A Lie at the Harbour

“A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.” — Proverbs 16:9 (KJV)

For nine years the Manichees had told Augustine to wait for Faustus. Whenever he asked a hard question, especially about the stars, which their books described in ways that didn't match the astronomers' calculations, they said, Faustus will explain everything. When Augustine was twenty-eight, Faustus finally came to Carthage.

He was charming and a beautiful speaker. But Augustine had learned something by then: a thing is not “true, because eloquent.” When he finally got Faustus alone with his questions, he found that the great man knew almost nothing about the subjects in question. What surprised him was how Faustus handled it. “For he knew that he knew not these things, and was not ashamed to confess it.” Augustine liked him more for it: “For fairer is the modesty of a candid mind, than the knowledge of those things which I desired.” But his trust in the Manichees was broken. Faustus, he says, “neither willing nor witting it,” had begun to set him free.

Then Augustine decided to move to Rome. Friends promised him more money and prestige, but his main reason was the students. In Carthage they would “burst in audaciously” on other teachers' classes and wreck them. In Rome, people said, students behaved.

Monica did not want him to go. She followed him down to the harbour, clinging to him, determined either to stop him or to come too. So he lied to her. He told her he had to stay with a friend until the friend's ship could sail. “And I lied to my mother, and such a mother, and escaped.” He persuaded her to spend the night at a chapel near the ship, built in memory of Cyprian, an earlier bishop of Carthage. She spent it in tears and prayer. In the night he sailed.

“The wind blew and swelled our sails, and withdrew the shore from our sight; and she on the morrow was there, frantic with sorrow, and with complaints and groans filled Thine ears, Who didst then disregard them.”

That night Monica asked God for one thing: don't let him sail. God said no. But Augustine sees what was going on: God “regardest not what she then asked, that Thou mightest make me what she ever asked.” She prayed for him to stay; what she had always prayed for was his soul, and the road to that answer went through Italy.

In Rome he almost died. A fever brought him close to death, and this time, unlike when he was a sick little boy, he didn't even want to be baptised. He recovered. He also admits the real reason the Manichees still appealed to him: “it delighted my pride, to be free from blame.” When he did wrong, he could say it was some other nature in him. “But in truth it was wholly I.”

Then a job came up: the city of Milan needed a public professor of rhetoric. Augustine applied, gave a trial speech, and got it.

Two things to take from this. First, God's “no” is not the same as God not caring. Monica's worst night was part of the answer to her lifelong prayer. Second, watch for the phrase “it wasn't really me.” Augustine had a whole religion built around that excuse, and he says it kept him sick. Owning what you did is where healing starts.

One thing to do this week: think of a time you said, even to yourself, “that wasn't really me.” Say instead, to God or to the person involved: “That was me, and I'm sorry.”