O
Eternal Truth, True Love and Beloved Eternity
Urged to reflect upon myself, I entered under your
guidance the innermost places of my being; but only because you had become my
helper was I able to do so. I entered, then, and with the vision of my spirit,
such as it was, I saw the incommutable light far above my spiritual ken and
transcending my mind: not this common light which every carnal eye can see, nor
any light of the same order; but greater, as though this common light were
shining much more powerfully, far more brightly, and so extensively as to fill
the universe. The light I saw was not the common light at all, but something
different, utterly different, from all those things. Nor was it higher than my
mind in the sense that oil floats on water or the sky is above the earth; it
was exalted because this very light made me, and I was below it because by it I
was made. Anyone who knows truth knows this light.
O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you
are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you, you
lifted me up and showed me that, while that which I might see exists indeed, I
was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely on me, beating
back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be
far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice
from on high: “I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat me.
You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed
into me”.
Accordingly I looked for a way to gain the strength I
needed to enjoy you, but I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and man,
the man Christ Jesus, who is also God, supreme over all things and blessed for
ever. He called out,
proclaiming I am the Way and
Truth and the Life, nor had I
known him as the food which, though I was not yet strong enough to eat it, he
had mingled with our flesh, for the
Word became flesh so that
your Wisdom, through whom you created all things, might become for us the milk
adapted to our infancy.
Source: The Liturgy of the Hours – Office of Readings
From the Confessions of Saint Augustine, bishop
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