Augustine relates in his Confessions that long before he accepted Christ and his gospel he was being led into a place of quietness. Looking back years after his conversion he saw that God had been enveloping him in his love, drawing him, unawares, into his embrace.

He wrote:

Unknown to me you caressed my head. You closed my eyes lest they see the things that keep me from you. I lost for a while the heavy burden of self and my madness was lulled to sleep. And when I awoke in you I saw you as utterly different.

(Confessions 7.14)

In these simple sentences Augustine lays before us the way in which God draws us into our own place of rest.

God’s first action is to enfold our weary heads. The word Augustine uses for caress, or enfold, suggests the image of a bird gathering her young ones under her protecting wings. It is the image Jesus uses when he laments the refusal of the people of Jerusalem to accept his loving protection: ‘How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused!’ (Matthew 23:37).

God next closes Augustine’s eyes lest he be seduced by empty joys. In time of silent prayer God closes our eyes, too, lest we be drawn aside into all that keeps us from the way of peace.

Augustine then discovers that, for a moment, he forgets about himself. His greatest burden, he sees, is the heavy burden of self. ‘I beg you, O Lord my God,’ he writes, ‘to look upon me and listen to me. Have pity on me and heal me, for you see that I have become a problem to myself, and this is the sickness from which I suffer.’

This is the burden that is lifted for us, too, when we come before God in silence. We forget ourselves. We forget for a while all that crushes us. Self-forgetfulness is one of the great blessings of silent prayer. To lose the burden of self and rest in God’s love is a pearl of great price. Even more so is the promise that our madness is lulled to sleep.

Augustine discovered that his troubled surface self was calmed and healed, and he found the peace which surpasses all expectations. Out of this state he awakens. Not an awakening into the hard reality of everyday life, but awakening with a new vision.

Augustine saw God in a completely new light. And in seeing God he saw everything differently.

An extract from Finding Your Hidden Treasure

© 2010 Benignus O’Rourke OSA

Published by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd

© Photo: Ian Wilson OSA

Get the book: www.theaugustinians.org