The Tears of St. Monica
Despite all the steps people will insist on taking to create union with God, clearing away whole lumberyards of spiritual debris along the way, intimacy with God has never really been about us to begin with. Having a relationship with God is not something we do but rather Someone we receive. And it is He who takes the initiative. Even our prayers are prompted by Another. That is, when we do pray. Too often our prayer life is rather like those “enchanted cigarettes,” of which the writer Balzac speaks—that is, the books we hope someday to publish but never actually get around to writing.
In other words, it’s not as if our prayers were like Shakespeare’s “bootless cries to heaven,” heartfelt but never answered; it’s that our cries are never sent at all. Or that our lament, as Hopkins writes, “Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.” It’s that we’re not sending any letters at all.
Pascal was surely on to something when he told us that it was God Himself, “who instituted prayer in order to confer upon his creatures the dignity of becoming a cause”—that by our prayers, we literally cause things to happen. But unless the grace of God moves us to pray in the first place, we’re not going to cause anything to happen except maybe more sinning.
And the point of all this? I mean, what has this got to do with Augustine? Well, where did we last leave him? Sunk in the same Manich
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
