Tuesday January 26th 2021
few excerpts from On The Road With St. Augustine by James K. A. Smith, before I re-clothe the book in its dust jacket and find a place for it on the bookshelf.In the last chapter, on the subject of death and humanity's search for an enduring love, stronger than death, Smith shares a portion of St. Augustine's letter to Sapida whose brother Timothy recently died.
But then he offers consolation on a higher register: "Let your heart be lifted up" - the passive here seems especially tender - "and your eyes will be dry. For the love by which Timothy loved and loves Sapida has not perished because those things, which you mourn as having been removed from you, have passed away over time. That love remains, preserved in its repository, and is hidden with Christ in the Lord" - the Lord who "was willing to die for us so that we might live, even though we have died, so that human beings would not gear death as if it were going to destroy them, and so that none of the dead for whom life itself died would grieve as if they had lost life." (p.216)I enjoy thinking about and reading thoughts on death; not in a morbid sense, but in the flavor of the excerpt shared above. This reminds me that I need to acquire and read N.T. Wright's For All The Saints: Remembering the Christian Departed, which "sets out to clarify our thinking about what happens to people after they die. Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, what it means to pray for the dead, what (and who) are the saints" (from the Amazon.com product description).
In Confessions, Augustine remembers his friend Nebridius who died some years prior, and with whom Augustine used to share eager conversation. From p. 217 of Smith:
"He no longer pricks up his ears when I speak," Augustine admits. He's not around to put up with me the way he did, constantly asking questions and hungry for conversation. Instead, he is hidden with Christ in God where he "puts his spiritual mouth to your fountain and avidly drinks as much as he can of wisdom, happy without end." Then Augustine allows himself a happy, consoling thought: "I do not think him so intoxicated by that as to forget me, since you, Lord, whom he drinks, are mindful of us."
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