Late Have I Loved Thee: Returning Home to Rome with St. Augustine

I leant over in the darkness and whispered to my friend, “Odysseus sure is Catholic in this, am I wrong?” I was promptly shushed. We were sitting in an old-timey cinema in St John’s, north Portland, watching Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey. I am one of those over-educated types who can snootily point out that Nolan’s Odyssey has in places more in common with The Aeneid than The Odyssey, more the spirit of a confessional than the plains of Homer’s Troy. More virtual ink has been spilt over this movie than perhaps required, but despite the lack of sex and terrible looking food,[1] I thought it was pretty good.

I am not the only one who observes that Nolan turned Matt Damon’s Odysseus into a tortured Catholic male of the twenty-first-century sort, one who doubts the gods are worth a damn but still lives in a Zeus haunted world, in dire need to repent for the slaughterous sins he committed in the name of a king not worth following. His desire is to confess, to be heard, to be known as the one who broke the law of God and brought down the ties of civilization around him, and in being known, being forgiven. Odysseus wants to go home, but he cannot. Not yet. The Odyssey and its cousin The Iliad stand on their own. They are not the tellings of a Christian imagination.

The ancient world is not the Catholic world. I am still learning a lot about Catholicism; I was welcomed home to the Church this past Easter. Every convert’s story is similar, and most are rather boring. Mine is not exceptional. What it involved was a change of worldview, a shift in priority, an acknowledgement of true desire. It required a painful opening of my eyes to see myself anew. Restless was my heart, though I thought myself ensconced in Protestant tradition. I had to be broken to be made whole, I had to be wounded to begin to heal. What does it mean for a person formed by one vision of reality to encounter another?

My conversion was long. I grew up a weekly Sunday First Baptist Church attendee. I memorized my Scripture, the Youth Group was my social life, a path towards being a pastor seemed set in stone from an early age. I became Presbyterian, because I was told that Presbyterian pastors make more money. College led to years of travel, which led to seminary, which led to more wandering. Ordination arrived, and I thought I was at journey’s end. I was not.

I failed. My ministry ended in failure. The story of my failure is not that interesting; the reality of my failure is. I failed professionally and personally as a pastor. It was not my calling; my vocation was not to be a Protestant pastor, though I fought for it to be so. Denial is a helluva drug, and I inhaled deeply.

Allow what may appear to be a digression: what difference does Christ make? The life of St Augustine made Christ’s difference real to me, and it is thanks to Peter Brown. I came to Peter Brown almost by accident. I had read Augustine, of course, but Augustine had been a name on the shelf, another Father of the Church, another theologian whose importance I understood without quite understanding him. He was an influence on Calvin, and I had been taught that Calvin was Augustine on steroids. Brown changed that. Brown insisted, as he wrote in a 2013 New York Review of Books article entitled “Rome: Sex and Freedom,” “Antiquity is always stranger than we think.”[2]

Brown made the ancient world strange to me. I had spent years thinking about the ancient world as the world into which Christianity came, the pagan world waiting, however imperfectly, for Christ. Yet this is a comfortable story we tell ourselves, and modern-day bards such as Christopher Nolan echo it. Antiquity is multiple worlds, with multiple understandings of desire, the body, death, freedom, virtue, and what constituted a good life. And yet, at the end of those worlds, at the end of the Roman world, was Augustine.

Brown’s magisterial Augustine of Hippo paints a man who in the first part of his life does not realize the ground he stands upon, but thinks he does.[3] Augustine was formed in the womb of North Africa—he was a Roman of the Romans, yet never felt at home in Rome (when in Italy, he quickly left the Eternal City for better job opportunities up in Milan.) He loved his Virgil, and Cicero was his North Star. Monica his mother was no Dido weeping on a shore as Aeneas sailed away; she hounded him with her love and her tears, following his restless steps across the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome to Milan to Ostia.

Brown pulled Augustine out of modern Protestant abstractions and put him back in the complicated Roman world he actually inhabited. Augustine does not stand outside the ancient world looking backward at it. He belongs to it. He had been educated by it, seduced by it, formed by its literature and philosophy. He wants the things that a successful Roman intellectual might want. He wants recognition. He wants a career. He wants love. He desires to know and be seen. You know the rest of the story.

Without Peter Brown, I doubt I would have met the saint in quite the same way. Augustine became more than a theologian I ought to know. He became a man who had lived through the very thing I was beginning to understand: the challenge of a worldview that failed. Of the necessity of leaving one world without knowing where you would wind up, where your home would be. I did not read Augustine and suddenly decide to become Catholic. At first he simply offered permission to distrust the story I had been telling myself about myself.

