Month: August 2008

The first recommendation tonight is: don’t let us waste much time gazing at ourselves. A deepened and enriched sense of God is far more important than increased and detailed knowledge of the self. God, our redeemer and sustainer, is all and does all, and is the one Reality. Life comes with such thoughts. Plunging more deeply in him with faith and love will do more than self-concerned efforts. We can do nothing of ourselves but depress ourselves and get fussy.

Augustine of Hippo’s On Patience. . . confines itself to two questions: where does Christian patience come from and what is its character? . . . Augustine argues that patience has but a single source, the free and unmerited grace of God, and defines patience as that which helps us “endure evils with equanimity so as not to abandon, through a lack of equanimity, the good through which we arrive at the better.”