Boarbank Hall Friday - Sunday 16-18 October 2009

Kitty Maguire Aims Higher and Higher

Saint Augustine and The Thirst for Totality

Kitty Maguire sometimes worried about herself. She had discovered early in life that she was never satisfied with what she had. She always wanted more and more. Her longing consistently outreached her outstretched fingertips. She was hardly two years old when she wanted to get at what was on top of the dresser.

When Kitty was in her teens her heart discovered yet wider horizons to long for and to aspire to, but always out there beyond her reach. She felt she was a contradiction in terms. Unlimited longings and little ability to gratify them grew up with her. She was frustrated and began to conclude that she would always be the same bundle of contrasts and contradictions.

Yet Kitty had a very attractive personality and many a lad wooed her until she found Mr. Right, fell deeply in love with him, became engaged to him and married him, all in a matter of months. It was a very happy marriage and they had four lovely children in quick succession.

Still the heart ache continued. One day she happened to find a quote from St. Augustine which read as follows:

Who is to carry the research beyond this point? Who can understand the truth of the matter? 0 Lord, I am working hard in this field, and the field of my labour is my own self. I have become a problem to myself, like land which a farmer works only with difficulty and at the cost of much sweat. (St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk 10, c.16).

Kitty thought to herself: This man knows what I am going through, so I must get hold of the book and see can I find some help in it.

Kitty Maguire Meets St. Augustine

Kitty was dismayed to discover to there are thirteen books of the Confessions of St. Augustine but dismay turned to delight when she learned that all thirteen books were in one Penguin volume with just 325 pages. The very first paragraph confirmed to Kitty that she had struck gold. She read:

You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in You (Conf 1:1).

Then followed a very detailed and intimate account of a tortured soul in search of itself and in search of peace. Kitty was astonished at the intimacy with which Augustine communicated with his readers. There was not just a candid autobiography, but a sharing of his deepest emotion, his instincts, his drives, his ambitions, his frustrations, his love affairs, his sins, and eventually, his journey home.

Augustine was constantly astounded at the vast wonder of his own self, his mind, his memory, his soul:

The power of the memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it that it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be a part of it, if it is not contained within it (Conf 10:8)?

He continues:

I am lost in wonder when I consider this problem. It bewilders me. Yet men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses. But they pay no attention to themselves. They do not marvel at the thought that while I have been mentioning all these things, I have not been looking at them with my eyes, and that I could not even speak of mountains and waves, rivers or stars, things which I have seen, or of the ocean, which I know only on the evidence of others, unless I could see them in my mind's eye, in my memory, and with the same vast spaces between that would be there if I were looking at them in the world outside myself. (ibid.)

No wonder Augustine felt frustrated, for the brilliance of his mind notwithstanding, he was still a great problem to himself. In his desperate search for happiness, fulfilment, completion, peace, Augustine travelled the known world. With his intelligence he was able to soak up all that his teachers could tell him. He even joined a Manichaean sect for a while to the great disgust of his saintly mother, Monica. He had many passionate love affairs until eventually he settled down with one girl, with whom he had a son whom he named Adeodatus (Given-by- God).

Saint Augustine Finds His Way Home

The Confessions tells us how he searched and searched but what he searched for simply eluded him. He was reaching the end of his tether, and could think of no place else to search. Then, to his immense surprise, what all his life he had been looking for surfaced into his awareness from where he had least expected it to be. He writes in Chapter 27 of Book 10 of this wonderful revelation:

Too late have I loved you, 0 Beauty ever ancient and always new! Too late have I loved you! You were inside 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 at all. You called me; You cried aloud to me, you crashed through my barrier of deafness. You shone up me, your radiance enveloped me; you put my blindness to flight. You spread your fragrance around me and I drew in my breath and now I gasp for sweet aroma. I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me and now I am all impassioned with love for your peace.

For Augustine this was a life-transforming experience. He continues:

When at last I cling to you with all my being, for me there wilt be no more sorrow, no more toil. Then at last I shall be alive with true life, for my life will be wholly filled with you (Con 10:28).

Kitty Maguire was looking at her own life as she read St. Augustine. She too, in her own way, was looking for fulfilment. She had studied hard in the hope of finding answers in books. And she had discovered many wonderful truths, and had gained a lot of insight into her condition. It has remained however out there on the pages of the books she read while inside her head and her heart she was still as restless as ever.

She was convinced at one time that if she married happily and became a mother and had no material worries, then her heart and mind would settle down and allow her to live out her vocation in reasonable tranquillity. She had never suffered from greedy ambition, but nevertheless, she often discovered herself sighing heavily for she didn't know what. She knew, however, for certain that even though she couldn't put a name on it, she would never be entirely happy unless she got it.

