Filled with the whole of you...

Today being Sunday St Augustine's feast takes a back seat, except among members of the Augustinian family, and other religious who live according to his rule and spirituality. But the other day I pulled his Confessions from my bookshelf, and started to read the early chapters. They contain many largely rhetorical questions, in which Augustine wonders at the greatness of God, a God his heart can scarcely comprehend, but whose enduring, loving presence - he knows - fills the universe... and wonders, too, in awed incredulity, at God's presence within himself, and offer of intimacy and relationship.

It's a wonder and incredulity I can understand. God's abundant, unconditional love is indeed a reason for awe and wonder... and it's also a reason for immense gratitude and joy!

So today being Augustine's day I will simply share these well-known words of his, which sum up something of that incredulity, awe and wonder, and his ever-present, God-given desire for more of God. May we, who also long for God to inhabit our hearts, make his prayer our own, so that our hearts too may continually open up to receive more and more, and one day the whole of us may indeed be filled with the whole of God...

How can the infinite God of earth and heaven come into my small heart? And how can I invite to enter one who is already there, because he is present in all things?

Yet even heaven and earth cannot contain you, any more than my heart can. It is not possible to limit one who fills everything. But to say you are everywhere, Lord, is not to say everywhere has all of you. Though you fill all things, you do not of necessity give them all of yourself. So I will pray that my heart, where you already have a foothold, may receive more and more of you, until one day the whole of me will be filled with the whole of you.