Late Have I Loved You

I sought a way to gain the strength which I needed to enjoy you. But I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God  and men, the man Christ Jesus, who is above all, God blessed for ever….Late have I love 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 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 not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke 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. 

From St. Augustine, Confessions

I don’t know what I could add that would say more than the passage above from the Confessions. When we even slightly move near God, he touches our lives and we become increasingly aware of our need for him. Sometimes the awareness of our need is immediate, but at other times it takes years for us to realize just what it is that we long for. Often it involves a long search down many blind passages filled with painful and unfulfilling experiences.

St. Augustine speaks well to our times—to our materialistic times that are only different from his in the degree and availability of the things we grasp for in order to fill the empty depths of the human soul. We must come on our own to the realization that the longing in our hearts is God-shaped. Nothing can fill such longing other than that for which our hearts were made.

For many years I searched for what would satisfy the unnameable longing I felt deep within. I tried to fill it with everything at my grasp only to find that the things at my grasp only intensified the awareness of my emptiness. To be without God, truly without God, is unimaginable.

Recently my 12-year-old son has taken an interest in Dante’s Inferno. The questions about hell were plentiful around my house this weekend. His mom and I offered him a divine comedy of explanations and speculations that only a 12-year-old boy could appreciate, but not without a tone of seriousness. It's interesting to watch a young person begin to ponder ultimate spiritual consequences. Regardless of how bleak a picture we paint, hell is never so dark as a single moment’s existence without God. I think this is what Augustine knew, and what everyone who genuinely searches for God knows.  There is no imagination of hell so bleak and painful as to live in the absence of love and peace.

Even in those times when we may have sought to fill our lives with everything other than God, he was nevertheless close; he was calling and tugging on our hearts. When, and wherever, we come to the realization that only God can satisfy, our reaction is universal, “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new. Late have I loved you.” Yet at the moment we realize that only God fills what was made to be filled by God, we enter into the relationship that is more than lifelong with him who bridges the gap that separated us from God. Late have I loved you, but in timelessness I embrace your love. Thus, we enter into true relationship with the Almighty.

We enter into communion with what we see, breathe, touch, and taste—and it only intensifies our desire for God, for that which is love, for that which is peace.  He fills us utterly, taking our souls to the heights and returning us to the ground on which we stand only to desire him the more.

Certainly I sought elsewhere. I ran from God, thinking not so much that something else could fill my longing need for love and fulfilment, but that I stood to lose what little I held. If only I had known the all-fulfilling love in you, Lord, I would never have sought anywhere else.

Comments

[H]

Amen!