to get wrapped up in what I think other family members should do and how their decisions affect me. It puts things in a very different light when I remember this other way of thinking of my loved ones and our roles in each others' lives.

A thought or two is also called for regarding self-love. St. Augustine is obviously using the term very differently from how we have come to embrace it today. We are seeing great emphasis on how important it is to accept that I'm a flawed human being and not hate myself for that. There is also a popular approach that suggests that I  must look to my own needs ahead of those of others. I have seen both of these perspectives applied appropriately and also misused. Living a life of healthy balance between my needs and others means that I will draw appropriate boundaries for both my benefit and the good of those I love, and an inner conviction of my lack of worth can drive me to many unhealthy types of decisions, both consciously and otherwise. Yet it's also possible to exalt myself, using self-love as a rationale for justifying my viewpoint in conflict with others. Augustine is obviously using the term self-love to refer to this type of self-indulgence by which the pastor places his own well-being over the needs of the flock, or his desire for personal glory above his striving to glorify Christ.

The importance of applying these ideas appropriately should be obvious, but I'm going to speak to them anyway. I must not interpret and respond to my family members' behaviors and needs primarily based on their effect on me. It's easy to think that it's all about me, when it really isn't at all. Yet this becomes a self-perpetuating thought-feeling-behavior habit that interferes with living and loving as we're called. It isn't that my family members are pulling my chain, or that they're inconsiderate. Yes, we may have some conflicts to resolve, but it's way easier to do that - to want to address them in the first place, and then to approach the situation in a helpful way - when I apply the proper perspective to my own thinking.

It is our underlying beliefs about ourselves and those around us that form the context in which we understand and respond to everything. These are the chief driver of our personal happiness (or lack), and the single area most directly under our control, as opposed to the circumstances to which we most often attribute it. Yes, our situations have very real repercussions on our emotional state, but these are often beyond our control and don't play as deep and lasting a role as our underlying beliefs do. When we focus on our happiness - the "outflow," to apply a concept from Oswald Chambers in a slightly different context - and on the way that others' actions directly and outwardly affect us, we fail to address our own foundational thoughts and attitudes, which most basically and profoundly effect our satisfaction with life and provide us the tools we need to deal with others' actions and our circumstances most effectively.

It's a bit like a sports team that focuses on winning to the exclusion of preparing to execute the actions that produce the greatest chance for victory.

Approaching the Triduum

"This is surely what we read in the Proverbs of Solomon: If you sit down to eat at the table of a ruler, observe carefully what is set before you; then stretch out your hand, knowing that you must provide the same kind of meal yourself.  What is this ruler's table if not the one at which we receive the body and blood of him who laid down his life for us?  What does it mean to sit at this table if not to approach it with humility?  What does it mean to observe carefully what is set before you if not to meditate devoutly on so great a gift?  What does it mean to stretch out one's hand, knowing that one must provide the same kind of oneself, if not what I have just said: as Christ laid down his life for us, so we in our turn ought to lay down our lives for our brothers?"  St. Augustine, from a treatise on John

Holy Week is a priceless opportunity to "meditate devoutly on so great a gift."  Truly, the whole season of Lent is a time for such contemplation, and praying our Way of the Cross service throughout the season has been a wonderful experience of connecting with Christ's love in a deeper, transforming way.

So how am I now to lay down my life?  I doubt I'm being called to martyrdom, though if I'm ever faced with such an opportunity I pray that Christ will be strong enough in me for the challenge.  But on a daily basis, I'm certainly called to put my loved ones' needs (and those of other brothers and sisters in Christ) ahead of my own wishes.  Sometimes I'm pretty good at that.  But often I miss these chances, and more often fail to recognize Christ in the midst of them.

More from St. Augustine

As a music minister, I was especially moved by St. Augustine's words in today's Office of Readings.

That's "today's" as in "the day I posted this," not necessarily "the day you read this," which after today - by the definition in this parenthetical - would be a different link, in all probability won't contain anything by St. Augustine, but is still probably worth your time!

