Notes from a small island

Notes from a small island
A weblog by Jonathan Ali

Thursday, August 28, 2003

I flung myself down under a fig tree—how I know not—and gave free course to my tears. The streams of my eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to thee. And, not indeed in these words, but to this effect, I cried to thee: "And thou, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord? Wilt thou be angry forever? Oh, remember not against us our former iniquities."

... I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which—coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, "Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it." [Tolle, lege.] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon....

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle's book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof."

-- St. Augustine, who died on this day in 430, from his Confessions. Also on this day, in 1565, the Spaniard Don Pedro Menendez, with soliders and missionaries, landed off the coast of Florida and entered the Timucuan Indian village of Seloy. He renamed it St. Augustine, one of the first permanent European settlements in the Americas.

posted by Jonathan | 1:41 PM 0 comments

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