St. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, Section 27: Augustine is reflecting on the process that led to the moment of his conversion in the garden, the role of Beauty, the nature of Beauty.
"I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have had no being at all. You called me; you cried aloud to me; you broke my barrier of deafness. You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me; you put my blindness to flight. You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet odour. I tasted you. And now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am inflamed with love of your peace."
(Penguin edition, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin, 1961)
Augustine begins his Confessions in Book 1 with this well-known and often quoted passage: "Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin, to remind him that you thwart the proud. But still, since he is a part of your creation, he wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you."
According to the many notes in my text, John Macquarie in Mystery of Truth writes that the phrase "you made us for yourself" should or could be translated "you have made us toward yourself." Thus, as far as our lives in time are concerned, we are always moving toward death, you might say, horizontally speaking, and time in that sense is inexorable, as we all know. We are never not facing death. Yet what Augustine knows is that there is such a thing as God's time, and in God's time we are made such that we are always "toward Him" as well. Our lives are defined by both the horizontal and the vertical, facing death, facing God. To put it another way, Death can find us anywhere at any time; the interesting thing is to see that so can God, though there is no Facebook "timeline" for that movement or meeting. We live in an age that celebrates the self, the social, the chronological and denies even the possibility of the mysterious and the hidden. In the social and chronological we are always connected, always talking, always available; in God's time we are also, ironically, always connected, though no one seems to know that, since it is not ours to control, though It (He) may break in at any moment.
After the passage on Beauty, Augustine starts a new section, 28, and begins it thusly:
"When at last I cling to you with all my being, for me there will be no more sorrow, no more toil. Then at last I shall be alive with true life, for my life will be wholly filled by you."