By the Rev Simon Li
Good morning! How are you doing? How is your heart doing? Is your heart troubled or at peace? Is your heart restless or stable? This seems to be our perpetual human quest and question, and the Saint whose feast day we celebrate today, St. Augustine, has written the well-known and well-loved line in the first paragraph of his autobiography Confessions: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” This deep insight is often quoted to explain why our hearts are restless, and point to the goal for us to obtain or attain: rest and stability in God. Of course, we long for rest and stability. The problem is we usually seek from the wrong sources.
This is kind of an existential question for me. I retired exactly four weeks ago. How do I get to rest and stability? I know two medical doctors who are retired. One publicly says that retirement is better than he has imagined. One publicly says that after retirement, he feels he can no longer do anything of significance. Can I find happiness by checking off a bucket list, or by writing a book, or by carving out a second or third career? St. Augustine has said it, but how do we find rest in God?
I appreciate the reading this morning from Chapter 4 of St. John’s 1st Epistle. I just love that whole chapter. It is about God; it is about love. For God is love. And St. John links that inseparably with our fellow human beings, our sisters and brothers. This helps us apply Augustine’s prayer in two ways.
Firstly, love reaches out and expands from a purely interior personal godly life, to a life in community. As John says in v.20: “sisters & brothers who we can actually see”. Moreover, love leads us to action – action that springs naturally and necessarily from interior life. The love that connects the persons of the Holy Trinity also connects persons on earth.
Of course, interior feelings are not to be discounted or neglected. After all, Augustine was writing that famous line as he began his autobiography. Then, what am I to make of it, when my heart seems restless again, even after a period of rest, stability and peacefulness? Has my heart really found its rest? Let us go back to the first half of that sentence “You have made us for yourself”. Two things to ponder here.
Firstly, God makes no junk. Because God has made you for God-self, you are surely good, beautiful, unique and worthy of God. That doesn’t depend on what you can or cannot do, what you have done, or have missed doing. (By the way, you have no idea how many regrets a retired parish priest may have!)
Secondly, the word “for” is translated from the Latin word “ad”, which means to, toward, or towards. In the Penguin Classics version, Garry Wills translates this way: “since you made us tilted toward you, our heart is unstable until stabilized in you” (italics added). So as human beings, we are created towards God, with a built-in restlessness, so that feeling restless is not a problem or sin or failure, but a sign, proof and reminder of our being human, our having that special “tilt” towards God. Full and final rest and peace cannot be found when we are in this world, on this side of Jordan. That’s why so many great hymns, prayers, and liturgies end and climax in our life to come, like the litany for baptism and litany for marriage, and great hymns like: “Amazing grace”, “Lead, kindly light”, “My Jesus I love Thee”, even the happy hymn “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee”.
Back to the question “Is your heart restless or stable?”, the answer is both/and. Our hearts can rest because we have found God, actually because God has found us. “Not that we loved God, but that God loved us.” (1 John 4:10) And this God sees us as we are and cherishes us as we are. What stability!
And, not but, our hearts have that built-in inkling reminding us that we are creatures created to lean towards our Creator God. This brings us back from our wanderings and meanderings. This moves us away from our self-centeredness and self-sufficiency. This drives us to prayer.
Let us now pray the Collect of Proper 15, for Sundays between July 10 and 16.
Almighty God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. May we find peace in your service, and in the world to come, see you face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.