Augustine had a restless heart. What he gave me was not an answer so much as a way of seeing the cause of the restlessness itself. Augustine understood that our desires can be real and still be disordered, that we can spend years pursuing something we think will make us whole and discover that it has only carried us farther from home. “My weight is my love,” he wrote. “Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”[4] I spent much of my life thinking I knew what I loved. I was beginning to wonder whether I did. It pains me to write all this. For most of my adult life I desired to be a Protestant pastor; this was a mistake. It was a failure of not only judgment, but imagination. Augustine, by the grace of God, made me wonder whether failure might also be a form of revelation.

Brown ends his memoir, Journeys in the Mind: A Life in History, by quoting Symmachus: Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum. (“Not by one avenue alone can we make our way to so vast a mystery.”[5]) I read these words while sitting in a coffee house outside of Chicago in September, 2023. I had quit ministry two years prior. My wife and kids had moved to Portland, Oregon two months before, while I remained in Illinois to sell our home. I had just seen a production of Hamlet the night before, and the words, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” echoed in my conscience, an eerie echo of the last great pagan of Rome. I was unmoored. I did not know which way was up or down, who I was or whose I was. Lost in my desires and despair, the knowledge of my failure. If I was not a pastor, who the hell was I? That moment crystallized for me that my life as a Protestant could not continue. Christ was calling my restless heart towards himself, towards his Church. But I did not have ears to hear.

This was not a Damascene-like conversion moment: it was an acknowledgement of the truth of my failure. My identity had been constructed around being a pastor—when my ministry ended, I lost my sense of self. Holding my chai latte, I started to cry. This was a moment when something I had been resisting became intellectually and existentially undeniable. This was the quiet acknowledgment that my life as a Protestant could not continue. I was not a pastor. I was not a Protestant. I was not even sure I was a Christian.

The irony was that I was actively adjunct teaching Introduction to Christian Theology at Loyola Chicago. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I stood before eighteen-year-olds lecturing on the Confessions and nature of the Trinity, using academic detachment to mask the fact that my own floor was caving in. I was asking teenagers to analyze a fifth-century bishop’s total undoing before God, all while trying to keep my own undoing hidden. I had spent years wandering, my entire life up to that point. But what Augustine did for me, and still does if I am honest, is help me recognize the road I am actually on, me, a poor wayfaring stranger traveling through this world of woe.

What interested me was not simply that Augustine converted. Plenty of people convert. What interested me was that his conversion did not mean that his previous life suddenly became meaningless. The things he had loved were still there, at least in his memory, but he had to learn how to love them differently. The problem was not that Augustine had desired too much. He had desired badly.

I had spent years thinking my problem was that I had failed to become the person I was supposed to be. Augustine made me wonder whether the deeper problem was that I had spent years desiring to become the wrong person.

The difference Christ makes which Augustine through his life, works, and continual presence in that great cloud of witnesses makes clear to me, was driven home to me in my post-Nolan Odyssey-driven mania. I decided I was going to read the Iliad. Emily Wilson’s translation is a true achievement; published in 2023, it is her greatest work so far. She makes the poem alive, even in the midst of so much killing, rape, and dying. She concludes her introduction to her translation with these words, which I quote in full:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem [The Iliad] will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.[6]

Wilson drives the point home—the ancient, Homeric world is our world in its mortality. The gods may intervene, but they cannot give mortals what they most desire: escape from death.

When I failed Protestantism, I died. I am speaking metaphorically, yes, but also damn near well physically. My identity, or so I told myself, up to that point disappeared as completely as tears in rain. Yet, Christ does not make our brokenness or mortality disappear; he enters our wounds and transforms them. By his stripes we are healed and made known as children of God. This is my desire. This is my reality. But could I be brave and die to self and live for God? Or would I continue to let the memory of the bitter herb of failure rule my world?

As if a cosmic joke, I wound up at a Dominican priory parish in Portland. But not immediately. I moved to the Pacific Northwest around Thanksgiving, 2023. I did not attend worship for nearly a year, because what was the point? I read more Augustine though, or works about him, and started forming stronger opinions on the more recent biographies on him (read deep from Augustine the African by Conybeare, appreciate the Lancel as the update to Brown’s biography, and embrace Robin Lane Fox’s for what it is.) I realized that God, if there was a God, was working through Augustine to speak to me here and now. And it was through the Confessions, but not in a way one typically understands the Confessions.

The Confessions are a prayer of a restless heart finding its rest in God. It is also a narrative of loss, and what comes from loss. In Book 4, we hear recounted the loss of Augustine’s close friend, but what struck me was that Augustine never names that friend. He holds the friend in his memory, but his name is lost, known only unto God. To pursue his career, he abandons his again unnamed concubine and leaves his home in Carthage, losing both his love and his homeland. In Book 8, at the moment of his realization that he needs to come home to the Church, he struggles at first to take up and read because of the fear of loss that such a conversion will bring about—the process of turning his disordered soul around, to begin to desire God in God’s fullness, will lead him to give up his life that he had created so far in Italy.