Sometimes we musicians tend to think our primary prayer is our song. After all, it was St. Augustine who also said that to sing is to pray twice. But this reading makes it clear that our primary prayer must be to live in Christ's love.

I still struggle with this, hesitant to yield my will over some parts of my life. It's hard to fully accept that embracing God's will results in greater joy and love than chasing my own. After all, isn't our primary objection that "we don't want to miss out on all the 'fun'!"

St. Augustine was intimately familiar with that perspective, too.

I knew this was my second post from St. Augustine, but it took me a while to find the first, two years and two days ago, on a completely different reading, since Easter was later that year . . . This blog was practically brand new then!

Thoughts from St. Augustine

Most of my blog references to the writings of the saints, unless indicated otherwise in the blog somewhere such as a book I'm reading, are from the Divine Office. This was from Wednesday:

"God could give no greater gift to men than to make his Word, through whom he created all things, their head, and to join them to him as his members, so that the Word might be both Son of God and son of man, one God with the Father, and one man with all men. The result is that when we speak with God in prayer we do not separate the Son from him, and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself: it is the one Savior of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us and in us and is himself the object of our prayers.
"He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, he is the object of our prayers as our God."

No wonder this saint is a Doctor of the Church! It seems preposterous to think I might add anything, and still I type. To misapply scripture: focus on the things above, not the things below!

This is why prayer is effective. It isn't some mumbo-jumbo, a magic trick, a bargaining process, a reward for being good, or an attempt to earn a favor. When we pray, fast, or give alms in one form or another, it is not just us doing it. Since it is Christ at work in his body, thus are we transformed, even though the primary objective we might have in mind is not our own transformation. In fact, all the better if it isn't. It is always what Christ desires for us, though, and what he effects within us. But since Jesus is one with all people, and we are one with our Head, then it is impossible to sincerely ask God to meet our needs alone, or to only meet the needs of others. In each case, God will be working in others through us and in us through others.

The Woman at the Well

This weekend, since we have an RCIA group, we had the gospel reading of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4). It's a great illustration of how Jesus works with us, especially the most shameful of us.

Here is this woman, alone at the village well in the middle of the day when Jesus arrived. Anyone who has studied this story knows that this in itself was unusual. The women drew their water in the morning, while it was cooler, and used the time as a social gathering. They'd share what was going on in their lives and catch up on the latest gossip. This woman's isolated water errand later in the day indicates that she was not comfortable with the other women, did not feel welcome in their presence. Perhaps she'd been ridiculed and outcast because of her past.

Even without any sort of divine insight, Jesus would have suspected she was a social misfit, but two other reasons proscribed him from speaking to her: a man would not have conversed with an unaccompanied woman, and a Jew would not condescend to speak to a Samaritan. Nonetheless, he did not let any of these social limitations bar him from the transformation which he wanted for her. Maybe her outcast status was the primary reason that he reached out to her despite her being a Samaritan woman. By his mere willingness to speak with her, he tempered his later words when he began to speak the truth of her status. When in the course of their conversation he made clear that he knew about her, she was prepared to not feel ridicule or scorn from him because he had not started off with an accusation. His discussion of her past becomes a revelation of mercy, because he has already not rejected her despite knowing the truth of which she is so ashamed.

The transformation in her is incredible. This shameful woman who'd avoided her neighbors, been hurt and shunned by them, was now driven to tell them all about the one she'd encountered. Her testimony must have been compelling, for rather than rejecting her further, they came to see for themselves, and discovered the wonderful Savior for whom they'd been longing for so long.

So it is with us. Are not the strongest testimonies to Christ's power given by those who have been delivered from the greatest darkness? St. Augustine says that the Samaritan woman is a precursor to each of us, that she has become a symbol of what happens in our own transformation. I remember, as a proud young man, coming to the conclusion that religion was for the weak. It was only when I encountered my own weakness that I came to understand that Jesus had acknowledged as much: "The well do not need a doctor; sick people do."

There is a wonderful Savior who has loved me, even to death, despite my failings. I suppose this blog is my equivalent of going and telling those around me so that they might want to know him, too.