Sublime

But St Augustine warns us not to be proud - we didn’t make the mansion, we’re a guest in our own souls. We need to seek the Lord in our minds and memories, which is not easy, because He is transcendent to our human imagining.

the buffered self seems predisposed to lock divine action out of its inner world, radically reversing Augustine’s vision and making things very difficult for the pastor. If God is to enter this space that Augustine helped make, then God must be stripped of otherness and made into a therapeutic crutch that the brave can outgrow.

the lowest kind of goods and we thereby turn away from the better and higher: from you yourself, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law.

Ensuring the success of one particular political order is not, in Augustine’s view, incumbent upon us as Christians.

If the heart is like a stomach (another reason to affirm “gut” as a contemporary translation of kardia!), we could render Augustine’s prayer in line with this metaphor: “You have made us for yourself, and our gut will rumble until we feed on you.”

ST. TERESA OF AVILA (d. 1582),