Take and Read

In the long history of the church, few minds have shaped Christian thought as deeply as one restless African who could not, for years, surrender his own heart. His name was Augustine, born in North Africa in the year 354. He was brilliant, ambitious, and divided. He chased rhetoric and status. He chased pleasure. He chased philosophical answers through one school after another, following the Manichaeans for years before their teaching left him hungry. He wanted truth, and he wanted his own way, and he could not let go of either. By the time he reached Milan, he had heard the great bishop Ambrose preach, and he had discovered that Christian faith could be more serious, more searching, more intelligent than he had ever imagined. He understood a great deal. And still he would not turn.

That is the strange agony of this story. Augustine did not need a better argument. He needed to surrender, and he could not make himself do it.

Then came the garden. He tells us about it himself in his Confessions, with a rawness that still aches across sixteen centuries. He was outside, alone, torn in two. Part of him longed for God. Part of him clung to old desires he could not lay down. He wept. He flung himself beneath a fig tree. He was a man who knew exactly what he ought to do and could not summon the will to do it, and the weight of that division nearly broke him. Wretched, he cried out, asking how long, how long he would keep saying tomorrow and tomorrow.

And then he heard a voice. As he remembered it, it sounded like a child, from a nearby house, singing the same words over and over. Take and read. Take and read. He could not place the game or the song. But he stopped. He took the words as a command from heaven. He went to where he had left a book of Paul's letters. He snatched it up. He opened it. And his eyes fell on these lines from the letter to the Romans: not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lust, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh and its desires.

He read no further. He did not need to. He said that as the sentence ended, a light of certainty flooded his heart, and every shadow of doubt melted away. The struggle was over. The man who had managed his desires while delaying surrender was finally, simply, summoned. And he turned.

Notice what the voice did. It did not heal him. It sent him to the Word, and the Word addressed him. The passage did not flatter Augustine. It named the very thing he had been hiding behind, and then it held out Christ as the new clothing he was to put on.

This was not the end of his discipleship. It was the door into it. Augustine was baptised by Ambrose. He returned to North Africa. He became a pastor, then bishop of Hippo, and he poured out a flood of writing that would feed the church for a thousand years and more. His mother Monica, who had prayed for him through all his wandering years, lived to see the son she had wept over belong wholly to God.

And here is the wonder of that garden. It tells us that conversion is not the reward of clever people who finally win the argument. Augustine had already won every argument. What he lacked was a turning, and turning is grace. A restless man, exhausted by himself, heard a child at play, opened a book, and was carried home by the words he found there. The voice has long since faded. The Word he opened is still speaking.