Augustine: Confessions Book 10, Chapter 27

Winter 2010. It was the worst winter in Seattle for many years. The city shut down. No one went to work. The hills were blanketed with that foreign white substance. I was indoors reading my damned civ pro outline; Luke was on the couch watching television. Friends stopped by when they could. I'd hand them a glass of wine. We drank more than we should have.

I was editing a research paper that some friends and I had written in the fall. The policy objectives were simple. I.e. forced sterilization is unsafe and torturous. Your numbers are out of control. Education and awareness. Access. Condoms? Birth control pills? Safe. Effective. Cheap.

The snow was falling, and I flipped through stories of women being mutilated-- I flirted with words. "Free of coercion?" "Violence?" "Forced?" "Involuntary?" "Eugenics?" Disgusted, I'd wander back to my school work. Interminably restless, I'd come back to the research report. This happened in cycles until I threw my hands in the air and thought of the best solution, "Wine!" 

I remember one winter day, when the snow had melted into weeks of freezing rain, I heard a song called Late Have I Loved You. I couldn't stop listening to it. These words were so different from the others. I must have played it at least a thousand times over the next three years.

"You called and you shouted, you broke through my deafness; You flashed and you shone, dispelled all my blindness; You breathed your fragrance on me."

I found the words again today, in a poem written by the infamous Augustine. He is like a grandpa whose words I have heeded (kind of, not really) since I was a child when one of my teachers gave me his Confessions to read. All this to say, that the following words are true and recurrently so:

Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new: late have I loved you. 

And see, you were within and I was abroad, 

and I searched for you there;

deformed I plunged into those lovely things which you made. 

You were with me, but I was not with you. 

The lovely things kept me far from you, 

though if they were not in you, they were not at all. 

You called and you shouted and shattered my deafness. 

You flashed and you shone, you scattered my blindness. 

You breathed fragrance on me, 

and I drew in my breath and now I pant after you. 

I tasted, and hunger and thirst. 

You touched me, and I burned for your peace.