Kingdom Harbor

As I turned 44 years old this past week, I’ve been ruminating on this breathtaking quote from Saint Augustine’s Confessions.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” 

When at last I cling to you with my whole being there will be no more anguish or labor for me, and my life will be alive indeed, alive because filled with you. But now it is very different. Anyone whom you fill you also uplift; but I am not full of you, and so I am a burden to myself. Joys over which I ought to weep do battle with sorrows that should be matter for joy, and I do not know which will be victorious. But I also see griefs that are evil at war in me with joys that are good, and I do not know which will win the day. This is agony, Lord, have pity on me! It is agony! See, I do not hide my wounds; you are the physician and I am sick; you are merciful, I in need of mercy.

-Saint Augustine of Hippo, 354-430 AD

I resonate deeply with the themes of his prayer. Augustine, one of the greatest and most influential Christian minds ever, took his time in coming to the Christian faith. It was a turbulent spiritual odyssey filled with twists and turns and tears. He wasted many years on worldly pleasures and pursuits, finally surrendering to Christ in his thirties. You sense his regret over years squandered on lesser loves in his words, “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!”

Augustine sought meaning and purpose and love and happiness in the shiny, temporary “worldly” things around him, while the soul’s deepest longing is for union with God in his inner being. While many Christians have focused on avoiding the trap of serving manmade idols in place of the Living God, most Christians including myself have been taught to seek God outside ourselves – up there, out there, beyond, transcendent, looking down, watching over, high and exalted, on His Heavenly Throne.

Only recently, around my 40th birthday, while reading the spiritual mystics and contemplative tradition, did I begin to explore what it means to say that God is to be sought and found within — what St. Teresa of Avila called the Interior Castle. Listen to Augustine’s words, and I hear an ache in his voice: “You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there [outside myself] that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.”

Somehow I came to adopt an Enlightenment view of the cosmos and of God, a split level universe with God way “up there” somewhere and we mortals “down here.” Combine this with a paranoia among Evangelicals toward certain fashionable “New Age” teachings that urge us to tap into our own inner divinity, and you now have masses of Christians who can’t make sense of Augustine’s lament that God was within him the whole time, while he spent many tortured years living a life where his soul was somehow detached from his True Self, or Soul, created for intimacy with God. “You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.”

Have you ever pondered what it might mean to live your life outside of your own self? If not, you’ve probably never read in the contemplative tradition.

Friends, I was 3/4 through a doctorate degree, with a masters and bachelors degrees in theology, before I realized I, too, was outside myself and I had been searching for God outside myself: in the stars, in the creeds, in the catechism, in classes and in sermons, in Bible studies and small group curriculums, in spiritual practices and in worship services. “You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.”

Too many days I must also confess that “You were with me, God, but I was not with you.” He was with me through my seminary studies, while my heart was more at home enjoying grand ideas about God than enjoying actual communion with Him. God was graciously with me while I founded ministries and planted a church, even though my heart and mind were sometimes more in love with the “vision” and my ideals of church than with Christ himself. In depression and anxiety, you sat with me while I poured out my soul to my therapists, holding me and loving me while I gave you largely cold silence.

Please make no mistake: My folly was not for a lack of trying, nor ill intentions, nor lack of Biblical knowledge. I have always sought to anchor EVERYTHING in a personal relationship with God through His Son Jesus the Christ. The problem was I was taught to love a God who is “out there” in the ether, “up there” in Heaven, and I was never given the contemplative framework to understand what God meant when He said He wants to make His dwelling in me (John 14).

I was never taught that the human soul, or True Self, lies buried beneath layers of a False Self, Ego, or what Paul calls my “fleshly nature” or “old man” I have concocted over the years to survive, to hide behind, to mask my insecurities and fears. Nobody taught me that spiritual maturity entails the messy process of identifying, exposing and detaching my Soul from my False Self, to risk taking off my “fig leaf” to stand naked and unashamed before God and find the “life that is truly life” (John 10:10). I have been all too willing to “gain the whole world” of external religious knowledge and practices, even as I forfeited the care of my soul in the process (Mark 8:36).

Only in the past few years, through exploring other rich Christian traditions and writers long “kept” from me, have I begun to pursue a faith that has as its goal NOT just Heaven when I die, but deep union with God here and now. Through such writers as Thomas Merton and Gregory Palamas, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila, Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr, and the wisdom of the Enneagram, I can say of God:

“You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” 

And how much do we, the church in America, burn for His peace today? Dispel our blindness, O God.

But my journey has just begun. I am still a divided self. I’m still longing for wholeness in my inner being. I wake up feeling empty more days than full. But I’m on the narrow path that leads to more spiritual fullness. “When at last I cling to you with my whole being there will be no more anguish or labor for me, and my life will be alive indeed, alive because filled with you…but I am not full of you, and so I am a burden to myself.” Yep.

The degree of my spiritual poverty and illness is becoming more clear, but I have found in Christ not just a forgiver of sins, but also a good and wise physician of the soul. Most hours of most days in my pastoring, my parenting, my ‘husbanding’, “I am not full of you, and so I am a burden to myself” and others. “This is agony, Lord, have pity on me! It is agony! See, I do not hide my wounds; you are the physician and I am sick; you are merciful, I in need of mercy.” I have a soul companion who meets me in the inner room, not just a stoic Deity on an exalted Throne. I have a community of sinners and saints at MainStreet Covenant where we don’t need to hide our wounds, and where we try to bask in His mercy.

Augustine is one of the most celebrated Christian intellects of all time. His brilliant mind was matched by a ravenous heart and fleshly appetites that took time to be tamed. He is known for his sinfulness as much as for his saintliness. His writings both throb with emotions and shine with brilliance. His Confessions reveal a man whose faith brought head and heart together in a dynamic package, much like an Enneagram Five with a Four Wing (which I happen to be).

I share this bit of my spiritual journey with you all as an invitation to join me on a similar quest to find a God who doesn’t just want to save you for Heaven but wants to inhabit your soul. You need not be forever longing, forever incomplete, just out of reach of God’s loving embrace. You can breathe His fragrance, draw in His breath, pant for Him, taste Him and hunger and thirst for more.
The central message of the faith that so long eluded me, despite all my Christian education, was that God’s loving gaze and healing presence is to be found within, that my inner being is to be a sanctuary where I can meet with God and find rest. As told us, “On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you” (John 14:20). Lady Julian spells it out more vividly:

“The place which God takes in our soul he will never vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there…. The soul who contemplate this is made like the one who is contemplated.”

“You have made us for yourself,” Augustine says elsewhere, “and our hearts are restless until they finds rest in you.” And this involves waking up to the reality that God has chosen to rest in my inner sanctuary as well. This is not New Age navel gazing; it is the faith of the apostles, the surprise in the Gospel of John, the pursuit of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the treasured wisdom of the Christian mystics, and more. It’s been enshrined in the Christian tradition for centuries, but grossly neglected in modern Protestantism–most especially among Evangelicals.

If only I had discovered these things earlier… “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!” But better late than never.