Saint Augustine has really been speaking my language lately. He reminds me that most of my internal struggles with faith are not new or unique. Augustine voices questions that I ask myself everyday, and he writes in such an eloquent and perceptive fashion.
I love how seamlessly Augustine weaves his faith with his doubt, his sense of certainty with his endless questioning. He is teaching me that faith really only abides in questions. It is the questioning, the searching, the calling out, the praying out in humility and reverence to the God whose thoughts are higher than ours, that makes up the life of faith.
There is nothing intellectually dishonest about prayer. To pray, you must simply realize that you are a created being dependent on your Creator. I am realizing more and more why prayer is at the heart of everything in the Christian life: not reasoning, not didactic teaching, not even authoritative preaching, but prayer, which is questioning and asking. We must always be in the position of seeking, asking, and knocking.
To not ask, to not seek, to not knock, is the ultimate sin. The life of a skeptic, who refuses to seek and search for what he cannot understand, who chooses a life of negative dismissal over a life of positive inquiry, is a sinful life. It does not recognize dependence, createdness, smallness, weakness. Augustine's life was not like this.
Augustine recognized his weakness and limitations, and it drove him to pray. He prayed in faith to his God. Its amazing to me that his "confessions" are mostly made up of questions. To question is to confess. To confess is to question. Its to confess "Lord I believe" and question "Will you help my unbelief?" The two, confessing and questioning, are interdependent.
Thus Augustine writes (note he writes almost entirely in questions):
"Then help me, Lord, to recognize and understand what comes first, to call for you before appraising you, or to recognize you before calling for you. Yet how can one call for what one does not recognize? Without such recognition, one could be calling for something else. Or is calling for you the way to recognize you? Yet 'how shall people call for one they do not believe exists? And how are they to believe it exists if no one proclaims it?' Still 'those who seek the Lord shall appraise him,' for by seeking him they find, and by finding they appraise. I shall seek you then, Lord, by calling for you, call for you by believing you exist."