Torn and Bleeding

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” — John 1:14 (KJV)

Augustine turned thirty “sticking in the same mire.” He had big plans: a government post, influential friends, and “a wife with some money.” His mother worked hard to arrange a marriage for him, hoping that once he was married he would be baptised. A girl was found and asked for in marriage. She was two years under the legal age for marriage, so the wedding had to wait. Then he tells us what happened to the woman he had lived with since he was a student:

“Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied, and my concubine being torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she returned to Afric, vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her.”

Read that slowly. They had been together for about fifteen years. She had been faithful to him. She was the mother of his son. And she was sent away because she was in the way of a career marriage. She went back to Africa without her child. Augustine doesn't tell us why he didn't simply marry her, and we shouldn't invent a reason. But we can say plainly what he himself suggests: this was a wrong done to her. He grieved, but she paid the price.

Then he makes it worse. She made a vow to God and kept it. He couldn't even wait two years for his wedding. He “procured another, though no wife.” He admits he “could not imitate a very woman”: the woman he had sent away was more faithful than he was. And the wound didn't heal; it went numb. His pains, he says, “became less acute, but more desperate.”

At the same time his mind was finally clearing. His great question had always been “whence is evil?” If God is good and made everything, where does evil come from? Some books of the Platonist philosophers gave him a new way to look. He turned inward and glimpsed something he could only call “the Light Unchangeable,” above his mind, the source of all truth. And he worked out that evil is not a thing at all, not a dark substance as the Manichees taught: “whatsoever is, is good.” Evil is what happens when something good gets twisted. “I enquired what iniquity was, and found it to be no substance, but the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee.”

But something was missing from those books. They spoke of God's Word, the light of all people. “But that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there.” They described the goal but not the road, and they had nothing about humility. Augustine could now talk about God like an expert, but he says, “I did not hold to my Lord Jesus Christ, I, humbled, to the Humble.” Knowing about God was not the same as coming to him.

Notice how the two halves of this chapter fit together. Augustine's head was getting closer to God at the very moment his life was hurting someone badly. Clever thoughts about God did not stop him treating a faithful woman as disposable. Only a God who came down, made flesh, humble enough to touch real lives, could reach that.

If you have treated someone as if they didn't matter, a friend you dropped for a better group, or someone you used, don't dress it up. Augustine didn't. He called it his sins being multiplied.

One thing to do this week: think of one person you have treated as disposable. Make one honest apology this week, with no excuses attached.