Sublime

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests,

The Christian gospel, for Augustine, wasn’t just the answer to an intellectual question (though it was that); it was more like a shelter in a storm, a port for a wayward soul, nourishment for a prodigal who was famished, whose own heart had become, he said, “a famished land.”

“The real test of every human community is how it cares for the most vulnerable, those like Angela who cannot sustain even a simulation of independence and autonomy.”

sacramental

protect

Susanna Moore, author of eleven books, who teaches creative writing at Princeton.

If there’s a map inscribed in the human heart that shows where home is, the fact that we haven’t yet arrived doesn’t make it a fiction. It might just mean there’s a way we haven’t tried. Maybe Camus gave up too soon. Augustine, his fellow African, might be a better guide.

op-ed

Here O’Connor recognizes what Augustine saw clearly in his own prayer journal, the Confessions—that living well depended on the reordering of our loves. To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.