"It was a sweet load pressing on me, light as a dreamload, and the thoughts that I tried to direct toward you were like the struggles of those trying to wake, only to fall back into a depth of sleep. Though no one wants to sleep forever, realizing that wakefulness is the higher state, yet a man puts off waking when torpor, making heavy all his limbs, smothers him sweetly in slumber, against his better sense that 'it was time to be rising.' In that very way, though I knew that rising to your love were better than lapsing into my sloth, the former act had my approval and wish, the latter my pleasure and assent. No excuse was left me when you told me when you told me, 'Awake, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.' I was defenseless when you urged your truth, since that truth I had already accepted. All I could mumble, muzzily, was: Later on. Or: Any moment now. Or: Wait a bit. But the any-moment never came, and wait-a-bit stretched out to endless bits. It mattered little that 'I took an inner comfort in your law, since another law, that of my outer limbs, made war on my mind's law, and took me captive to the law of sin in my limbs.' Sin's law is the dominance of compulsion, which leads and lords it over the unwilling soul, which was willing to fall into such merited captivity. 'Who will deliver me, in this pitiful state, from death's body, if not Jesus Christ, our Lord, through His bounty?'"
"With what verbal reverberations I lashed my soul, trying to force it along with me in my quest for you. But it balked, it would not move, though it could not excuse itself-all its arguments had run out, it had been refuted. It could only tremble in silence, holding it death to escape the stream of habits that were draining it to death."
"As I thrashed about, stalling, I made bodily motions some persons might be incapable of, even if they wanted to perform them, either because they lack a limb or the limb is tied, or they are weakened by malady or otherwise debilitated. Yet I, when tearing my hair, pounding my head, hugging tight my knee with laced fingers, was doing exactly what I willed with my body-the willing would not have been followed by this effect if my limbs' response had been blocked. Yet I could not do what I far more eagerly wanted to do, and which I should have been able to do at will, since what I wanted to do at will was---to will. Here the faculty to be affected by the will was itself. And what it had to do was to be itself. Yet it could not. My body's limbs were moved by the soul's lightest volition, receiving its direction, yet the soul did not respond to its own eager willing, when all it had to perform was to will."
"Off in the direction I was turned toward, though I was afraid to advance into it, Lady Self-Control was revealed in all her chaste majesty, serene, quietly mirthful, smiling me on to her, lest I hold back. To welcome and to hug me she reached her holy arms out, and in them were throngs of persons setting me their example, innocent boys and girls, young men and women-all ages, including chaste widows and women still virgin in old age. In all of them, Self-Control was not sterile but 'fertile with children of happiness' by you, Lord, her husband. She teased me with a smiling insistence: Can you not do what all of these have? Or do you think they did it by themselves, without God their Lord? He it was who gave me to them. Why do you stand alone, which is no standing at all? Throw yourself on him!! Do you think he will not stay your fall? Give up fear, and throw yourself-he will catch you, and will heal you."
Posted by todd at August 6, 2006 04:13 PM