Sublime

And in that moment Augustine’s counsels took on a new relevance for me as I realized that in this season of our marriage and in this stage on the road, the kind of detachment Augustine encouraged—the refusal to be dominated by the libido—was exactly the word I needed to hear.

You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.1

St. Augustine once prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.”

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.

Sin gains entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire, since they are

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.”