And the failures, the losses, continue after his repentant conversion. Cassiciacum ends in failure. Monnica dies just as he is to return to North Africa. He tells us also in Book 9 of his beloved son Adeodatus, baptized alongside him, whose death Augustine mentions almost in passing. As you read the Confessions it becomes clear how much Augustine loves his mother, but the mention of his lost son is striking in how brief it is. One imagines that Augustine grieved in his heart the loss of his boy, and even all those years later he does not have the words. The wound remains fresh.

The losses continue after the story that the Confessions tell ends. Augustine’s desire to retire in Thagaste and start a monastery comes to naught. Seized and forced to become a priest in 391 in Hippo, made a co-bishop in 395 (a task he felt totally unprepared and ill-suited for), Augustine continually loses himself to the providence of God. Yet, God is capable of doing profound and beautiful things through this loss.

Bishop Erik Varden, in his remarks at the Papal Lenten Retreat this year, related to Pope Leo, he who upon his papal election declared himself “a son of St Augustine,” insights he had gained from the book of Job. “God can enable a new world after he has pulled down walls we thought were the world, walls within which we actually suffocated. Job breathes again. Aware of the transience of things, he sees that God is greater. He acknowledges that God does not promise security but virtue for trials, also face to face with death. Job bows down and worships.”

Job does not get his old world back. Like Christ, although he experiences a kind of resurrection, he continues to carry his wounds. So, what difference does Christ make? What does the Christian say to Homer? What does Christ do with a dead man? “He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.” The ancient world is not the Christian world, and thank God for that!

So how did I end up with the Dominicans in Portland? Well, the boring but true answer is that it was the closest parish to my home. By coincidence it had also been suggested by some Chicago friends, friends who had dragged my depressed and lonely self to Mass over the summer of ‘23 as I was separated from my family. For a year and a half, I attended Mass at Holy Rosary in Portland and began to be formed in and by the liturgy. I could not take communion, as desperate as I found myself to be for the Eucharist. I found myself going forward, my arms crossed over my chest, to receive a blessing, my prayer being “if I can but touch the hem of his garment I will be healed.” Did I believe? I do not know. I frankly do not think it mattered, because God was calling me home whether I knew it or not.

I began OCIA, I attended a biweekly course on Christology. I got to know my priests, took them out for coffee, they took me out for lunch. I was still a mess, a walking contradiction, but I began to feel as my frame of reference was shifting—the desires of my heart were becoming more grounded. Easter Vigil approached, I went to my first confession and forty years of mortal sin came pouring out. Holy Saturday came. I am standing outside in my suit, surrounded by other catechumens and confirmands. A fire blazes, and it is quite hot and I am worried that Father Joseph might accidentally catch on fire. We process into the Church.

Smells and bells, holy water sprinkled, I kneel and am called by my new name—Augustine. The priests lay hands upon me, and it is at this moment, in the glare of the candlelight, in the aroma of the incense, that I begin to have an experience I cannot fully describe. I feel as though I see myself from above, and my heart is smiling. I am at rest. I am home.

In Book 9 of the Confessions, Augustine relates a mystical experience he shared with his mother that he cannot fully describe. Augustine and Monnica are alone at a window overlooking a garden. They have been talking about the eternal life of the saints, quoting Paul: “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man.” Augustine says they were “forgetting the past and reaching forward to what lies ahead.”

Then their conversation becomes an ascent. Augustine describes them moving beyond created things and then they turn inward: “We entered into our own minds and passed beyond them . . . .” And finally, they reach toward God himself, “that region of never-failing plenty.” Augustine says: “We touched it slightly by the whole force of our heart.”

If this experience were to be prolonged, and other visions of a far inferior kind were removed, and this single vision were to take total possession of its beholder, and ravish and absorb and plunge him into interior joy, so that eternal life were to be like that one moment of understanding for which we sighed—would not this be what is meant by “Enter into the joy of your Lord”?[7]

And here we are. I attend Mass every week, not because I have to, but because I need to. I need to be where Jesus is. And so I receive him, he who is the source and summit of our faith. Late have I loved Thee!

A coda: I can do theology alongside Augustine, under his tutelage. I am not there yet with the Angelic Doctor, but I have a copy of his Theological Compendium bedside, and God willing I will get there. This fall I will begin teaching an Adult Catholic Education class on the Life and Works of St. Augustine. Please keep me in your prayers.

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