Yet here was Augustine telling her that what she longed for was unbelievably more wonderful than she had ever imagined. He was telling her it was something all the money in the world could never buy for her. Furthermore it was not just pie in the sky when we die, as some communists have often accused us of. This wonderful Reality was hidden inside her, down in the deepest centre of her being. Augustine has also discovered that while he was searching desperately for this Reality, It was already searching even more thirstily for him.

In the thirteenth century a famous Dominican theologian and mystic called Meister Eckhart had stated that for every feeble step we take towards God, He rushes a thousand steps towards us.

Augustine's Confessions declare in the first chapter of the first book that the human heart is a vast abyss of emptiness that refuses to be filled with anything less than everything. In the final chapter of the last book (Bk 13, c.28) he tells us that the peace we look for is nothing less than God Himself. He himself is the peace we long for, He himself if the only Repose in which finally we rest fully satisfied

Kitty Maguire Discovers it is Pure Gift

Kitty Maguire noticed that even St. Augustine, with all his brilliance, failed to discover by his own efforts what all his life he longed for. It was only when he ran out of places to look, ran out of energy to run, ran out of defence systems with which to protect himself that the Reality was able to surface into his awareness.

St. Paul told the Romans (c. 4) and the Galatians (c. 3) that grace, and freedom, and life are free gifts from God to those who believe. The letter to the Hebrews repeats this message again and again in c. 11, Paul was a Jew through and through but he spent his life trying to convince his fellow Jews that what God was offering in Jesus was way beyond anybody's efforts too achieve it by one's own merits.

The word grace itself comes from the Latin gratia and gratis: you can only have it for free, it is absolutely too wonderful and priceless and so beyond anybody's capability to pay for it. On the other hand God wants to give it as a completely unmerited free gift, ours for the taking.

Kitty Maguire wondered how in practice can this take place. Kitty liked to meditate on Christmas. There the young girl Mary, probably only 12 when the Annunciation took place, simply said to the Angel Gabriel: I am the hand maid of the Lord. Let it happen to me according to your word (Lk 1:38).

Mary held herself totally receptive, welcoming, undefended, nothing withholding, fully free, unpreprogrammed, to the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit is a river of life flowing in the womb (cf. Jn 7:38,39), and a fountain of water bubbling up inside us into life unlimited and unending.

The Holy Spirit, a river of life flowing in the deep of the Virgin Mary, shaped in her such a wonderful welcome and receptivity that He was able to bring about right inside the temple of her body the Son of God. Through the doors she opened wide in welcome, not only did He become man right inside her. Through those same doors He entered into our history to bestow on us his totally free gifts of life more abundantly (cf John 10:10), life to the full (cf John 15:11; 16:24; 17:13), freedom (cf. Lk 4:16 ff; John 8:32; 2 Cor 3:17; Gal 5:1-12), peace (cf. Jnl4:27; Eph 2:14; Phil 4:7), and complete union and intimacy with God and with each other (cf. Jn 17:11, 21-23).

Kitty Maguire Discovers Anew The Importance of Here and Now

Meister Eckhart preached at Christmas:

Here in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says: 'What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.' {Meister Eckhart, Sermon One, Sermons and Treatises, Vol i, p. 1 translated and edited by M.O'C. Walshe. London and Dulverton: Watkins 1979).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the events of our salvation, the incarnation, life. passion, death and resurrection of Our Lord are unique: all other historical events happen once, and then they pass away, swallowed up in the past. The Paschal mystery of Christ, by contrast, cannot remain only in the past, because by his death he destroyed death, and all that Christ is - all that he did and suffered for all people - participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being present in them all (n. 1085).

What contribution, Kitty Maguire asked herself, should I make towards bringing out the conception and birth of the Lord inside me? Should I fill my mind with holy thoughts and images, and strain to fast and abstain, and say a hundred rosaries a day? Eckhart answers: none of these things. Instead we should allow the Holy Spirit to shape in us a wholly God-receptive attitude, allowing Him to bring about in the deepest centre of ourselves, this wonderful event. All the Virgin Mary did was let it happen, and it happened.

It came home to the higher and higher aspiring Kitty Maguire that the more you surrender like the Virgin Mary the more wonderful life becomes. The free gifts of life more abundantly, joy to the full, freedom even from death itself, a deep and abiding peace, and love and intimacy and union with God and with others are for those who oppose no obstacle, offer no defence, but simply and solely and wholly enjoy the flood and fountain of the Holy Spirit, as He brings about right inside them the conception and birth, the life, death and resurrection of the Lord, not just as lovely memories, but as here and now incredibly fantastic events.

Fr Martin Nolan O.S.A.