Half of My Soul

“Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.” — Psalm 42:5 (KJV)

Back home in Thagaste, teaching his first classes, Augustine became inseparable from a friend he had grown up with. They had been at school together and played together. Augustine had pulled him into the Manichees too. He calls this friendship “sweet to me above all sweetness of that my life.” It lasted barely a year.

The friend fell ill with a high fever and lay unconscious for a long time. Because no one expected him to live, he was baptised while he was out cold. Augustine didn't care; he assumed his friend would laugh at it later. Then the friend woke up and began to recover. Augustine made a joke about the baptism, expecting him to join in. Instead, his friend “so shrunk from me, as from an enemy” and told him that if he wanted to stay friends, he must never talk like that again. Augustine was stunned. He decided to wait until his friend was stronger and then argue him out of it. A few days later, while Augustine was away, the fever came back, and his friend died.

What follows is one of the most honest pictures of grief ever written. “At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death.” His home town became torture, because every place reminded him. “Mine eyes sought him every where, but he was not granted them.” He told his soul to trust in God, and his soul refused, because the God he believed in then was a fantasy, and his friend had been real. “I became a great riddle to myself.”

He borrows the words of an old writer who called his friend “Thou half of my soul,” and says that was how it felt: “therefore was my life a horror to me, because I would not live halved.” And he describes something that many grieving people know: “at once I loathed exceedingly to live and feared to die.”

If you have ever felt that, that you don't want to go on living after a loss, please don't carry it alone. Tell a safe person this week: a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a doctor, or a crisis line where you live. Augustine survived his darkest year, and he did it with other people around him.

He couldn't stay in Thagaste, so he went back to Carthage. Slowly, time and friends patched him up. He lists what he loved in them: “to talk and jest together, to do kind offices by turns; to read together honied books; to play the fool or be earnest together.” Friendship, for him, was one of life's great gifts.

But looking back, he understood why the loss had nearly destroyed him: “I had poured out my soul upon the dust, in loving one that must die, as if he would never die.” His answer is not to love people less. It is to love them in a way that is held by something that can't be lost: “Blessed whoso loveth Thee, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thee. For he alone loses none dear to him, to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost.”

This doesn't mean Christians don't grieve. Later in this book you'll see Augustine weep for his mother. It means that if your friendships rest in God, death is not the end of them. Your friends are not meant to be your god. They're meant to be loved, and held, in God's hands.

One thing to do this week: if you are grieving someone, tell one person their name and one memory of them. If you aren't, think of a friend who has lost someone this year and send them a message that simply says you remember.